Craft Skills and Their Role in Healing Ourselves and the World

Abstract

The work I am presenting here on craft or, taken to a more basic level, engagement with the material world, came out of a concern about placeless environments as unconducive to human flourishing. A range of positions has developed through the academic discourse on place. These could be characterised as the basic ‘placelessness is bad’ position, the ‘compensatory benefits position’, and the ‘embracing the post-modern condition with gusto’ position. In this paper I will just be giving a flavour of the first two in order to lay out a number of propositions about people and their relationship to place, but the main action of the paper is to explore the role of crafts in forging a more reasonable response to placelessness than the idea that compensatory benefits alone could mitigate the psychological and social problems of living in placeless environments. The compensatory thesis points to ideas such as cosmopolitan freedom and increasing self reflection as the upside of lost embeddedness. However, I propose that we can retain the cosmopolitan ideas of freedom and self-reflection and re-find a sense of embeddedness even in the midst of contemporary 'thinned out' places. And we can do this through even a minimal engagement with handcraft as a means of reintegrating ourselves into the material fabric of the world. I see this as a means to arrive at an emplaced way of being regardless of where we are; and thus a kind of backdoor route to building more meaningful places.