Steampunk is the intersection of technology and romance. www.steampunkworkshop.com

Daniel Kreibich 'William Morris' 2006 (combined technique on cardboard 100 x 70cm)

Could there be some bond between Morris’s interest in the Middle Ages and Steampunk enthusiasm for the Victorian era? Is it ironic perhaps, that with a time gap of almost one and a half century and all the disparities, there still seems to exist an enemy common for them both – ever-accelerating progress? Further connections might start springing to mind.

There is much in common between Morris’s nostalgia for genuine medieval workmanship and Steampunk longing for ‘the days before machines were build to build other machines’ (as Ele Carpenter comments in the current JMC issue, p 148). In both cases, their romanticization of a historic period is tied to a desire to opt out of the dreary reality.

Steampunk has been accused of glorifying the past. Fictional author Paul Jessup criticizes Steampunk as ‘escapism that tells us Empire is grand.  (Indeed one could say with Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) that ‘the one of the charms of the past is that it is the past.’ Escapism and its troubled relationship to utopianism would surely make a fascinating topic for a discussion. Let’s try to approach this from a different angle for the moment.

The portrait of William Morris by Czech artist Daniel Krejbich reproduced here hints that there is more to Morris than the black and white picture we’re often presented with tells. As Edward Palmer Thompson brilliantly noted, Morris was “absorbed in a world of “romance””, however, “the world of “romance” was not incompatible with the closest observation and study wherever his interests directed him…” (E. P. Thompson William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary Merlin Press, London 1977, p 17).

It has often been suggested that Morris was a Luddite. This is quite true after all. Morris, just as Luddites, was revolting against replacement of human power and creativity by machinery. Positively, though, this didn’t mean he wanted to ‘go back to some rose tinted vision of Middle Ages’ – to borrow words from Robin Wood’s comment to the previous post on Craft and Utopianism. Morris’s position is quite clear from his lecture Art and Its Producers:

I do not mean…that we should aim at abolishing all machinery: I would do some things by machinery which are now done by hand, and other things by hand which are now done by machinery: in short, we should be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us.

In short, what he despised was not machines, but the human drive to move forward at all costs without any forethought for consequences. Similarly, today’s Steampunk does not object against technology. Let the Steampunk computers, Steampunk ipod cases or Steampunk electric guitars speak for themselves. However, their retro style gadgets have their own way of suggesting, that although time flies, it doesn’t necessarily need to fly as quickly as our obsession with all things new makes us believe.

Here then, unfolds the connection between Morris’s medieval and Steampunk Victorian nostalgia. Neither Morris nor steampunks want to stop the clock. Yet, if implicitly, they’re asking what it is that is driving us forward this fast? And, more importantly still, do we want to be driven there?

In his Social change with respect to culture and original nature (1922), William Fielding Ogborn coined the term “cultural lag” to describe the common phenomenon when the changes in material culture (technology especially) often outpace the changes in the non-material culture (ideas, beliefs, symbols etc). Adaptation to new technology thus becomes difficult, as one part of culture virtually lags behind another. Although the term “lag” may suggest so, this doesn’t mean there is no choice and we should simply adapt to and be constantly dragged by technological innovation. The possible misreading of Ogborn’s concept was thus addressed in Alvin Toffler’s famous book Future shock (Random House, New York 1970), where Toffler makes clear that rapid change is not inevitably beneficial and that it might be for our own good to slow down “the future” and adapt to innovation at our own pace. He writes: “… we need neither blind acceptance nor blind resistance, but an array of creative strategies for shaping, deflecting, accelerating, or decelerating change selectively” (p 331).

Perhaps Morris and steampunks are doing just this.

The Principle of Hope is all but an account of the easy ways to get by. Quite on the contrary, it draws us into the labyrinth of imaginative curiosity, anticipation and the aspiration to cross over the limits of the up to now experience and explore what lies beyond. Utopia, in Bloch’s terms though, is not a country that no one has ever been to. Rather, it is the hopeful, if often intricate, journey from our deepest (day-) dreams toward their possible realization.

