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Vernacular earthen architecture presents a series of relevant conservation challenges that involve designing solutions for different kinds of alterations and degradations. Other challenges of a social nature simultaneously arise and are related, among other factors, to the participation of local communities and the actions of different institutional actors. Understanding these phenomena has generally been approached from perspectives that take technical considerations and social dynamics as separate fields. The current global context has resulted in an acceleration of changes in these dynamics, in terms of both techniques and management models, giving rise to the need to develop comprehensive conceptual and methodological approaches through which these challenges should be addressed jointly by recombining the technical and the social.This paper will analyse the main problems affecting vernacular architectures in three communities in northern Argentina, where earthen techniques have been very relevant. We will reflect on various potentially useful theoretical frameworks, incorporating concepts from the anthropology of technology and methodological approaches from an ethnography of conservation as a way to work with multiple ontologies.

Se référant à une tradition de l’anthropologie technique qui confère le même statut aux deux faces du travail (effort et produit, labeur et œuvre), l’auteur montre qu’il est possible de renouveler l’exploration de la question de l’économique. À cette fin, elle utilise les matériaux recueillis au cours d’une étude monographique menée dans une grande entreprise de télécommunications. Dans un premier temps, elle aborde les formes d’économie spontanée déployées dans l’activité. Et, dans un deuxième temps, elle traite du discours indigène sur l’économie « des économistes », abondamment mobilisée par le discours managérial. The wage-earning relationship has served as a prism through which the sociology of labour has traditionally dealt with the economic sphere. As a consequence, a dichotomy has cropped up between this sphere (encompassing “hierarchical logics”) and the social one (with its informal groups and autonomous means of regulation). By referring to the anthropology of techniques, which assigns the same status to both aspects –effort and product, labour and output– of work, the question of the relation between these two spheres can be re-explored. Data collected during a case study conducted in a big telecommunications firm are used to do this. Forms of the “spontaneous economy” of human activities are discussed by examining how customers (who are increasingly taken into account) can be characterized by using a “logic” adapted to the type of activity. Thereafter, attention is focused on the “native discourse” (oft used in managerial circles) about the “economy of economists”. Two stances are identified: distant adherence, which tends to naturalize the economy, and “intellectual withdrawal”, which tends to see the economy as a social construction.

This article is focused on the potential of technological analysis of material culture understood as an eminently social practice. This perspective allows us to incorporate all the information derived from the analysis of technical gestures with other concepts such as the technological know-how of the group, learning processes, socially constructed technological practices, etc. Thus, these concepts permit to establish methodological strategies from technological analysis that go beyond pure technical gestures. Furthermore, this procedure allows us to go into the set of daily social praxis that are developed in the production and use of objects which are significantly involved in the construction of the social arena of the communities. As a case study of this proposal we cited diferents examples of the handmade production of pottery., En este artículo se defiende el potencial del análisis tecnológico concebido como práctica eminentemente social. Esta perspectiva combina la información derivada de los análisis de las acciones y gestos técnicos con otros conceptos como el savoir faire tecnológico del grupo, los procesos de aprendizaje, las prácticas tecnológicas socialmente constituidas, etc. Esta estrategia metodológica permite adentrarse en el conjunto de praxis sociales que se van generando en el día a día de la fabricación y uso de los objetos e intervienen, de manera significativa, en la construcción de la arena social de las comunidades. Como caso de estudio de esta propuesta se citan ejemplos de la producción de la cerámica a mano.