Fast, Easy, and In Cash by Jason Antrosio Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld

Author:Jason Antrosio, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld [Jason Antrosio, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Development, Economic Development, Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780226302614
Google: kdwpCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-10-30T05:46:07+00:00

Figure 22. Comparison of cultural, fashion, and preference scores of twenty acrylic sweater designs

Shirt makers were more upbeat. Their scores for personal preference tended to be higher, with the average of their means at 3.06 as compared to 2.65 for the sweater makers.7 Average cultural scores tended to be higher as well, with an average cultural rating of 2.9 compared to the sweater makers’ 2.5 cultural rating average.8 In terms of fashion, a small majority of shirt makers saw the shirts they made as fashionable (twenty-four cases) as compared to the seventeen cases that fell into the “fashion skeptic” category. Indeed, using the same values to group shirt makers as was used to group the sweater makers, we found that they split more closely down the middle, with a much wider variance on all three scales. However, despite this variance, shirt makers shared with their sweater-making neighbors a preference for fashionable items, though the correlation was not as tight.9

In an effort to gain another perspective on the cultural ratings and design preferences of the sweater makers, we repeated the interviews using the same selection of designs but with a group of students at the University of Iowa. The tastes of college undergraduates are particularly relevant because they make up a significant portion of Otavalo’s target market. Students enrolled in “Latin American Economy and Society” were selected for their basic awareness of the circumstances of artisan production in South America. That is, they understood the category of good they were being asked to rate. Among the twenty-nine respondents, though, none had visited or read about Otavalo.

As with the sweater makers, the items that students preferred correlated with what they considered fashionable.10 However, what students liked and what they judged to be trendy did not match up at all with what the sweater makers liked or what they saw as fashionable. The correlation between average fashion scores provided by undergraduates in Iowa and artisans in Otavalo was .100, and of preference .023. Judgment of the cultural value of products, though, proved to be altogether different. When it came to picking out which of the twenty items represented Otavalo identity and which did not, student ratings correlated highly with the producers (.858, p <.01) despite the lack of direct knowledge about the place and its people. Whatever else it is, the “native Andeanness” represented by those sweaters clearly entails a particular point of intersection between Iowa college students and Otavaleño artisans, a point we now address in more detail.

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