Is it possible then, that utopian thinking and craftwork might actually have a lot in common? Do craft and utopianism, perhaps, share the curiosity and also the courage to ‘begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing’ as Ruskin writes in Stones of Venice. Or could their willingness to take the risk of thinking and working at the limit of one’s own competencies be a connecting point too? The history of social and political debates in which craft played a catalyst role for re-imagining the status quo suggests that craft and utopian quest for a better future have often walked hand in hand.

Let’s think of the significance of craft in the history of intentional communities – Quakers, Shakers or Amish people – to name several obvious examples. Remember craft’s crucial role in utopian socialism and in the reform started by Ruskin, Morris and continued by the Arts and Crafts Movement later on. Moving on to the twentieth century, start with the emphasis put on craft in guild socialism, craft’s importance for the Indian Independence Movement and its role in the late twentieth century DIY culture. The most recent examples would surely include the craftivism movement, that has, quite fittingly in this context, been given a whole recent issue of Utopian Studies – the journal of the Society for Utopian Studies, and perhaps even steampunk phenomenon – the theme of the current JMC issue.

Surely, another analogy between craft and utopianism could be exemplified on the never ending tension between the ‘make do’ and ‘make better’ -the dilemma between the instantly practicable solutions versus the desire for the ideal, that has long been haunting not only social reformers and activists but generations of craft theorists and practitioners alike.

In short, neither utopian thinking nor craft necessarily offer the easy way scenarios. But, shall we agree that the common strength of both might lie in a determination that is well illustrated in the following extract of one of the stories from the 2008 anthology of steampunk literature (Brown, Molly: The Selene Gardening Society, in: Vandermeer, Jeff and Ann eds.: Steampunk, Tachyon Publications, San Francisco 2008, cited in: Steampunk Magazine n7, 2011, p. 3)?

“Calm down, Maston,” said Mr. Barbicane. “I merely said it was impossible. I never said we wouldn’t find a way to do it.”

Theme for 4.2

‘Steampunk’ reflects a retro-Victorian machine aesthetic. Currently in vogue, the contemporary phenomenon of ‘steampunk’ raises some curious questions.

This ‘back to the future’ nostalgia seems to contradict the modernist aesthetic normally projected onto technology. It also evokes the industrial revolution against which the Arts and Crafts movement reacted. But is it possible that the ‘mechanical age’ of the nineteenth-century have a craft value, at least from the perspective of the 21st century?

Furthermore, Is it the destiny of all technologies to become a potential inspiration for craft, once they are no longer useful? Guest bloggers are Mila Burcikova and Linda Hughes.

Flickr image from Urban Don, with Creative Commons license
‘Satanic mills’ reference is from William Blake’s poem Jerusalem .

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The second issue of 2011 casts us back to craft futures of the past.

Articles

Editorial introduction

Corporate Craft: Constructing the Empire State Building by Ezra Shales

Coal-powered Craft: A Past for the Future by Ele Carpenter

Crafting a New Age: A. R. Orage and the Politics of Craft by Adam Trexler

Primary Text

Politics for Craftsmen by A. R. Orage

Statement of Practice

Technology and Hand Skill in Craft and Industry by Robin Wood (pdf)

Exhibition Reviews

• Ballets Russes: The Art of Costume Reviewed by Sally Gray
• Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art Reviewed by Dana E. Byrd
• Circuit Céramique aux Arts Décoratifs: La Scène Française Contemporaine Reviewed by Alison Britton

Book Reviews

• Cone Ten Down: Studio Pottery in New Zealand, 1945–1980 Reviewed by Grace Cochrane
• Cultural Commodities in Japanese Rural Revitalization: Tsugaru Nuri Lacquerware and Tsugaru Shamisen Reviewed by Sarah Teasley

This issue features three articles that address this theme. Together they tell an interesting story of continuity through the twentieth century. At the early end of the chronological spectrum we have Adam Trexler’s in-depth study of A. R. Orage, a figure who ought to be as well-known as Ruskin and Morris, but who has remained somewhat obscure. It is easy to understand why. Not only did he go in for currently unfashionable theories like Theosophy and Nietzsche’s principle of the superhuman, but his writings depart from (and sometimes attack) the hallowed principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. To make matters worse, as Trexler writes, his ideas are hard to situate along a familiar left-right political spectrum. Orage’s emphasis on guild structures and higher consciousness can seem bewildering: simultaneously radical and reactionary. Yet precisely because of this unfamiliarity, his ideas feel surprisingly relevant today. To help readers come to grips with this important figure in craft’s historiography, in addition to Trexler’s examination of his intellectual trajectory we offer a reprinted text by Orage, entitled ‘Politics for Craftsmen.’

