Gender dimension and semiotic ideology of tradition. Crafting the Russian folk

Abstract

The paper proposes a more holistic approach to gender in crafts and grounds it in the (post)socialist context. It focuses on traditional crafts, also known as ‘folk art’, and investigates the shifts in signification that are accomplished by female craftswomen over almost a century of the clay toy production located in Kargopol, a small historical town in a Northern region of Central Russia. The analysis relies on Peirce’s pragmatist theory of signification and Keane’s notion of semiotic ideology. It reveals the inner controversies of ‘tradition’ as a type of semiotic ideology and explores four shifts in signification related to the female dimension of the folk art: 1) the emergence of the iconic craftswoman, 2) the materialization of female work ethics and appropriation of symbols, 3) the transformation of craftswomen’s bodies from indexes to icons, 4) challenging semiotic ideology through modelling of a modern female character. The paper demonstrates how the feminine constituent of the folk art has been gradually reshaped over time through those shifts, without major disruption.

Keywords:

• Craft
• gender
• gender equality
• materiality
• tradition
• semiotic ideology

Introduction

Gender is a key parameter for understanding of crafts in relation to cultural economy, activism, or contemporary art. This paper deals with gender dimension of crafts that, to various extents, are aimed at the revival and maintenance of national and local traditions. Using the example of a Russian clay toy production, it proposes a holistic approach to gender in crafts that combines its main constituents (labour, representations, materiality, and body) and shows their interdependence.

To develop a theoretical framework, I adhere to Peirce’s (1955) pragmatist theory of signification and Keane’s (2003, 2005, 2018) notion of semiotic ideology. Keane continues the transfer of Peirce’s pragmatic approach to semiotics from the domain of abstract philosophical investigations into empirical social science. Following Peirce, he states that signs acquire power of signification only within the situational and reflexive practice of communication. He then operationalizes Peirce’s (1955) conceptual assumption that ‘a sign does not function as a sign unless it be understood as a sign’ and suggests looking at the conditions under which certain signs would (not) be recognized as signifiers in particular circumstances.

Semiotic ideology is a context-specific system of ‘underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs do or do not serve, and what consequences they might or might not produce’ (2018, 65). Studying semiotic ideology, we do not merely describe a network of meanings, but focus on how pragmatically they are produced and negotiated within specific social, cultural, and political contexts. It is crucial for this research that, first, the forms of semiotic ideologies are multiple and grounded in particular historical and social formations. An obvious example of their variations would be the difference in the assumptions about the power and effects of visual images in Orthodox Christianity and Islam. Second, they are dynamic – driven by the reflexivity of people who experience, use, and constantly explore the affordances of signs in an abductive manner.

I consider the ‘tradition’ guiding the craft practice as a type of semiotic ideology that is supposed to represent and create the reality of ‘folk’, i.e. it determines how and under with conditions a particular type of traditional crafts can operate as a representation of ‘folk’. Although there is no such form of semiotic ideology that would allow full clarity, certainty, and closure, tradition is an especially controversial example, which leads to the constant negotiations over the signs and to the shifts in the forms of signification as they are enacted in practice. Tradition does not only imply pursuing ‘without discontinuity the endless search for the origin’ (Foucault 2002[1982], 21), it also implies the constant search for a) a right way to re-enact the origin, b) right conditions that would enable such re-enactment. As I show later, the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms of signification implied in the semiotic ideology of tradition are inherently self-contradictory, which makes the search indefinite. Craftswomen within this ideology find themselves in a complicated position of those who create signs, those who are expected to verify the relation between the signifiers and signified (‘folk’) through their bodies, and those who themselves are supposed to become signifiers. I will trace how the feminine dimension of ‘folk’ is embedded in the craft practice and is being reconfigured over the period of time within the semiotic ideology of tradition.

For this purpose, I explore one of the clay toy crafts located in a small old town in a northern region of central Russia. Kargopol clay toy manufacturing has developed from a mixed-gender to a female-dominated craft. This, on the one hand, provides material for a retrospective comparison of men’s and women’s roles in the craft production, and, on the other, allows us to conduct a more detailed analysis of various manifestations of femininity in craft practice and objects. I start with an overview of studies in cultural geography and anthropology, with primary attention to the works that discuss the position and agency of female producers in predominantly female or gender-mixed crafts. Then I describe my fieldwork and the history of Kargopol clay toys. In the main part, I analyse four types of shifts in signification related to the female dimension of the folk art: 1) the emergence of the iconic craftswomen, 2) the materialization of female work ethics and appropriation of symbols, 3) the transformation of craftswomen’s bodies from indexes to icons, 4) challenging semiotic ideology through modelling of a modern female character.

Gender manifestations in crafts

Gender inequality in one way or another lies in the basis of most of the craftswomen’s labour conditions and representation in crafts. Following the tradition of cultural geography, Acharya (2003a, 2003b; Acharya and Lund 2002) puts space in the centre of her analysis of the marginalization and empowerment of female craft producers. The escape of craftswomen from domestic space to a formal workshop (Acharya and Lund 2002) or partial escape – to a cooperative network of producers (Buchczyk 2015) is usually a step towards a more independent and stable professional position. It may give craftswomen more financial and creative opportunities outside of the kinship networks and higher degree of recognition in the local public scene (Colin, 2013; Makovicky 2011). A workshop may also stimulate the collective solidarity of craftswomen based on professional and gender unity (Acharya 2003a).

