Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Craft and cooperative practices are currently resurging in many European and North American societies. Builders often construct certain political sensibilities through their daily work, which frame their wider social and political engagement with the encompassing society. This book explores the revival of cooperative craftwork in Denmark, delving into construction sites and political assemblies to reveal the dreams, drives, and desires of a diverse group of builders working in a Copenhagen-based craft co-op. It sheds light on the political capacities of cooperative craftwork and on cooperative practitioners’ complicated relation to capitalist practices; practices which they simultaneously refuse, ridicule, and reproduce.
“It’s refreshing to see a solidly placed-based ethnography... the experiential aspects of participation-observation clearly informed the author’s appreciation for and comprehension of what the builders were telling her.” • Heather Paxson, MIT Anthropology
Maia Ebsen is currently Assistant Professor at Aarhus University. She has held various visiting scholar positions at institutions including MIT Anthropology and served as Vice President of the Danish Association of Anthropology from 2019 to 2025.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1. An Economy of Freedom: The Foundations of KLAR
Chapter 2. Becoming Builders: Learning the Norms and Forms of “Good Craftsmanship”
Chapter 3. The “Family” of KLAR: Generational Continuities and Ruptures in Cooperativism
Chapter 4. Tinkering with Democratic Forms: Negotiating Cooperativism at Assemblies
Chapter 5. Crafting Against the Standardization of Construction: Reckoning with Regulation
Chapter 6. Tinkering with Capitalism: The Production of Value in Construction Projects
Conclusion: Taking Politics into One’s Own Hands
References
Index