A record of some literature sources that I gathered to support my critical discourse essay and the synthesis of what is relevant to my case.
Cheah, Hwei-Fen. Nyonya Needlework: Embroidery and Beadwork in the Peranakan World. Peranakan Museum, 2017.
Page 7
The technique of stringing miniscule glass beads to form representational images seems to belong to no particular culture, but rather taps into Chinese, European, and Southeast Asian forms. For example, it has always been assumed that the glass beads found in Peranakan objects were made in central Europe.
Glass beads were used to decorate a number of objects, from altar cloths to vases and lamps. Most famously, they were used to embellish slippers. In analysis of the techniques associated with Peranakan objects, it reveals a complex network of cultural connections. The various types of needlework were practiced by women and men, and drew upon techniques from Europe, India, China, and the Malay world. There were many cross-cultural surprises, gold embroidery derives not only from European military brocade, but from ancient Chinese thread techniques of gold strips wrapped around paper.
The Peranakan culture is a reminder that new cultures develop in the rich and teeming environment of port cities. Overlooked and outside official scrutiny, hybrid-communities quickly create their own creoles, cuisines, fashions, and art forms. The peranakan culture is therefore not just some community institution, representing a tiny, once-influential fraction of the population. In its creative hybridity and synthesis of many different cultures, it represents something that was actually common throughout the Indian ocean and Southeast Asia. But which has been lost with the development of modern society. Often in the invented concepts of so-called pure cultures, whether Chinese, Malay, or Indian. Peranakan art is a reminder that there is really no such thing as a pure or true culture, all cultures borrow, appropriate, fuse, and blend.
Luxurious materials, intricate workmanship, and minute details, complex texture, characterize the beadwork of Peranakan Chinese. For centuries, Chinese traders and craftsmen arrived in Southeast Asia where they established families, often by marrying local women. As the community evolved, so is their culture. Chinese customs and beliefs intertwining with local ways of life.
Levine, Faythe, and Cortney Heimerl. Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Today’s craft world has emerged as a marriage between historical technique, punk culture, and the DIY ethos, also influenced by traditional handiwork, modern aesthetic, politics, feminism, and art. It is no longer simply about cross-stitching samplers or painting floral scrolls on china. Instead, it embraces a vibrant movement of artist, crafters, and designers working in traditional nontraditional media. The heart of the new wave of craft is the community. Participants share ideas and encouragement through websites, blogs, boutiques, galleries, and craft fairs. Together they have forged a new economy and lifestyle based on creativity, determination, and networking.
Hung, Shu, and Joseph Magliaro. By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
In the last decades, we’ve seen an explosion in the DIY Movement. Many of today’s designers and artists are returning to handmade work: hand lettering, hand drawing, hand sewing, and so on. Personal craft is emphasized over perfection, and the personality of the artist is put forth as a key element of the finished product. A growing number of contemporary artists are producing work with their hands, using methods and materials traditionally associated with craft. What differentiate these artists from their more politically overt forebears in the 1970s is their emphasis on personal experiences rather than on a collective social message. Art is engaged as a process rather than as a means to an end, and there is a palpable sense of attachment to the materials and methods that are employed. In many cases, the techniques they use have been passed down to them by their mothers and other close relatives, lending them a sentimental importance.
Individuals who have grown up surfing the internet are now impassioned by the ideals of “Do it yourself” generation. Craft is what you make of it. Some people want to embrace craft for its essence of craftsmanship, the quality of a piece of work, the time and effort that went into its production. Others are excited by craft because of its inherent otherness-that is, its unique ability to set its practitioners outside of mainstream industrial society.
Page 22. A gallery is pretty intimidating to a lot of people. It seems so elitist. Really, putting something on a pedestal to me says “you can never do this”. In that way, it also speaks down to people rather than encouraging them. If people approach me and they are excited about what i make, i tell them that they can do it themselves and i can show them how if they want to learn or they can order a kit in the mail.
“Why is handcraft so popular?” I think that handcraft is popular right now as a reaction against a whole slew of things, including our hyper-fast culture, increasing reliance on digital technology, the proliferation of consumer culture, and even war. Some people want to see a project through from beginning to end, something they don't get to do in their daily lives. In their jobs, they do one part of producing something and they don't do the other parts. In producing a handcraft project, people can see something from start to finish and then have a material product that they can use themselves. Even though we all have frequent access to the internet and are able to communicate with people through digital media, we are still sensual beings. We need to maintain a tactile relationship to the world.