Nevertheless, craftswomen working in both private and institutional spaces tend to have much less bargaining power and to be especially vulnerable while dealing with the market mediators or the authorities who control the resources allocated to business or social initiatives (Acharya and Lund 2002; Naji 2016). Employment in the traditional craft sector may follow the logic of the horizontal gender differences in the division of labour that promotes vertical gender inequality (Acharya 2003b).

Often female masters are less visible in the public representations of craft in comparison to their male counterparts. One example is when the objects created by a couple are known in public under the husband’s name only (Cant 2016, 29). Another example is when (Wilkinson-Weber (2004; Wilkinson-Weber and DeNicola 2016) craft patrons and mediators to legitimize the craftswomen’s subordinated position by framing them as backward, profoundly traditional, and needing the guidance in order to save the craft from decline, which detaches women from their work.

The relations between a crafts(wo)man and the materiality of her craft are also examined in terms of power dynamics that shapes her ethics of production and personality. The examples of weaving traditions in Morocco (Naji 2009) and Kazakhstan (Portisch 2010) demonstrate that this craft practices has a disciplinary power over craftswomen bodies and subjectivities that train them to fit the patriarchal social order. At the same time, through the very same practices craftswomen gain ‘agency or self-realization’ (Naji 2009, 65). Makovicky (2020) specifies that craftswomen can exercise their power over the craft and achieve the transformation of objects’ value ‘when productive activity not only turned material into […] artefacts, but allowed for the further conversion of these products into other material goods (through sale) or into immaterial social values (such as ‘social awareness’ or social recognition)’ (Makovicky 2020, 10).

Tradition as a semiotic ideology of folk art

One can roughly distinguish between two types of activities. The first includes crafts that are practiced to revive a local or national tradition and restore endangered social values, and that contain a system of symbolic elements (patterns, signs, compositions) endowed with meanings. The second includes crafts that ‘do not have a rooted role in local secular or sacred practices’ (Milgram 2016, 176) and have less symbolic load in their material and aesthetic form. The first type of craft practices, ‘folk art’ (Buchczyk 2019; Chatterji 2011; Makovicky 2009; Sharma 2019; Wherry 2008), usually implies more restrictions on craft(wo)men’s agency. These restrictions are grounded in the craft technique and externally controlled by various experts. The second has a more ‘contingent’ character (Milgram 2016), giving more freedom to crafts(wo)men in their interaction with the material, mastering themselves, and organizing social relations around production. Kargopol clay toy manufacturing falls into the category of folk art but also can be performed in a more contingent manner when it comes to the ‘Kargopol-style’ souvenirs produced on demand.

There are three main types of relations between the toy as a sign and ‘folk’ as its object which fit the three types of signs according to the Peirce’s semiotics. First, toy as an icon is ‘a sign that denotes its object by virtue of a quality which is shared by them but which the icon has irrespectively of the object’ (Peirce 1955, 102). Subject of the toys represent folk characters (usually – peasants) and situations from folk life. Second, toy as a symbol is ‘a sign that denotes its object solely by virtue of the fact that it will be interpreted to do so. The symbol depends on a natural or conventional or logical rule, norm, or habit, that is enacted through each particular instance of the symbol’ (Peirce 1955, 102). The toys represent folk through their style which contains a set of aesthetic principles and elements (shape, colour, pattern, little number of details, conventionality etc). Each of these elements is associated with a certain essential characteristic of folk: ‘simplicity’, ‘archaism’, ‘naturalness’. Third, and the most important in the context of this study, toy as an index is ‘a sign that denotes its object by virtue of an actual connection involving them, one that he also calls a real relation in virtue of its being irrespective of interpretation’ (Peirce 1955, 102). The toys are materialized experience of their authors who represent ‘folk’.

The latter means that the clay toys’ belonging to the category of ‘folk’ art frames the relations between craft objects and their creators in a very peculiar way. The ideas of romantic nationalism and revivalist cultural agendas (Boyes 2010; Buchli 2002; Kaneff 2004; Olson 2004) formed the semiotic ideology according to which these objects do not merely tell about the past but rather become an embodiment of the timeless and authentic ‘folk’. Their production should trigger the (re)enactment and maintenance of ‘folk’ as a community of practice and a moral community. In such a case, both the objects and crafts(wo)men are involved in the process of signification (Mohsini 2016). Therefore, folk art is considered ‘authentic’ (Buchczyk 2015; Errington, 1998; Makovicky 2009; Wherry 2006) as long as its aesthetic and material form appears to be defined by the specificity of the ‘folk’ lifeworld that, however, is inevitably different from the actual situation of craft production as it happens today. The relations between ‘folk’, folk art objects and their contemporary creators are characterized by a permanent tension, and, hence, those elements never fully match. To explore the gender dimension of craft means to analyse how it is incorporated in all its elements. To do so, I will trace the shifts in signification that happen simultaneously within the craft discourse, craftswomen’s bodies, and in the materiality of craft objects.

Methodology and case overview

The main part of the fieldwork was conducted in July 2014 during a two-week ethnographic expedition to Kargopol. I interviewed eight craftswomen and four experts, attended guided tours and three workshops on the modelling of the clay toys. All the initial interviews were conducted at the workshops, simultaneously with the craftswomen’s work or at extended lunch breaks. Each interview took approximately two hours and covered various topics: from the family background of the craftswomen to the micro-level practical details of the crafts. I also took photographs (with permission of the craftswomen) and collected printed and online materials. In the spring of 2020, I conducted three more phone-interviews, which allowed me to deepen and update my analysis.

