Invisible Presences and Visible Absences

Abstract

Since 2008, Valenza, one of the World's largest jewellery production centres, has experienced a period of profound economic uncertainty. In four years, about a third of the jobs and workshops of the city were lost. The paper investigates the practices and the form of knowledge Valenza people used to speak and understand the crisis. While economic data were marginally known by the population, the crisis emerged in the words of Valenzani as a visual experience of the city landscape. ‘Invisible presence’ and ‘visible absence’ emerged as the fundamental keywords used by the community to describe the industry, its normality and change. The paper investigates these concepts, indicating the analysis of the sensorial experience and its rhetoric expression as a rich ground for an alternative, human understanding of economy. In so doing, it aims at aim at providing an example of a possible different way of writing economy that does not starts from econometric data, but from the very perception of the social life and space as experienced by its actors.

KEYWORDS:

• capitalism
• crisis
• jewellery
• economy
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The research included 20 months of fieldwork in the city (6 in 2006, 13 between 2008 and 2011). Although the district of Valenza extends outside the city, encompassing a territory of approximately 300 km² and 11 other municipalities between two provinces and two regions – the province of Alessandria in Piedmont and the province of Pavia in Lombardy – the research was conducted mainly in Valenza itself, the centre of the district and the municipality with the greatest concentration of companies and people working in the trade. The fieldwork was carried out by combining archival research, conducted in the archives and libraries of Valenza, and Alessandria, with ethnographic methods. The archival research was aimed at reconstructing the economic history of the city and the trade, in particular in the last 40 years. Scholars such as Gaggio (2007) and Lenti (1994) had largely investigated the first century and a half of the industry's history offering a documented account of the origins of the business in the early nineteenth century, until its boom in the 1970s . The archival research was aimed at filling gaps the information already available and providing a more complex account of the sociopolitical transformations of the city and its jewellery industry. From an examination of local and national newspapers and periodicals, the investigation involved the study of the deliberations of the Valenza City Council, Valenza goldsmiths’ job associations and the Alessandria Chamber of Commerce. The research included participation in the life of families of goldsmiths and non-goldsmiths, following the family members, where it was possible, in the different activities and moments of their daily lives. It involves, moreover, the visit and observation of workshops, mostly of small or medium size, where I was allowed to conduct observations of the daily production activities for prolonged periods. Unfortunately, none of them were any of the large establishments of the city. In the course of the research I conducted in-depth interviews with goldsmiths and non-goldsmiths of different ages, backgrounds and employment status. The information gathered enrich a more broader corpus of interviews, conducted either with goldsmiths or non-goldsmiths and focused on specific issues of working and social life in the city.