Handicrafts

While sorting stuff in the attic I came across a fairisle patterned pullover knitted for my father by his mother, and it made me think about the disappearance of all the homely handicrafts. Of course, such a pattern can be made by knitting machine, but that’s not the same and perhaps will not be a luxury we will be able to afford come Peak Oil. Sadly, this kind of handmade knitwear now belongs in a museum, a museum that is somewhat snooty about what is the real thing. Put ‘handicrafts’ in your search engine and the impression is that they are the subject of books on how to make tacky stuff at home, or are now ‘ethnic’and made in Asia, or somewhere else in the ‘majority world’, where they can be taught anew and be the means towards an income.

What is the relevance to habitude? Well, I do wonder where the habit of making things has gone, and how easy it will prove to be to retrieve these skills when we need them again.

But on a broader perspective, this is surprisingly relevant to the research I’ve embarked on whereby I shall study writings of Voltaire (1694-1778) and of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), in order to consider how those writings are (or may or may not be) received today in the English-speaking world, and how the reception and interpretation of such works could enable us to gain a different perspective on the critical period spanning the two writers’ lives from the prevailing assumption that there has been, and will continue to be ‘progress’ and ‘development’. One crucial question can be applied to such a study: What is the human brain ‘for’? In other words, before we became urbanised, literate, traders and industrialists, and elements of the workforce; before we became uprooted from local communities and the land, what did we use our brains for? and what did we lose when we became urbanised, literate etc.? I explored that a little in a pamphlet called ‘Cultivating Confusion’ which I wrote many years ago, and later put on my ‘design for revolution’ web site. My thoughts there on what our brains were originally for were unacceptable to the group (Quaker Universalists) which had suggested I write a pamphlet for their series, so they turned it down and I published it privately. One part my Friends disapproved of was my speculations about what edge over other creatures our bigheadedness had given us, and what we did with our big brains when our circumstances changed. The relevance of that to Tagore, in particular, is intriguing and involved. Ranajit Guha’s book, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997), provides some insights, such as new histories of India being written in the eighteenth century in order to achieve – actually invent – clarity on who owned what land in order to collect taxes. Prior to the European-style chronicles of battles and conquests being drawn up, India’s histories were such as the Mahayana and Ramayana, mere morality tales and mythology to the British colonisers, but real oral history for Indian people – and that is one thing that the human brain is ‘for’: passing oral knowledge from generation to generation. Teach children from rooted communities to read and write and the result is that traditional oral proficiency, as well as ecological knowledge from experience and real need, and also important craft skills, are devalued and given low priority, and those children, now qualified merely for administrative jobs in the city, are lost to the villages, which gradually die.

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