Page 30. It may sound strange that a bunch of people who are trying to reclaim handicraft are using technology to do so, but it’s undeniably true. The modern craft fair evolved from church bazaars and hippie markets. In the 1990s, craft fairs grew in size and importance. As a result, crafters discovered the strategy of deliberating flattening out their works so that it looked better on slides. With the ascendancy of etsy and other e-commerce sites aimed at the new wave of crafters, it’s not far-fetched that today’s artists tailor their work to look good on an LCD screen. Instead of homogeneity, the internet has fostered diversity through friendly competition, resulting in a gloriously messy tangle of blogs, forums, projects, email groups, and social networking sites. As it turns out, there was an army of people out there who found ways to rebel through their respective craft, and we all came together thanks to the magic of the internet. Through the magic of the web, i can consume craft just like i would books, dvd, or television. For the time being, it’s the internet that holds the craft world together.
Kingsley-Smith, Heather. World of Crafts. Merlion Publishing, 1993.
In the late 1700s, the European settlers began to give the North American Indians tiny glass beads which were made by machine in Europe in exchange for food and other necessities. The Indians used these beads to decorate clothes, shoes, and even woven baskets. With more colours and different beads to choose from, the patterns became more complicated and interesting. Gradually, the Indians’ use of the purple and white wampum beads (made from shells) decreased.
At the same time, small glass beads were also being used to make decorative knitted bead pictures in Europe. Beaded pictures took a long time to make. Each bead’s position had to be carefully planned on a pattern sheet before knitting began. Fine bead knitting was used for purses, borders on bonnets, and shawls, and to make decorated items like cushion covers.
Beads can be woven into decorated belts, necklaces, and bracelets. The beads have to be threaded onto the weft thread, which runs across the fabric. (a pic of their beading technique is different to Peranakan’s).
Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through Craft. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018.
We work at computers all day. Crafting allows us the experience of the tactile world, the non-virtual, the “real”. In a world where only a few actually manufacture products, making something that you can touch, wear, or inhabit is satisfying on an almost spiritual level. Let’s just say it feels good.
Crafting is a political statement. With globalism, factory labor, and sweatshops as growing concerns, and giant chains like Starbucks, and Old Navy turning America into one big mini-mall, crafting becomes a protest. By doing it themselves, they vote with their wallets and assert their individualities, knowing that no one will have the same hand-knit sweater or silk-screen T-shirt. The point of crafting is to be in touch with one of the things that make us human - our ability to make stuff.
Craft as a process. I have been employing “craft” rather loosely, as a word, an idea, and a category. Of course, it can be all these things, but it might be more usefully conceived as a process. Rather than presenting craft as a fixed set of things, pots, paintings, this book will analyze it as an approach, and attitude, or a habit of action. Craft only exists in motion. It is a way of doing things, not a classification of objects, institutions, or people. It is also multiple: an amalgamation of interrelated core principles, which are put into relation with one another through the overarching idea of “craft”.
First, while the modern artwork has usually been held to be autonomous, the work of craft is supplemental. Second, where artistic practice has normally been oriented to optical effects, craft is organized around material experience. A third chapter, less dialectical in its arguments, presents the case of skill. In that, skill is the most complete embodiment of craft as an active, relational concept rather than a fixed category. The final two chapters turn to craft’s situation in the modern social fabric: the pastoral and the amateur.
Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Page 13. Craft’s reputation is as something eternal. It has always been with us, it seems, since the first pots were made from clay dug out of riverbeds and the first simple baskets were plaited by hand. Seen from this perspective, craft is intrinsic to what it is to be human. In modern times, though, it seems to be under constant assault. Its steady disappearance, in the face of the more powerful and efficient forms of production that we call “industry” is therefore to be understood as a tide of depersonalization. We must try to turn the clock back, to revive craft’s organic role in society, or at least slow the pace of its vanishing.
That is the usual way of looking at things. But this book is going to tell the story rather differently. Rather than treating craft as an ever-present aspect of human behavior increasingly threatened by technological advances, I argue that craft itself is a modern invention. It is customary to speak of the century from 1750 to 1850 as the time of the industrial revolution, a phrase that conveys a sense of radical transformation. And rightly so; it is impossible to miss the novelty and importance of the mechanization, factory organization, mass production, and division of labor that characterized this period in history.