The first time Kargopol toys were mentioned by ethnographers was in the 1870s. The toys were made from clay leftovers of the peasant’s pottery manufacture. As with other similar crafts, its emergence was to a great extent predefined by the material available in the region. The toys were made for children and for sale at the market located in Kargopol, the central town of this area. In the 1910s this production almost completely stopped in Kargopol region. No fully ‘authentic’ (produced before the 1917 Revolution) samples of the toys survived, only a couple of unpainted pieces were found. The following story of the Kargopol toys fits the logic of the (re)invention of traditional material culture in socialist countries (Buchczyk 2019; Kaneff 2004; Makovicky 2009).

In the 1930s, one family (the Druzhinins) started to create clay toys, according to what they had seen and learned in their childhood. The Druzhinins’ toys were not meant for play, as they took the form of small statuettes. These toys were bought for private collections and the State Russian Museum, which is one of the key institutions that assembled a collection of Russian traditional material culture and defined the criteria of what should be regarded as such. Ivan Druzhinin was later recognized by key experts in the field as the founder of the contemporary Kargopol toy craft; his toys were used as the examples for later generations of the crafts(wo)men.

After World War II, several other crafts(wo)men (I will call them ‘oldtimers’) started manufacturing such clay toys. The most famous among them was Ul’yana Babkina – a single elderly woman who was living in the nearby village of Grinevo. From the end of the 1950s various Russian folk arts, and Kargopol toys in particular, received attention and support from journalists, ethnographers, artists, art historians, and amateur researchers. In 1960s Kargopol toys and their creators became one of the ‘hidden treasures’ that soviet urban intelligentsiya found during the search for the authentic pre-revolutionary Russia which, as they hoped, could be still found in the rural areas and restored as an alternative to the Stalinist modernist cultural agenda (Olson 2004). There are books (popular ethnography of the Russian North, folk art history) and a number of papers and chapters in museum catalogues published on this (Arbat 1970; Boguslavskaya 1975; Durasov 1986 and other).

At the same time, the government decided to take the bottom-up interest to the remains of the traditional pre-revolutionary rural culture under its own control and institutionalized folk arts. It simultaneously created additional employment opportunities for people in rural areas and small towns. The first Kargopol clay toy workshop was opened in the late 1960s; it was and has remained a part of the larger folk craft company ‘Belomorskie Uzory’ (‘White Sea Patterns’) with the main office in Arkhangelsk, the capital of the region. The workshop was established by Alexander Shevelyov, who learned the craft from his parents and then got an academic art degree. His sister, Klavdia, and her husband, Dmitry, were making the toys as a part of the workshop and later as individual crafts(wo)men. With a couple of other domestic craftsmen, they started practicing the craft later in life and had to reconstruct what they remembered from their youth. All of them are now recognized as ‘oldtimers’ (old masters), i.e. classics of the craft, though the quality of their works can be evaluated differently by folk art historians. Shevelyov employed more than 30 people, most of whom learned the craft directly from him. He developed new characters and compositions and implemented the key principles of the collective craft production.

By 2014, there were two factories. One is the successor of the Soviet workshop that was later privatized. It supplies souvenirs to the local museums and to the store in Arkhangelsk. The other, ‘Bereginya’ (a female ‘Carer’ or ‘Saver’), is State-affiliated and was opened in the 1990s by the craftswomen who left the first factory and established their own business. The latter works as a public culture centre, offering workshops and organizing exhibitions related to Kargopol crafts. The collective of crafts(wo)men significantly shrank after the Perestroyka; in total there were 11 craftswomen working at these factories during the time of my fieldwork. In recent years, some of them retired or left the job for personal reasons. Despite the fear that it might be impossible to find and train new people for the job in ‘Belomorskie Uzory’, the company has recently managed to hire several new craftswomen. Apart from the main factories, there is also the Shevelyov private museum which exhibits the works created by family members and other ‘oldtimers’ and gives craft workshops for tourists.

What are now called ‘Kargopol toys’ can be divided into five types:

Figure 1. Clay toys by Ivan Druzhinin, from the collection of the Kargopol State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum. Three female figures and three animals (a elk, a deer, and a goat). Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Figure 2. Traditional clay toys created by the craftswomen of the Center for Folk Crafts “Bereginya.” A bearded male figure sitting on a bench, a female figure with a basket, and a horse. Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Figure 3. A church statuette made of kargopol clay by Tamara Vodyanitskaya from the Center for Folk Crafts “Bereginya.” Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Figure 4. Bespoke clay toys representing a surgent operating on a patient, a nurse helping a patient with broken arm and leg, and a border guard in the forest of pine trees. Created by the crafswomen of the Center for Folk Crafts “Bereginya.” Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Figure 5. Several dozens of colorful kargopol clay toys displayed in a kiosk window along with other tourist souvenirs made in a folk style. Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Table

Canonical The toys created by the ‘oldtimers’ that are preserved in museum and private collections or at the factories and used as the type-form of authentic traditional Kargopol clay toys (Figure 1).
Traditional Contemporary toys that meet the basic requirements of Kargopol clay toy production and are created for folk-art contests, exhibitions, museum collections, and for sale (Figure 2).
Artistic The innovative toys ‘invented’ by a particular crafts(wo)man but produced in the same technique and style as traditional Kargopol toys (Figure 3).
Bespoke The toys ordered by a particular customer (person or organization) but produced in the ‘Kargapol style’. The subject of such toys is defined by the customer, while the craftswomen are responsible for their final form, aesthetic details, and technical issues (Figure 4).
Souvenir The toys produced for sale for tourists on a regular basis. They have a limited set of subjects and characters listed in the factories’ catalogues (Figure 5).

