Art and Crafts

Arts and Crafts was an anti-industrial movement in the United Kingdom, which flourished from 1880 to 1910. Adherents strove toward creating integrated (holistic) beauty in designing, constructing and furnishing of buildings.

My (family-bound) dynamic conception of ‘Arting & Crafting’ support their view but emphasizes in ‘being in grace’ by experiencing and creating art. Arts and Crafts are in this view deeply intertwined and involves allowing mild/strong pleasurable sensations of well-being and beauty (Van Bekkum 2015).

An anthropological way to understand is also more focused on how we humans manually-mentally re-create and co-create our everyday worlds. Individual people think-act in this ‘world-making’ approach in pre-existing, prescribed time-situation bound realities, such as our occupational settings, our leisure-sports networks and our religious-political experiences.

In my MA thesis (1988) and in various publications/presentations I tried, as a clinically anthropologist and the son of a blacksmith, to formulate a way of ‘gazing’ this crafted-thinking world-making. In a paper “Beauty and Grace Making Artifacts‘ I updated and completed in 2015 the Arts-Crafting-Impulse (ARTS & CRAFTING CONTINUITY IN HUNDREDS OF MILENNIA HUMANIZATION)