Yet it is easy to overlook the fact that craft was taking shape at the same time. It emerged as a coherent idea, a defined terrain, only as industry’s opposite number. Craft was not a static backdrop against which industry emerged like a figure from the ground. Rather, the two were created alongside one another, each defined against the other through constant juxtaposition.
I have tried to examine the broader question of craft’s position within modern production. Craft was invented principally as a counterpart to industry. I try to enlarge on the work of author like Larry Shiner in his book, The Invention of Art (2003), who also argues for a differentiation between craft and fine art. For Shiner, the divergence between art and craft first emerged in the Renaissance and culminated in an absolute institutional separation in the 18th century. This is wrong.
The habit of defining craft principally in opposition to fine arts is, in fact, a largely 20th century, even post 1945, tendency. It is an outgrowth of the fact that we tend to encounter craft in museums and galleries, because it is only in these rarefied circumstances that it can achieve economic viability.
The conventional narrative of craft in the period of the industrial revolution is one of decline followed by renewal. Artisans were drummed out of work by machines, with tragic consequences both for the experience of the makers themselves and the quality of the things they produced. Eventually the arts and crafts movement arose in response as a reclamation project. Because of its simplicity, this received story is deeply satisfying. It provides us with a noble but fallen victim (the craftsman and his picturesque shop)_, a cardboard cutout villain (the capitalist lorning over his belching factory), and a heroic savior (the high-minded craft reformer).
The nuanced interdependencies of the hand and the machine. The variable rate and irregular manner in which automation was introduced to workshops, the many trades in which new tools extended the reach of hand skills, rather than replacing them. And the craftsmanship necessary to make machines and other industrial tools in the first place.
In the book “The Bureaucracy of Beauty”, a study of British design interventions into colonial India, Aridam Dutta noted that “As a figure of difference, the artisan does not disappear with the advent of industrialism. Rather, it appears within it.”
Artisans are primarily important because they preserve knowledge of his past. This is not to say that craft is devalued under modernity, rather it is valued differently from other forms of cultural production. It is positioned as fundamentally conservative, both in the positive and negative sense of that word.
Progress is always located elsewhere, in political radicalism, machinery and technology, organizational structures, but never in skilled hands themselves. This attitude puts strict limits on craft. Artisans and their products then, were understood in one of two ways, as in need of constant improvement, or on the contrary, as fragile connections to the traditional past. This did accord artisans an unprecedented cultural responsibility, but though much was gained from this set of associations, today we have more to discover by departing from it.
These transformations did not as is often claimed, de-skill workers. Rather, the modern invention of craft literally put artisans “in their place”. In fact, it was precisely their worker’s valuable skills that motivated capitalist to invent new techniques of controlling them.
Woodcarving is an exemplary example case. This craft was impossible to mechanize, but was nonetheless thoroughly transformed in the late 18th century. Factory system advocates frequently compared artisans to machines, with the crucial caveat that they were less efficient and consistent than their automated equivalents. In response, anti-factory reformers began to prize craft precisely for its instinctive, inefficient, and irregular qualities. Memory serves as the ordering principle, because it is in forming a new relation to the past that craft proces most indispensable.
Craft as memory work
Page 186.
This sort of distracted, repetitive experience is a key part of modern craft, hence the common emphasis on the pleasures of unthinking “flow”. The haphic, rhythmic quality of artisanal work resides exactly in the arena where Leys sees traumatic response occurring: “bodily memories of skills, habits, reflex actions, and classically conditioned response that lie outside verbal-semantic-linguistic representations.” craft is carried out through repetitive somatic movements. Given that the experience of modernity is so disjunctive, it is no wonder that the rhythmic quality of craft seems so comforting. And equally, it has always seemed an exemplary case of the fragility of memory in the face of modern disruptive forces. Once lost, a skill is lost forever. And so it must be revived, literally brought back to lids, and it will only come back in unnatural form. In this respect craft resembles oral tradition. Its cultural value depends on a sense of continuity. It is no coincidence that the syntactical structures of craft and storytelling are closely parallel. Both have internal repetitive forms that aid in the act of recall. Reciting an extensive epic poem, for example, is greatly aided by a composition based on theme and variation. Craft techniques tend to operate in this way too. They are formulaic and mnemonic. These very forms create the impression of something being remembered. But we also need to recognize in this repetition a form of concealment. One speaks of “losing oneself” when immersed in a skilled task. Repetition is, in this context, precisely a means of forestalling an encounter with the self-a way of maintaining dissociation between the present and the disruptive past.
