The Invention of Ceramic Art. Contribution to the Sociology of the Construction of Professional Groups

摘要

The emergence of ceramic artists as a professional group in the twentieth century did not occur through the efforts of an original core of actors who intentionally established a nucleus of established and codified professional norms. The article shows the formation of a group through coalescence-i.e. by the coming together of related, but disjointed factors. It combines different levels of analysis, from the sectoral (key figures in ceramics; technical developments) to the structural (May 1968 and the neo-rural movement; economic transformations in the agricultural sector), to retrace a process during which professional standards were only formalised after the practices had emerged. The first part describes how, from the 1940s onwards, the individuals belonging to the craft's "founding" generation developed new practices through successive processes of specialisation, amalgamation in the division of labour and transmutation of earlier professional practices. The second part analyses the process of "uniting singularities" carried out by the second generation of ceramicists, the "builders" of the craft, who codified and established a body of shared standards. Almost 30 years after the appearance of the first ceramic artists, therefore, a capital specific to the group i.e. the core of the entity was formed. (C) 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.