Ezra Shales’ study of the Empire State Building carries us a few decades on, to the interwar period (often thought of as a depopulated valley in craft historical terms, caught between the twin peaks of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the post-1945 Studio Craft movement). It may be surprising to consider a skyscraper as a handmade object, but as Shales demonstrates, that is exactly how it was presented at the time. A rhetorical appeal to artisanal values was crucially important to the triumphal rhetoric of the Empire State Building’s financial backers and key spokesman, including bricklayer-turned-master-politician Alfred E. Smith.

If Orage were alive today, he might very well love steampunk – not only because that subculture refers back to his own Victorian and Edwardian moment, but also because this contemporary DIY-based subculture operates through precisely the combination of collectivity and hyper-individualism that he favored. Up-and-coming craft theorist Ele Carpenter gives us a report from the front lines of steampunk, showing how artists use its apparently eccentric, science fiction-derived imagery to create persuasively critical works at the intersection of the physical and the digital.

Finally, in this issue we are pleased and honored to feature a Statement of Practice by Robin Wood, the chair of the Heritage Crafts Association. Devoted to the preservation of threatened artisanal skills in Britain, the HCA is politically active in a way that, again, cannot be easily located on a left-right spectrum. It is equally ecumenical in its self-imposed mandate. Wood wants to celebrate the full range of skilled labor: not just pastoral crafts like pole lathe turning (his own craft) but also light industrial trades like blade-making. Though his viewpoint is perhaps closest to Morris’s, one suspects that he would have found much to discuss with Orage, and it is certain that he would have been fascinated by the plumbers, hoist operators, and asbestos handlers who helped erect the Empire State Building. It is just such unexpected discursive connections, over space and time, that this journal aims to foster.

Yet Byatt is also supremely pragmatic, and suspicious of falling too deeply into an idealized dream state. In the interview she offers a lovely example of utopianism gone astray, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II:  “We were going to have a new Elizabethan age and people were going to write verse plays, Shakespeare was going to come back, and energy and color and beauty were going to return to Britain. Buildings that had been painted green, cream, and a certain dirty brown were suddenly painted a very hopeful pale blue.  This was before the Clean Air Act and they very quickly became dirty.”  This is the sort of observation  —grounded in hard, sometimes unpleasant, material facts—that gives her fiction its grounding.

Sarah Fayen Scarlett’s article on the craft of patternmaking looks at a similar down-to-earth movement. She examines the career of American furniture-maker Charles Rohlfs (who, interestingly, began as a Shakespearean actor), pointing out that he could never have realized his magically ornate chairs and desks without long experience as a carver of patterns for a stove manufacturer—a professional training he later tried to hide. Here is one idealistic Arts and Crafts maker whose skills were nurtured within the context of industry. Fayen Scarlett argues that we should take this lesson to heart, not only paying attention to the craftspeople who work in factories, but also the part that their often-invisible skills play in shaping our mass-produced environment.

Joshua Stein also argues for the relevance of craft in an unexpected production context: computer-assisted architectural design. He applies the theories of David Pye and (a writer perhaps less familiar to our readers) Manuel De Landa to show how architects can shift across vastly different scales—from tabletop models to full-scale buildings—using digitally-fueled craft as a connective tissue. Stein finds in this method a way to invest even indirect operations with “material intimacy.” It is a phrase that Byatt might like. In the interview, she vividly describes the process of inventing her characters with her body:  “I sit there and I think their fingers with my fingers.  And if they get hurt I feel it.” It is a suggestive parallel with Anselm Stern, the beguiling puppet-master in The Children’s Book, and also with Stein’s architects, who try to invest their structures with tactility through remote control.