Page 7
The technique of stringing miniscule glass beads to form representational images seems to belong to no particular culture, but rather taps into Chinese, European, and Southeast Asian forms. For example, it has always been assumed that the glass beads found in Peranakan objects were made in central Europe.
Glass beads were used to decorate a number of objects, from altar cloths to vases and lamps. Most famously, they were used to embellish slippers. In analysis of the techniques associated with Peranakan objects, it reveals a complex network of cultural connections. The various types of needlework were practiced by women and men, and drew upon techniques from Europe, India, China, and the Malay world. There were many cross-cultural surprises, gold embroidery derives not only from European military brocade, but from ancient Chinese thread techniques of gold strips wrapped around paper.
The Peranakan culture is a reminder that new cultures develop in the rich and teeming environment of port cities. Overlooked and outside official scrutiny, hybrid-communities quickly create their own creoles, cuisines, fashions, and art forms. The peranakan culture is therefore not just some community institution, representing a tiny, once-influential fraction of the population. In its creative hybridity and synthesis of many different cultures, it represents something that was actually common throughout the Indian ocean and Southeast Asia. But which has been lost with the development of modern society. Often in the invented concepts of so-called pure cultures, whether Chinese, Malay, or Indian. Peranakan art is a reminder that there is really no such thing as a pure or true culture, all cultures borrow, appropriate, fuse, and blend.
Luxurious materials, intricate workmanship, and minute details, complex texture, characterize the beadwork of Peranakan Chinese. For centuries, Chinese traders and craftsmen arrived in Southeast Asia where they established families, often by marrying local women. As the community evolved, so is their culture. Chinese customs and beliefs intertwining with local ways of life.
Levine, Faythe, and Cortney Heimerl. Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Today’s craft world has emerged as a marriage between historical technique, punk culture, and the DIY ethos, also influenced by traditional handiwork, modern aesthetic, politics, feminism, and art. It is no longer simply about cross-stitching samplers or painting floral scrolls on china. Instead, it embraces a vibrant movement of artist, crafters, and designers working in traditional nontraditional media. The heart of the new wave of craft is the community. Participants share ideas and encouragement through websites, blogs, boutiques, galleries, and craft fairs. Together they have forged a new economy and lifestyle based on creativity, determination, and networking.
In the last decades, we’ve seen an explosion in the DIY Movement. Many of today’s designers and artists are returning to handmade work: hand lettering, hand drawing, hand sewing, and so on. Personal craft is emphasized over perfection, and the personality of the artist is put forth as a key element of the finished product. A growing number of contemporary artists are producing work with their hands, using methods and materials traditionally associated with craft. What differentiate these artists from their more politically overt forebears in the 1970s is their emphasis on personal experiences rather than on a collective social message. Art is engaged as a process rather than as a means to an end, and there is a palpable sense of attachment to the materials and methods that are employed. In many cases, the techniques they use have been passed down to them by their mothers and other close relatives, lending them a sentimental importance.
Individuals who have grown up surfing the internet are now impassioned by the ideals of “Do it yourself” generation. Craft is what you make of it. Some people want to embrace craft for its essence of craftsmanship, the quality of a piece of work, the time and effort that went into its production. Others are excited by craft because of its inherent otherness-that is, its unique ability to set its practitioners outside of mainstream industrial society.
Page 22. A gallery is pretty intimidating to a lot of people. It seems so elitist. Really, putting something on a pedestal to me says “you can never do this”. In that way, it also speaks down to people rather than encouraging them. If people approach me and they are excited about what i make, i tell them that they can do it themselves and i can show them how if they want to learn or they can order a kit in the mail.
“Why is handcraft so popular?” I think that handcraft is popular right now as a reaction against a whole slew of things, including our hyper-fast culture, increasing reliance on digital technology, the proliferation of consumer culture, and even war. Some people want to see a project through from beginning to end, something they don't get to do in their daily lives. In their jobs, they do one part of producing something and they don't do the other parts. In producing a handcraft project, people can see something from start to finish and then have a material product that they can use themselves. Even though we all have frequent access to the internet and are able to communicate with people through digital media, we are still sensual beings. We need to maintain a tactile relationship to the world.
