Artisan Culture: Made By Hand

Artisans at work

Ester Bloom is a columnist for Cheek Teeth. She blogs at Full of Pith and Vinegar. 

What does it mean for things to be made by hand anymore? Mike Daisey, in his now somewhat-discredited but still fascinating monologue for This American Life about visiting the factories that produce Apple products in China, raises the point that all of our high-tech electronics are made by hand these days. By lots of hands, in fact. Machines alone can't churn out the iPhones and iPads we have come to rely on with the precision we have come to expect; and besides, labor is cheap.

The effect on the hands themselves can be devastating. Daisey claims in his show that: "Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs." Other news outlets like The Guardian have echoed Daisey's main points about inhumane working conditions, so the thrust of his argument is not under dispute, just some of his more chilling details.

Of course, when we yearn for the old days of things made by hand, we do not picture underage workers lined up alongside conveyor belts. We think about artisans: the silver-smithing of Paul Revere or the stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany. We want the care and attention that we assume went into each piece; even flaws are evidence of authenticity, and thus come to be valuable. We seem to assume that when a person makes something, they invest their creation with a bit of their soul. But factory work is soulless by design. Anything that comes off an assembly line, be it car or computer, needs to be as reliable as it is interchangeable. Modern consumers pay a premium for that predictability.

Ford, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, and the like have done their jobs almost too well. Our lives and their accoutrements have become so predictable that we reach back nostalgically for a world when not all bananas looked and tasted the same. We crave the potential strangeness that comes from trying to re-create classic ice cream sandwiches in our own kitchens, or hybridizing an iPad with a typewriter.
 

So we turn to Etsy, to backyard gardens, to craft fairs and farmer's markets, seeking out some of what's been lost. Anything made to order can fail; we can't know how it will turn out, or even if, having succeeded in brewing beer in our bathrooms once, we will be able to replicate the feat. But in a world full of pre-packaged predictability, that not knowing, that mystery, is appealing. Once more, we recognize there is power in something shaped by hand--at least, by one set of hands, not dozens.