A final inclusion in this issue of the JMC is worthy of note: our primary text, an excerpt of Jean Baudrillard’s 1973 book The Mirror of Production. Here we have a writer who is definitely not reminiscent of Byatt—her carefully observed, empathic humanism finds little place in his critical theory. Interestingly, however, this passage shows him engaging in his own puppet act, manipulating craft for his own theoretical purposes. Baudrillard presents the artisan as a figure who inhabits a symbolic realm, outside of modern productivity. His target is orthodox Marxist thinking, which treats all work as exchangeable labor—rather than as an irreducible experience unto itself.  Against this conception Baudrillard offers a vision of craft that is completely contained within community and materiality—which are, in fact, two primary concerns of Byatt’s. Readers might be surprised to find some common ground between these two powerful, and very different, thinkers. But then, for both, common ground is what craft is all about.

The Editors
The Journal of Modern Craft

Table of contents 4.1

Articles

Editorial introduction

Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste by Elizabeth C. Miller

The Craft of Industrial Patternmaking by Sarah Fayen Scarlett

Speculative Artisanry: The Expanding Scale of Craft within Architecture by Joshua G. Stein

Statement of Practice

Interview with A.S. Byatt including Tanya Harrod and Glenn Adamson (PDF)

Commentary by Glenn Adamson

“The Artisan,” from The Mirror of Production by Jean Baudrillard

Exhibition Reviews

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946 reviewed by Bibiana Obler

Japanese Sashiko Textiles reviewed by Moira Vincentelli

Book Reviews

Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era reviewed by Ellen Paul Denker

KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave reviewed by Sue Green

Almost two years ago now, the Journal of Modern Craft’s first editorial argued for a broad framing of our subject, one that would go beyond the studio crafts and their discrete disciplines, as well as the tendency to place craft in a series of continuous dialectics with modernity, industrialization, commerce, and fine art aesthetics. Our first Primary Text, by the late Reyner Banham, argued for an authentic species of craft embedded (and buried, out of view) within the routines of the factory. In more recent issues we have continued to seek out scholarship on craft well outside “movement” logic, in contexts such as tourist economies, public art performance, and industrial design. Yet the area of academic study most closely associated with the word “craft” remains, of course, the Arts and Crafts movement.

In that first editorial we expressed the hope that a major study would emerge that tackled the movement’s complexity and paradoxical nature. Gillian Naylor’s The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory, first published in 1971, set the bar high. It is salutary to consider that although there has been much valuable infilling in the form of newly discovered objects, good international surveys, monographs on individual figures, and detailed regional studies—both in our own pages, and in such exemplary recent publications as Lawrence Kreisman and Glenn Mason’s The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest—there has been nothing quite as energetic, incisive and politically aware as Naylor’s pioneering contribution, written nearly forty years ago.

The last fresh contextualization of the Arts and Crafts movement was the decisive turn to Romantic Nationalism, a diffusionist approach that informed Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan’s succinct, admirable 1991 The Arts and Crafts Movement in the World of Art series and the papers in Art and the National Dream (1993) edited by Nicola Gordon Bowe. A key moment for reframing Arts and Crafts studies should have been 2005—when two major exhibitions were mounted (at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at Los Angeles County Museum). Both, however, were chiefly informed by Romantic Nationalist scholarship, choosing to explore the international nature of the movement by tracking its dissemination country by country. When nationalist agendas are examined in relative isolation, we miss the opportunities to see what is common to different experiences of craft reform, what hybrids develop, and why. Craft movements do not chart a simple, linear process of influence, but rather a series of asymmetrical and overlapping fits and starts.

Then there is the question of the relationship between the Arts and Crafts movement and later developments within modern craft and design. Alan Crawford’s remarkable, modestly entitled “The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Sketch”—in Alan Crawford (ed.), By Hammer and By Hand: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham, 1984—showed the way. As Tom Crook argued in our first issue of this year, the Arts and Crafts movement should be viewed as presenting an alternative option within (rather than an escape from) modernity, and its political and aesthetic transformations. A logical corollary is that historians should look beyond the chronological boundaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, finding continuities that might reshape our understanding of early modernism in design and architecture, and uncovering hidden stories of craft hitherto obscured by an interwar rhetoric of progressive technology.

