LOCAL CULTURE of CRAFTSMEN as the MaNet INTELLIGENCE

Local Craftsmanship as the Territorial Intelligence

The scope of the MaNet Strategy is to design a coherent future-oriented plan. A prerequisite for such a result is to fully understand every aspect of the Mastorochoria territory through the passage of time. The driving force behind this perspective is the important culture that emerged from the activities of craftsmen who lived and interacted in this multicultural region. Their knowledge, which is interwoven with the evolution of these communities, was a product of absorbed traits from prior cultures combined with the ability to adapt and exploit creatively the natural environment. In other words, to paraphrase the ethnographic thought of Howard Morphy, a distinguished academic of Anthropology, we argue that ‘the landscape is redolent with memories of other human beings’. Eventually, as ‘[t]ime was created through the transformation of ancestral beings into place, the place be[came] for ever the mnemonic of the event’ and the ancestors ‘became part of the place for ever [...], they turned into the place’. Morphy’s claim in his essay is that ‘[t]he ordered, frozen world of the ancestral past becomes part of the subjective experience of the individual, through the acquisition of knowledge of the ancestral past as he or she moves through the world’ (Ganiatsas 1996:103-104; Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995:188-189). Thus the slow pace of these procedures resulted in a dynamic cultural capital becoming a latent form of intelligence that was integrated into the Mastorochoria as part of the landscape. A landscape, which is not just a ‘passive receptor[r]’. In contrast, it represents a filter which distilled distinct changes and concrete evolution ‘according to their Genius Loci’. This significant capacity to cope with changes in various aspects of life is almost identical to the concept of “regional intelligence”. ‘Regional intelligence can be defined as the capacity of a region to both anticipate socioeconomic change and manage the knowledge derived from such change for the purpose of developing policies’. This concept is introduced by the European Association of Development Agencies (EURADA), an advisory body that aims to promote regional economic development (2004:1). Hence, this innovative approach based on the designated heritage of the Mastorochoria territory, as a common thread that has defined the collective identity of the communities, ‘is recognised as a precondition for individual and social well-being […] and for sustainable development, as well as a resource conducive to economic activity’ (COE 2008:30; Drury 2002:13; Ganiatsas 2011b:25).