My doctoral research is a multisited ethnography of woodworkers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I am investigating – through participant observation, life-narrative accounts and archival research – the “carnal connections” (Wacquant, 2005) between embodiement, apprenticeship and professional identity.

In their relation to wood and its physical properties, woodworkers are confronted to a “chaotic materiality” (Appadurai, 2006) they master – until a certain point – through different forms of knowledge and aptitude. Those habits of practice are structured by the conservation / accumulation / reconversion of capital (Bourdieu, 1979) based upon the hierarchies inside the professional group : in Geneva, the “ébénistes d’art” could either reproduce ancient furniture or work with designers for a rich clientele while in Fribourg or in Valais, woodworkers would dedicate themselves to the construction of furniture for everyday-life. Those variations allow me to question the distribution of capital between “artists” and “craftsmen” (Becker, 1978). In addition to ethnography, I would like to investigate the discourses related to the notion of  an endangered “patrimoine” in the socio-economic context of globalized capitalism (the IKEA threat) and its relation to a public morality in which class and race are subsumed into neutrality.