Craft Heritage and the Sustainable Marketplace

Last month the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage began an online marketplace for “authentic craftwork created by artisans representing communities from recent Festival programs: Armenia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil, along with other countries around the globe, with more to come in the future.” Most of the crafts are traditional and reflect something of a community-of-origin aesthetic. A father-and-son duo from Brazil, to take but one example, “share [with whoever will buy them] hand-painted and woodblock prints that are traditionally used as covers for cordels, or epic poems,” according to the Center’s press release. The woodblock prints feature stylized natural objects such as birds and stars. But instead of being used as cordel covers, they are framed and for sale to anyone who would like to display them in their homes. The financial arrangement is intended to benefit the artists, less the costs of marketing and sales. It appears that some of the traditional uses for these crafts also continue, while others are endangered. In addition to benefiting the artists, these sales are intended to help sustain the craft traditions themselves. The buyers are like tourists at the Festival, who may purchase what they like, not only for display but possibly also as an investment that could appreciate in value, the way some folk art has done over the decades.

In the past here and elsewhere I’ve written critically about tourism and the heritage marketplace, wondering about the differences between the community aesthetic that produced such crafts and the tourist aesthetic that purchases them. I also worried about the effect of the tourist marketplace on the motives of the artisans and on the traditions. Folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett pointed out in the early days of heritage tourism that marking someone or something as cultural heritage added value to the person or product. I wrote about the dangers of confusing values with value: that is, confusing the cultural values of a community craft tradition with the pecuniary value of an art object in the heritage economy. I was concerned about the emphasis on exemplary artisans, in those instances when the object or skill was something functional  that nearly everyone in the community was expected to be able to accomplish. I recalled conversations from my time serving on grant-awarding panels for the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, where passing on traditions within communities was favored over anything that smacked of commercialism. And yet what is to happen with craftwork that has outlived its usefulness within the community? Should it become extinct, or perhaps be kept alive as part of a diversity of cultural expression, for possible future usefulness?

Lobster fishing in a peapod, Maine, early 20th century.

In this connection I think now of the fifteen-foot, highly maneuverable rowboats that were in use for lobstering along the rocky coast of Maine, peapods as they were called on account of their shape. They were rowed from a standing position. Seaworthy craft, well-fashioned and graceful, they arose in the 19th century but nearly became extinct by World War II as lobster boats became motorized and traps attached to ropes were hauled up with power winches instead of by hand. A gradual increase in interest among tourists and newcomers and a repurposing of them primarily for recreation has insured their revival. No doubt heritage adds to their appeal; and besides, it is not as if peapods were not bought and sold in the marketplace when they functioned as lobster boats.

In the first half of the century a man living on the Maine coast might learn a number of craft skills with which to make a living. I knew one such, Hap Collins (d. 1990), who had learned how to mill shingles, how to fish for lobster, how to build rowboats, how to twitch logs out of the woods with work horses, how to build chimneys out of fieldstone or brick, and how to play the fiddle. In his old age he earned part of his living making paintings and model boats and selling them to tourists. I think of Hap and how he would embrace the online marketplace for his goods without a second thought.