Due to the variety of toys, one of the key elements in the production and creation of meanings of the toys is the never-ending negotiations concerning which toys are the most ‘correct’, ‘traditional’, and ‘authentic’. As in other cases of folk/aboriginal arts and crafts revivals, the experts (urban middle-class intelligentsia or local mediators) are a crucial part of the craft and significantly affect how it develops (Buchczyk 2019; Fisher 2012; Makovicky 2009; Myers 2001). Through the narratives about the craft, its history, and personalities of iconic masters, experts constitute the semiotic ideology of the folk art in explicit and seemingly unproblematic form. At the same time, they don’t provide instructions on how exactly to accomplish the desirable relations between the toy, the ‘folk’, and the craftswoman in an actual situation of material production. The practice of craft reveals the controversial character of this ideology. The craftswomen actively challenge it and tactically transform the relations of signification.

Representations of crafts(wo)men: from icons to the Icon

Narratives about the oldtimers are aimed at constructing the signifiers of the most authentic folk-art figures since their lifetime was the closest to the imaginary folk past. Their biographies and lifestyles are linked by the experts to their craft aesthetic to demonstrate and justify the semiotic ideology of the folk art. They are mostly used as icons, i.e. members and representatives of the folk who unconsciously imprint their folk roots and lifestyle in the craft objects.

Most of the iconic oldtimers and the craft revivers are men. Male Kargopol craftsworkers generally tend to be ascribed by the researchers with more unique artistic qualities than do women, despite that the development of an individual artistic style is widely believed to lead them away from the collective folk-nature of the craft (Becker 1978). Nevertheless, they are the organizers, developers, innovators, and central agents in the craft-based kinship network. The craftswomen who worked together with their husbands for a long time were either completely excluded from narrative about the old-time craft (as Ekaterina Druzhinina who painted the toys of her husband production) or considered secondary and less authentic (as Klavdia Shaveleva who also made her own toys) (Boguslavskaya 1972; ‘Collection. Kargopol Clay Toy’ n.d.). This view has only later been challenged (Durasov 1986; Shevelyova 2011). However, among the oldtimers there is one exceptional female figure and the most iconic Kargopol craft master - Ul’yana Babkina.

Babkina’s work is seen by most of the experts and contemporary craftswomen as canonical and exemplary as Druzhinins’ work. But her biography and personality are much better documented, mostly due to the two researchers and writers who ‘discovered’ Babkina in the 1950s and later helped to make her famous among folk-art scholars and collectors (Arbat 1970; Babkina and Durasov 2014; Durasov 2014a, 2014b; Kuleshov 2015). Today Babkina is widely celebrated: there are several books devoted solely to her, the craft festival named after her, museum exhibitions and art competitions depicting her life and craft. In 2018 the Kargopol Department of Tourism and Culture created the permanent memorial place and interactive summer exhibition Grinevo, her village, named ‘Babkina’s glade’ (Babkina polyana). Her image became a part of the regional tourism brand.

It is not only the scale of Babkina’s representation in the history of Kargopol craft that is exceptional, but also the content of this representation. The narrative about Babkina is very detailed, and simultaneously specific and typical, as it combines recognizable cultural tropes. There are three main constituents of her image. First, she was imagined as a child: naïve, in constant need of care and protection. The writers not only promoted her craft but also helped to solve bureaucratic problems (including receiving a pension) and various domestic issues. Together with her clients from all over Russia, they sent her groceries, paints, and other necessary items. Like a child, she also seemed to have the immediate perception of, and direct access to, the lifeworld of the local folk, as well as Nature. Babkina was described as simultaneously unsophisticated and talented. Second, she is portrayed as a grandmother (‘babushka’): she was a craft teacher for local village children, and as a welcoming host who was always caring about others, telling stories, and making toys. She alone (after Druzhinin’s death) preserved and kept the craft tradition solely for its own sake, she did not attempt to popularize and institutionalize it, as Alexander Shevelyov did. Since she was introduced to the public later in her life, for the audience she always remained an elderly lady: short, wrinkled, with crooked fingers, gradually losing sight and hearing. Durasov even claimed that in her female toys Babkina depicted herself: a small elderly woman welcoming people with freshly-baked pies (Khoroshavina 2008). Third, she was represented as a holy fool, a person of great spirituality who does not fit the common life patterns of secular society and does not belong to any profession and institution. Babkina was neither ever married (her fiancé was killed in the WW1) nor employed by the State (in the local kolkhoz or the craft workshop), she existed on the margins of the social system. The selective nature of this dominant narrative, however, hides the evidence of the professionalization and commercialization (in a neutral sense) of Babkina’s work as it developed under the patronage of Durasov and other craft mediators.

