Developing sustainable heritage-based livelihoods: an initial study of artisans and their crafts in Viljandi County, Estonia

This paper examines the role of traditional woodworking and building crafts as a local resource in a country in transition from socialism to a market-based economy. The authors use an applied anthropological approach to integrate the preservation of intangible heritage (in the form of traditional crafts) and sustainable heritage-based livelihoods into a contemporary institutional framework. The paper starts with a theoretical discussion of skills as a form of tacit knowledge, a mode of knowing that does not easily submit to verbal explanation and transfer. The authors then discuss the methodology, purposes, procedures and precedents of collecting information about artisans and their skills. Relying on fieldwork data collected in Viljandi County, Estonia in the summer of 2008, the authors sketch an overview of relations between artisans and the communities they live in. The paper also examines several related phenomena such as economic sustainability of the crafts, intergenerational transmission of skills, changes in the relationship between the artisan and the customer, and relevant implications for crafts-related institutions and policies.