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Craft and cooperative practices are resurgent across many European and North American societies. This book explores the revival of cooperative craftwork in Denmark, venturing onto construction sites and into political assemblies to reveal the dreams, drives, and desires of a diverse group of builders in a Copenhagen-based craft co-op. It shows how these builders forge distinct political sensibilities through their daily work - sensibilities that frame their social and political engagement with society at large. In doing so, it illuminates the political capacities of cooperative craftwork, and the practitioners’ complicated relationship with capitalist practices, which they simultaneously refuse, ridicule, and reproduce.
"Based effectively on extensive participant-observation research, the virtue and value of the text lies in its detailed exploration of the entwined tensions that arise between the promise and the pitfalls of both craftwork and collectivism. While the builders at KLAR are idealists, they are also skeptics — and thus are engaging ethnographic subjects from whom the author, and readers, can learn a lot….In short, this is a strong work of ethnography." 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