As a result, her public image resembles the characters of Soviet-era literature genre called ‘Russian Village Prose’, a literature genre developed in 1950-80s in the USSR and also adopted in other arts, especially cinematography. This genre was one of the popular cultural forms that emerged as an opposition to the Stalinist modernity. It evolved around a conservative national imagination, search for roots and authenticity within the rural communities. Babkina especially corresponds with Matryona from the famous Solzhenitsin’s novel ‘Matryona’s Home’ (2009[1959]) – a simple rural woman who has an exceptional inner power to endure life tragedies and devote herself to others, without asking for recognition and respect. Such female characters in the literature of the 1950 to 1980s were presented as one of the key mainstays of the country (Parthé 1992; Youkhanna 2015). Babkina, thus, became not only a folk icon in the basic sense (representation by means of resemblances (Peirce 1955)), but also the Icon in more general cultural sense (a successful fusion of collective representations, aesthetic/material form of embodiment, and social relations (Alexander 2010; Alexander et al. 2012). Babkina as the Icon is composed of narratives, images, objects, and places that together produces a multidimensional representation and convincing reality of an archetypical folk person. For the audience, the Icon is authentic because it 1) is created through the dense assemblage of interconnected mediums and performances, 2) is unique and stands out among the other folk icons of the craft, 3) corresponds with the more general cultural tropes and discursive representations, which stimulates the feeling of recognition and triggers emotions. For the contemporary craft community, this Icon also embodies the specific moral practice that constitutes the female craftwork till today – the ethics of care (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Four portraits of Ul’yana Babkina: 1. a painting by G.A. Kuleshov from the collection of the Kargopol State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum; 2. a photograph of Ul’yana Babkina and Georgy Durasov in Grinev village from the collection of the Kargopol Georgy Durasov (Babkina painting a toy while a female child next to her observing how she photo).

Ethics of care: materialization and appropriation of symbol

The ethics of care is one of the frameworks that privileges non-economic logic and meaning of work. It implies that the work is practiced as a part of the broader social responsibilities to maintain the wellbeing of the community (whether it is family or professional collective), regardless of a reward or the absence of it (Morris 2016). As I show below, the care of the craftswomen is directed towards their audience, each other, and the tradition that often corresponds to the idea of national culture in general. It gives them a positive sense of what they invest their time, skills, and physical efforts in. The care in relation to the craft persists despite the lack of recognition, the experts’ criticism, the comparatively unprivileged status of their job, or the lack of material and symbolic rewards. This female ethical practice (Alaimo and Hekman 2008) eventually materializes in one of the crafts objects though the reinterpretation and symbolic appropriation of one of the Kargopol toys.

Audience

‘Bereginya’ craftswomen enjoy the additional cultural and pedagogical activities because these make the work more diverse and allow the women to feel valued and appreciated by the audience, as well as by the students (including small children and people with disabilities who are involved in regular classes). It requires significant emotional investments but, at the same time, helps to take the craftwork out of the commercial logic of tourist-oriented production, and to frame it instead in moral terms. For example, if tourists arrive when it is the workers’ day off, some of the craftswoman would always immediately go to work to serve the tourists. This additional workload is not directly converted into extra earnings for the women, and it brings only minor benefits. One of my key informants put it this way: ‘If people want [to see our craft and exhibitions], and probably are not going to come back [to Kargopol], how can I not please them?’ (this and in the following citations – author’s translation).

Female collective

Talking about the past of ‘Belomorskie Uzory’ or the present of ‘Bereginya’, all the informants gave very emotional and detailed descriptions of the warm social relationships and high levels of solidarity that exist between them. First, they teach each other and share skills. They recognize each other’s artistic styles, but it is felt to be appropriate to copy each other’s works and aesthetic choices. Second, they constantly socialise, discuss personal problems, and share hobbies (such as growing flowers). Third, they help each other by listening, giving advice, doing favours for each other, borrowing or just collectively giving money to the colleagues who need it in some critical situation.

Importantly, the craftswomen’s solidarity and care for each other goes beyond separate workshop. Despite the tension between the two factories after the separation, inequality in their labour conditions, and some aesthetic disagreements (‘Bereginya’ works more closely with the experts and claims to produce more ‘traditional’ toys), the craftswomen did not break relations with each other. For example, when ‘Bereginya’s’ members created a hall of fame demonstrating contemporary craft masters, they added the portraits of the ‘Belomorskie Uzory’ senior craftswomen on it as well. This pleased their colleagues who, otherwise, felt invisible and neglected while their company did not put their names on the toys (only the brand), identified them as ‘manufacturers’ instead of ‘masters’, and did not help them to accumulate symbolic capital (certificates of qualification and honour).

Craft tradition and national culture

Finally, the ethics of care is extended to the whole folk-art practice, as the women who keep working and do not drop out of the craft see themselves responsible for the survival and continuation of the local craft tradition, and also find their moral duty in contributing the national culture in general. However, the care directed to the craft is often experienced as ‘difficult love’ typical for female blue-colour workers in the post-Soviet context that was described by Morris (2016, 126): ‘You do what you can to take care, but the recipient of that care, whether enterprise, worker, or elderly relative, may not acknowledge or thank you for that’.