Page 30. It may sound strange that a bunch of people who are trying to reclaim handicraft are using technology to do so, but it’s undeniably true. The modern craft fair evolved from church bazaars and hippie markets. In the 1990s, craft fairs grew in size and importance. As a result, crafters discovered the strategy of deliberating flattening out their works so that it looked better on slides. With the ascendancy of etsy and other e-commerce sites aimed at the new wave of crafters, it’s not far-fetched that today’s artists tailor their work to look good on an LCD screen. Instead of homogeneity, the internet has fostered diversity through friendly competition, resulting in a gloriously messy tangle of blogs, forums, projects, email groups, and social networking sites. As it turns out, there was an army of people out there who found ways to rebel through their respective craft, and we all came together thanks to the magic of the internet. Through the magic of the web, i can consume craft just like i would books, dvd, or television. For the time being, it’s the internet that holds the craft world together.
In the late 1700s, the European settlers began to give the North American Indians tiny glass beads which were made by machine in Europe in exchange for food and other necessities. The Indians used these beads to decorate clothes, shoes, and even woven baskets. With more colours and different beads to choose from, the patterns became more complicated and interesting. Gradually, the Indians’ use of the purple and white wampum beads (made from shells) decreased.
At the same time, small glass beads were also being used to make decorative knitted bead pictures in Europe. Beaded pictures took a long time to make. Each bead’s position had to be carefully planned on a pattern sheet before knitting began. Fine bead knitting was used for purses, borders on bonnets, and shawls, and to make decorated items like cushion covers.
Beads can be woven into decorated belts, necklaces, and bracelets. The beads have to be threaded onto the weft thread, which runs across the fabric. (a pic of their beading technique is different to Peranakan’s).
We work at computers all day. Crafting allows us the experience of the tactile world, the non-virtual, the “real”. In a world where only a few actually manufacture products, making something that you can touch, wear, or inhabit is satisfying on an almost spiritual level. Let’s just say it feels good.
Crafting is a political statement. With globalism, factory labor, and sweatshops as growing concerns, and giant chains like Starbucks, and Old Navy turning America into one big mini-mall, crafting becomes a protest. By doing it themselves, they vote with their wallets and assert their individualities, knowing that no one will have the same hand-knit sweater or silk-screen T-shirt. The point of crafting is to be in touch with one of the things that make us human - our ability to make stuff.
Craft as a process. I have been employing “craft” rather loosely, as a word, an idea, and a category. Of course, it can be all these things, but it might be more usefully conceived as a process. Rather than presenting craft as a fixed set of things, pots, paintings, this book will analyze it as an approach, and attitude, or a habit of action. Craft only exists in motion. It is a way of doing things, not a classification of objects, institutions, or people. It is also multiple: an amalgamation of interrelated core principles, which are put into relation with one another through the overarching idea of “craft”.
First, while the modern artwork has usually been held to be autonomous, the work of craft is supplemental. Second, where artistic practice has normally been oriented to optical effects, craft is organized around material experience. A third chapter, less dialectical in its arguments, presents the case of skill. In that, skill is the most complete embodiment of craft as an active, relational concept rather than a fixed category. The final two chapters turn to craft’s situation in the modern social fabric: the pastoral and the amateur.
Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Page 13. Craft’s reputation is as something eternal. It has always been with us, it seems, since the first pots were made from clay dug out of riverbeds and the first simple baskets were plaited by hand. Seen from this perspective, craft is intrinsic to what it is to be human. In modern times, though, it seems to be under constant assault. Its steady disappearance, in the face of the more powerful and efficient forms of production that we call “industry” is therefore to be understood as a tide of depersonalization. We must try to turn the clock back, to revive craft’s organic role in society, or at least slow the pace of its vanishing.
That is the usual way of looking at things. But this book is going to tell the story rather differently. Rather than treating craft as an ever-present aspect of human behavior increasingly threatened by technological advances, I argue that craft itself is a modern invention. It is customary to speak of the century from 1750 to 1850 as the time of the industrial revolution, a phrase that conveys a sense of radical transformation. And rightly so; it is impossible to miss the novelty and importance of the mechanization, factory organization, mass production, and division of labor that characterized this period in history.
Yet it is easy to overlook the fact that craft was taking shape at the same time. It emerged as a coherent idea, a defined terrain, only as industry’s opposite number. Craft was not a static backdrop against which industry emerged like a figure from the ground. Rather, the two were created alongside one another, each defined against the other through constant juxtaposition.