And there are plenty of other possibilities for further research. These might include the investigation of workshop practice and engagement with materials—themes intrinsic to the Arts and Crafts movement’s pedagogy, both informal and formal, and transmitted through permissible tools, and the study of historic and vernacular material. This could tie in with an investigation of time consumption and normative work practices during the high period of the Arts and Crafts movement. John Roberts’s Marxist-infected art historical study, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, suggests the potential for using a labor theory of culture as a model to investigate Arts and Crafts values. Equally, a history of colonial art education would show Arts and Crafts values being deployed and depleted in strategies of underdevelopment.

The research articles included in this issue suggest the rich possibilities afforded by some of these approaches. Each essay presents craft reform as inextricably bound to modern innovations, whether those occur in the registers of mass production, urban reinvention, or spiritual experimentation. Freyja Hartzell offers a sharply observed account of the stonewares produced in the Westerwald of Germany at the turn of the century. She shows how designers such as Richard Riemerschmid appropriated the völkisch emblems of vernacular ceramic production in the service of a modern German material culture. Jordi Falgàs tracks the transmission of these German ideas to the town of Girona in Spain, where the progressive architect Rafael Masó tried to put similar principles into practice. If Riemerschmid and his colleagues enjoyed success in reframing craft within an ideologically driven reform movement, Masó’s story is fascinating partly because of his failures. In the politically fractured context of Catalonia, artisanal architecture was impossible not because it was mute, but because it spoke all too clearly. Our third article brings us forward in time to the seam between the Arts and Crafts era and the emergence of an individualist studio craft movement. Art historian Roberta Meyer and master woodworker Mark Sifrri place the iconic figure of Wharton Esherick— often described as the first American studio furniture maker—into the surprising context of 1920s international anthroposophy. Meyer and Sfirri show that the motifs and intent of Esherick’s furniture conform closely to the teachings of this modernist spiritualist movement, pioneered by the Austro- Hungarian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.

All three articles attest to the importance of in-depth primary research in the effort to come to grips with the historical craft movement. In this spirit, we offer a Primary Text that takes us further forward in time to the postwar period, but not necessarily away from turn-of-the-century preoccupations. Paul Caffrey introduces us to a fascinating document of 1960s design reform, the so-called “Scandinavian Report,” in which a team of visiting designers frankly appraise the strengths and weaknesses of Irish craft and industrial production. It is fascinating to observe some of the same issues that were at issue in Germany and Spain, c.1900—such as the proper deployment of folk motifs and the ideal organization of workshops—still at issue in this very different chronological and geographical situation. Finally, we have a Statement of Practice by the founders of the Handspring Puppet Company, who are based in South Africa but have taken London by storm recently in the theatrical production War Horse. They argue that the contemporary puppet is a unique form of craft because its “ur-narrative” is a functional commitment to “seeming to be alive.” There are many subtle ways in which this absorbing account of puppet design connects with Arts and Crafts studies—by allying craftedness with radical modernity, through its global references and inspirations, through puppetry’s implicit commentary on individual agency and, not least, in a shared ambition to create a constructed object with a narrative, animate purpose.

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Allison Smith 'The Donkey, The Jackass, and The Mule' (2008) click image for source.

Craft in the 21st century has become a forum for activist causes such as feminism, democracy, land reform and the gift economy. There are strong parallels here with the origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement as a revival of traditions lost through industrialisation. So what’s new?

Craft activism today seems to provide a democratic forum for a much broader range of concerns. It is no longer exclusively concerned with craft issues, such as the loss of skills through globalisation.

So is craft now a form of culture jamming? Can we trace a connection here back to earlier political interventions through craft, even William Morris?

For issue 2.2, we are joined by guest bloggers Faythe Levine and Lycia Trouton. Faythe Levine is the director of Handmade Nation, a film about contemporary DIY. Lycia Trouton lectures in art theory at University of Tasmania with a particular interest in Irish linen memorials.