Even the craftswomen who are satisfied with their labour conditions may experience the care for tradition as a strong yet problematic emotional attachment. This sentiment results from reflections on the relatively low status of the craft reserved for women. In such town as Kargopol, men can be employed in construction, logging, or other physically demanding jobs, which are better paid than most work felt to be appropriate for women. Craftswomen’s husbands, who usually approved of their wife’s employment in the craft industry, for long time considered this job as easy and non-essential, regardless of the women’s significant contribution to the family income. Moreover, it seemed hard to attract any new fellows to the workshops, since even young women prefer jobs that are better-paid or offering better career perspectives. The ‘difficult love’ attitude is especially prominent among the craftswomen of the privatized factory ‘Belomorskie Uzory’ who suffered not only from huge workloads and low salaries, but also from the lack of social and symbolic rewards, and in general a sense of alienation of their work. However, even in such case craftswomen referred to the ethics of care directed not merely to the craft but to the national culture more broadly:

We have our Mother Russia, so to say. Anyway, she needs to be revived. But only sometimes [people in power] see [what we do], very rarely they help [us].

This social imaginary puts the transcendental idea of the nation as a defined cultural unity in the centre. It takes over the idea of economy-based prosperity of the people and legitimises the situation when some of the cheapest labour is continuously performed for what is considered one of the highest collective causes. Reviving the tradition and through it – the nation – should ideally bond the folk and the people in power, but even when it does not lead to the recognition and rewards, the people continue to carry the burden.

Appropriation of symbol

The ethics of care was eventually materialized in one of the toys that are popular among tourists and appreciated by craftswomen. Apart from the humans and animals, there are several mythological characters that were borrowed from other folklore sources and added to the repertoire of Kargopol toys. They included one male (‘Polkan’ – half man and half horse) and one female (‘Bereginya’) creature. The latter (Figures 7 and 8) is believed to represent a pagan goddess with bare breast, hands raised up to the sky, either holding or turning into birds. Its name corresponds with the verb ‘to save/protect’ (berech’) and is mostly interpreted as a female saviour. According to the crafts(wo)men, museum experts, and popular folklore studies, it symbolizes Mother-Earth (Boguslavskaya 1975).

Figure 7. A large two-color poster with the title of the “Bereginya” folk craft centre, an image of Bereginya toy with two birds in her hands raised up to the sky, the address of the Centre, and a welcoming phrase underneath. The poster is hanging on a wall of a wooden building in the city centre. Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Figure 8. A work desk from the “Bereginya” craft centre: the surface is covered with oilcloth and white paper, a Bereginya toy standing in the centre, it is already fully covered in white colour paint, but only her head, face and birds have colour and pattern, the rest is not painted yet. There are thin brushes, a pen, small jars, and pieces of cloth with stains of clay laying around the toy. Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

In the 1990s, the newly established collective of craftswomen took the name ‘Bereginya’ and used an image of this toy as their logo. They even used ‘beregin’ky’ (plural and cute form of Bereginya) to sign collective letters to the head of the workshop. However, they were also criticized by outsiders for a wrong interpretation of the character’s name and origins, or for the fact that the statuette of a deity could not be a toy for children to play with. The craftswomen, however, defend their professional totem, insisting that it perfectly symbolizes their female collective as well as the meaning and value of their work in general. They are craftswomen who, according to their own words, ‘save and take care of what was before’. Thus, the symbolic connection between the discursive and aesthetic qualities of the toy, on the one hand, and the imagined pagan past, on the other, was called into question, but the symbol was re-appropriated. The toy’s discursive and aesthetic dimensions were fused with the current social conditions and moral values of the toys production – the ethics of care.

Craftswomen’s bodies: from index to icon

The third shift in signification happens in relation to the craftswomen’s bodies and the way they are involved into the creation of the folk reality. A gender dimension came to the foreground of the craftswomen’s narratives when they highlighted the physical conditions in which certain types of manual work are done. While clay toy craft is perceived as an easy job, and thus suitable for women, craftswomen challenge this view, emphasizing two aspects. First, a person must have certain qualities and talents to be able to learn the craft and keep her job. Many of those who come as interns soon failed to learn appropriately and then left the workshop, including a couple of men. Second, while the greater part of the working process does not require strong physical effort (except the extraction of the wild clay), it does influence the craftswomen’s bodies and health in the long run. Sitting weakens the spine, decorating adversely affects the eyes, while modelling clay leads to dry skin and damage to the joints.

When I am modelling small items, it is fine, but after I decorate while holding [larger] items, my hands are shaking due to the toy’s weight. I need time to recover, to let the hands have some rest after the heavy lifting. If the hands are shaking, it is hard to draw the pattern accurately. As we get older, we try to ask our husbands to help with blunging the clay. I, for instance, already asked my husband. […] He blunged and replied that it is hard work.

The transformations of the old-time craft people’s bodies, that happened even quicker due to the absence of proper lightening and other necessary spatial/material conditions at that time, were imprinted into their toys and can be detected in sloppy patterns or uneven shapes. Certain degree of inaccuracy was in the indexical relation to the specific folk body of the toys’ producers. And the crafts(wo)men’s body itself served as an index of the folk lifestyle. For instance, the crooked fingers of Ul’yana Babkina were praised as evidence of her authenticity and folk identity. However, the contemporary craftswomen question both of those indexical relations.

First, it requires them additional efforts and reflexivity to avoid making the toys too smooth and the pattern too neat, as it is demanded by the experts. The current physical conditions of the workshop and the professionalisation of the practice allows them to make the objects much more accurate; and, unlike the experts, they assume that it would be legitimate to indexically represent these new conditions in the toys. Additionally, more accuracy better fits their personal aesthetic preferences, which they want to be at least partly manifested in their craft. As a result, they try to balance the material traces of the past folk lifestyle, on the one hand, and the traces of the actual situation of production and their own taste, on the other.