I have tried to examine the broader question of craft’s position within modern production. Craft was invented principally as a counterpart to industry. I try to enlarge on the work of author like Larry Shiner in his book, The Invention of Art (2003), who also argues for a differentiation between craft and fine art. For Shiner, the divergence between art and craft first emerged in the Renaissance and culminated in an absolute institutional separation in the 18th century. This is wrong.
The habit of defining craft principally in opposition to fine arts is, in fact, a largely 20th century, even post 1945, tendency. It is an outgrowth of the fact that we tend to encounter craft in museums and galleries, because it is only in these rarefied circumstances that it can achieve economic viability.
The conventional narrative of craft in the period of the industrial revolution is one of decline followed by renewal. Artisans were drummed out of work by machines, with tragic consequences both for the experience of the makers themselves and the quality of the things they produced. Eventually the arts and crafts movement arose in response as a reclamation project. Because of its simplicity, this received story is deeply satisfying. It provides us with a noble but fallen victim (the craftsman and his picturesque shop)_, a cardboard cutout villain (the capitalist lorning over his belching factory), and a heroic savior (the high-minded craft reformer).
The nuanced interdependencies of the hand and the machine. The variable rate and irregular manner in which automation was introduced to workshops, the many trades in which new tools extended the reach of hand skills, rather than replacing them. And the craftsmanship necessary to make machines and other industrial tools in the first place.
In the book “The Bureaucracy of Beauty”, a study of British design interventions into colonial India, Aridam Dutta noted that “As a figure of difference, the artisan does not disappear with the advent of industrialism. Rather, it appears within it.”
Artisans are primarily important because they preserve knowledge of his past. This is not to say that craft is devalued under modernity, rather it is valued differently from other forms of cultural production. It is positioned as fundamentally conservative, both in the positive and negative sense of that word.
Progress is always located elsewhere, in political radicalism, machinery and technology, organizational structures, but never in skilled hands themselves. This attitude puts strict limits on craft. Artisans and their products then, were understood in one of two ways, as in need of constant improvement, or on the contrary, as fragile connections to the traditional past. This did accord artisans an unprecedented cultural responsibility, but though much was gained from this set of associations, today we have more to discover by departing from it.
These transformations did not as is often claimed, de-skill workers. Rather, the modern invention of craft literally put artisans “in their place”. In fact, it was precisely their worker’s valuable skills that motivated capitalist to invent new techniques of controlling them.
Woodcarving is an exemplary example case. This craft was impossible to mechanize, but was nonetheless thoroughly transformed in the late 18th century. Factory system advocates frequently compared artisans to machines, with the crucial caveat that they were less efficient and consistent than their automated equivalents. In response, anti-factory reformers began to prize craft precisely for its instinctive, inefficient, and irregular qualities. Memory serves as the ordering principle, because it is in forming a new relation to the past that craft proces most indispensable.
Craft as memory work
Page 186.
This sort of distracted, repetitive experience is a key part of modern craft, hence the common emphasis on the pleasures of unthinking “flow”. The haphic, rhythmic quality of artisanal work resides exactly in the arena where Leys sees traumatic response occurring: “bodily memories of skills, habits, reflex actions, and classically conditioned response that lie outside verbal-semantic-linguistic representations.” craft is carried out through repetitive somatic movements. Given that the experience of modernity is so disjunctive, it is no wonder that the rhythmic quality of craft seems so comforting. And equally, it has always seemed an exemplary case of the fragility of memory in the face of modern disruptive forces. Once lost, a skill is lost forever. And so it must be revived, literally brought back to lids, and it will only come back in unnatural form. In this respect craft resembles oral tradition. Its cultural value depends on a sense of continuity. It is no coincidence that the syntactical structures of craft and storytelling are closely parallel. Both have internal repetitive forms that aid in the act of recall. Reciting an extensive epic poem, for example, is greatly aided by a composition based on theme and variation. Craft techniques tend to operate in this way too. They are formulaic and mnemonic. These very forms create the impression of something being remembered. But we also need to recognize in this repetition a form of concealment. One speaks of “losing oneself” when immersed in a skilled task. Repetition is, in this context, precisely a means of forestalling an encounter with the self-a way of maintaining dissociation between the present and the disruptive past.
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