Online from Journal of Modern Craft 2.2: Editorial and ‘Acts of Association: Allison Smith’s Craft as Civic Practice’ by Jennifer Geigel Mikulay

We have not had themed issues as yet in Journal of Modern Craft, and this latest edition was certainly not planned under the rubric ‘politics’. Serendipitously, however, much of its content addresses craft’s fortunes under various political structures. Under the conditions of industrialism craft finds it hard to make a niche for itself – whether within a command economy in communist China or in the apparently lush pastures of neo-liberal North America. Small wonder that in early twentieth-century Britain, as studio craft was defining itself as something more individualistic and even more ‘handmade’ than the Arts and Crafts Movement, the hunt was on for viable craft politics. By the time of the 1930s, makers were paying close attention to the Soviet model, in which local councils of workers organized their own production. British craftspeople such as T. S. (Sam) Haile and Michael Cardew were inspired by the rhetoric of figures like the poet Stephen Spender who argued in his Forward From Liberalism (1937) that “the aim of communism is, as Lenin wrote, to create multiformity.” Home-grown movements like guild socialism, social credit and, for Roman Catholics, distributism (based upon the neo-Thomist argument for “just price”) all appeared to offer a place for the small-scale production that was studio craft. That was, and is, one problem – how to find a space for craft within overarching political and economic frameworks.

It is of equal interest to reflect on craft’s relationship to differing ideologies. Do craft objects, along with other works of art, offer visual evidence of a specific political moment? Yes and no. While our historical and critical understanding of craft would be greatly diminished if we did not ground it in its ambient ideologies, craft objects (more perhaps than other kinds of art work) can look exactly the same even as they are embraced or co-opted by very different political values. Tradition is the most potent of the political valences of craft, which can embody cultural continuity during times of drastic social transformation. This quality has been exploited by progressive and reactionary regimes alike—a fact often forgotten by advocates who see craft as essentially anti-authoritarian. It is therefore chastening to be reminded, in our review section, of the political history of mingei. This Japanese handcraft revival started as a fringe avant-garde movement, and was subsequently co-opted as a component of Japan’s plans for an imperial ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,’ only to be reconfigured after the Second World War as part of the visual culture of a peaceful democracy with strong Anglo-American affiliations.

Craft’s chameleon-like properties are also seen in Juliet Kinchin’s article about three potters who were trained in Hungary, more or less simultaneously. From that point their careers diverged. Eva Zeisel, the best known of the three, experienced a disastrous foray into the brave new world of Soviet production, only to become one of the friendly faces of American capitalism promoted in the Museum of Modern Art’s Good Design program. Margit Kovács stayed in Hungary and found success producing work that was ideologically correct within that Socialist context. Lili Márkus, however, slipped quietly into obscurity after she came to Britain—where perhaps the Cold War was not so closely fought as to require potters to be its standard bearers.

Elsewhere in the journal are further examples of craft’s course being set by the waves of politics. The Yixing potters described by anthropologist Geoffrey Gowlland have successfully adapted their working habits, and their understanding of skill, to the successive circumstances of pre-war, Communist, and now market-driven China. Jonathan Clancy gives us the turn-of-the-century example of Elbert Hubbard, who made the Arts and Crafts Movement safe for capitalist enterprise (or is it vice versa?) through an appeal to the individualistic ethos of Transcendentalism. And Jennifer Mikulay analyzes contemporary performance artist Alison Smith (also discussed by Julia Bryan-Wilson in the previous issue of the JMC), who weaves together political strands from the nineteenth century with those of the present day. In Smith’s work The Donkey, The Jackass, and The Mule, disparate ideological material is assembled in a way that would be incomprehensible, Mikulay argues, without the use of craft to make the associations.

Smith’s example suggests that craft’s flexibility as a common political language can be a strength as well as a weakness. This idea finds confirmation in Gabriela Gusmão’s Statement of Practice, a moving account of her investigations into the improvisatory crafts of the Brazilian streetscape. Gusmão’s images and words capture the irrepressible workings of human spirit in a city without an effective social safety net. She reminds us that craft happens not only from the top down at the behest of political powers that be, but from the bottom up as a form of the political vernacular. The inventive but fragile street crafts of Rio may be the most conclusive evidence offered in this issue that politics and experience are impossible to pull apart—a law equally applicable to craftspeople and their products. As Gusmão puts it, “the lifecycle of inanimate things should not be dismissed.”