When it comes to bodily representation, craftswomen do not try to combine the two logics but rather introduce the alternative relations of signification. The craftwork unavoidably transforms the bodies of the craftswomen, but they do not use those transformations to prove their own authenticity and close belonging to the imaginary folk. Instead, they try to suspend or conceal them by means of physical exercises, medical and cosmetic care products. One of the craftswomen even stopped giving craft classes because her hands looked bad (crooked) due to the joint problems, and she considered it inappropriate to show them publicly. Thus, contemporary craftswomen tend to present themselves as active individuals, artists, and cultural employees who consciously work with the audience and manage their personal front (Figure 9).

Figure 9. The hands of a female master from the “Belomorskie Uzory” company, modelling a female statuette of raw clay. Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

Their bodily belonging to the ‘folk’ is re-established by means of traditional female dresses. The dresses are worn for particular occasions, such as festivals, craft markets, and craft contests organized in Kargopol and elsewhere. Craftswomen from ‘Belomorskie Uzory’ have attended local museum workshops on Russian costume. In ‘Bereginya’, the dresses are ordered by the factory and produced for all the employees. However, craftswomen may customise their personal costumes or make their own more exclusive dresses. They do not attempt to wear strictly historical dresses; their outfit reproduces some key elements of traditional design. The costumes do not serve only as devices for the marketing of the craft to customers, but also are an important part of the craftswomen’s ‘feminine’ performance. The craftswomen said that they liked how they look and feel in the traditional dresses and look forward to each opportunity to wear them. Thus, the bodily signification of folk among the contemporary craftswomen shifts from indenxicality (the features of the body transformed by the folk-art practice) to iconicity (self-representation and performance using the dresses of traditional style). It is noteworthy that the new signifier (the dresses) itself is gradually getting appropriated and endowed with personal experiences by the performers.

Female toys: following and challenging the semiotic ideology

To represent iconically a female character, toys should have two basic elements: breast and skirt. According to experts, traditional Kargopol toys should not be too straightforward and realistic in the way they represent folk characters: they should be static, not detailed, simple. However, craftswomen sometimes use another logic of modelling or painting the toys, especially, when they teach and correct the mistakes of junior craftswomen. They imagine how the actual entity that a toy represents should ideally be like in reality. This is applied to traditional female characters who must embody the qualities of health and fertility:

I had very thin [clay] women to start with. [The supervising craftswoman] told me: ‘Look into the old books, there are such burly women in there. Or do you watch old movies? They do not include a single skinny woman. All those women have boobs and butts. […] A girl should have a braid, a thick braid! Not a slim braid. How did men choose girls? – If the braid is thick, then the girl must be good’. This is how my master explained this to me. (author’s translation)

While ‘butt’ is not visible ‘under’ the skirt, and braid can be ‘covered’ with a headscarf or a hat, breast is always modelled, as well as the second sign of femininity – a skirt.

Traditional female toys ‘wear’ long skirts, so their legs are ‘hidden’ under the skirt (i.e. do not need to be modelled), whereas male toys have beards and legs visible. Each of the two types of human bodies requires a slightly different technique to master a piece of clay and to give the toy physical balance. The long skirts give more stability to the female characters and eliminate the need to make an additional fulcrum. It also gives the crafts(wo)man a relatively large flat surface on which they can draw the traditional ‘solar’ patterns. Thus, a long skirt functions as the second most basic signifier of femininity, and it is applied even to non-human characters. For instance, Klavdia Shevelyova made female bears for already existing bears with male accessories (a drink or an accordion) and ‘dressed’ them in skirts to make a clear gender distinction (Shevelyova 2007).

The toys created to order are usually expected to maintain the ‘Kargopol style’ of modelling and general aesthetic qualities but provide much more precise and realistic representation as icons of today’s ‘folk’. They are often ordered by professional organizations as presents for employees and depict contemporary occupations in accordance with the current gender division of labour. The toy characters and themes become more diverse, but nevertheless female toys still must both have breast and ‘wear’ skirts. There is a rare exception to this rule that I describe in the last part of my analysis. This example demonstrates how, to make an innovation (such as a modern female character), craftswomen have to bypass the cultural entanglement of the craft and win over the material.

Clay is not a uniform material; its qualities can significantly vary depending on a place where it was extracted. Kargopol clay is greasy, wet, and heavy. It is not as flexible as other sorts of clay, it needs a long time to get dry, and it cracks easily. This determines the basic methods of working with Kargopol clay and the shapes it can take. The toys are made mainly from one solid piece of clay and cannot be thin because this would lead to cracks. They are stocky since the clay shrinks more while it dries.

The material imposes strict limitations on the practice of crafts(wo)men and form of the objects. It stimulates the development of certain aesthetic and meaningful dimensions of the toys. ‘Archaic simplicity’, ‘primitivism’, ‘monumentalism’ – these are the characteristics of Kargopol clay toys often reproduced in the narratives of experts (Boguslavskaya 1972; Durasov 1986). On one hand, these stylistic peculiarities are tightly related to the romantic idea of ‘folk’ as ‘natural’, left intact by modern civilization, localized in the past but a-temporal (i.e. it does not belong to any particular historic past) community. On the other hand, these characteristics of the toys result from the specificity of the material. Thus, material and discourse stand for and reinforce each other. The fact that the toys made from Kargopol clay are stocky and static allows one to consider ‘folk’ as a carrier of immediate and authentic experience. The fact that, in the descriptions and interpretations of the toys, attention is mostly paid to these symbolic characteristics leads to the solidifying of such methods of modelling and such shapes of the folk-art objects.

Keeping in mind the co-constitution of the discourse and materiality of the craft, let us look at the case of modelling a contemporary female character. A client of ‘Bereginya’ ordered a set of presents for his sports team, including the toys looking like female gymnasts (Figure 10). The craftswoman who had to make these toys and the client were not satisfied with the initial result because all the female toys had thick legs. This did not fit the image of feminine sportswomen. The craftswoman asked the client if it would be fine to paint the legs so the toys would ‘wear’ trousers instead of shorts. The client refused, claiming that gymnasts do not wear trousers.

Figure 10. A glass shelf at the Centre for Folk Crafts “Bereginya” with several bespoke clay toys representing various sport activities. Men in traditional peasant outfits, bears and A glass shelf at the Centre for Folk Crafts “Bereginya” with several bespoke clay photograph, stands a female athlete who holds a kettlebell, has a stocky body, is dressed in short-sleeve top and shorts, and stays steadily on two separate legs. Photo by V. Kobyshcha.

However, the craftswoman found a solution: she whittled off the clay from the legs after the toy had already dried and before it was put into the kiln, so the toys’ legs looked thinner. This method is not provided by the basic rules of the craft: the shape is defined working with the raw clay, not afterwards. Moreover, it goes against the symbolic logic of the craft practice that should avoid sophistication and elegance to perform the ‘archaic simplicity’. However, since this roundabout manoeuvre of the craftswoman was successful, the affordance of the craft material appeared to be much broader than what is prescribed by the rules. The formal characteristics of the objects predefined by the material revealed their arbitrary nature. Both following the rules defined by the semiotic ideology of tradition and making symbolically important innovations require the craftswomen to perform a reflexive attitude to their work along with emotional and practical efforts.

Conclusion

Gender dimension is one of the basic for an understanding of traditional as well as contemporary craft practices. Contemporary crafts developed within a broad feminist approach explicitly challenge and deconstruct the meanings of femininity manifested in the handmade objects. Traditional craft practices are generally seen as leading to the reproduction of the unequal gender division of labour and patriarchal identities, despite a certain degree of emancipation that can be brought into a craft with commercialisation and modernisation. The case of Kargopol clay toys is an alternative example. It allows to see how the feminine constituent of the folk art is being reshaped over time through the shifts in signification, without major disruption.

We might expect that the transition from the socialist cultural policy that was the initial context of the craft revival to the post-socialist market condition should have dramatically altered the craft. However, the distinction between soviet and post-soviet should not be overestimated and automatically presumed as the main factor that defines the dynamic of the craft and all its dimensions including the gender specifics. In this case, there was no ‘clash’ of semiotic ideologies (Keane 2018, 83). Instead, we observe the gradual shifts in signification that have been happening during the modern history of the craft. They are driven by the very framework of ‘tradition’ as an inherently controversial semiotic ideology. They do not imply merely a re-interpretation (i.e. discursive changes in the meanings ascribed to objects or people) but rather a reconfiguration of the relations of signification that is accomplished from within the discursive-material practice.

The first shift I analyse is related to the emergence of the Iconic craftswoman against the background of the other iconic old-time masters who are considered as the closest to the imaginary past ‘folk’. The unique significance and authenticity that this figure gained in the stories about the craft can be explained by the fusion of the rich material, performative, and discursive representations of her, as well as by her exceptional (‘holy’) yet typical social/ethical position that resonates with the major narratives about the folk femininity of the post-war Russia. The second shift is related to the re-appropriation of a symbol through visual means (the logo) and discursive acts (the factory title, craftswomen’s self-naming). As a result, the pre-existing material symbol becomes the embodiment of the actual female ethics of care that guides craftswomen’s production and social relations. The third shift is related to the development of the reflexive approach to the craftswomen’s bodies as signifiers of traditional femininity. Contemporary craftswomen replace indexicality with iconicity, hiding the traces that the folk-art practice leaves on their bodies and re-establishing own connection to the ‘folk’ by wearing and performing traditional-style dresses. The fourth shift is related to the situations when the craft’s semiotic ideology inscribed in the rules of mastering the toys is challenged. Craftswomen reflexively explore the affordance of the specific local clay to transform the traditional visual/material signifier and model a contemporary female character. The proposed framework of analysis, based on Peirce’s pragmatics of signs and Keane’s notion of semiotic ideology, allows to juxtapose human producers and their objects, as well as discursive and material elements of practice and, by doing so, develop a holistic approach to an understanding of the gender dimension of craft.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Yulia Karpova, Olga Gurova, Birgitte Pristed, David Inglis, Alisa Maximova, Jeremy Morris, the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and support at the different stages of preparing this publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Varvara Kobyshcha

Varvara Kobyshcha is a PhD researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki. She is working on a dissertation about visual artists with exile experience who relocated to Germany and Finland from countries of West Asia. Her research interests include cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism, critical memory studies, as well as urban and housing inequalities She published in Cultural Sociology and won Cultural Sociology journal’s 2019 SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence.