Welcome to the Finnternet!

This afternoon I went to the Western Montana Fair, mainly to look at all the crafts that are entered for competition and display. I recently joined a knitting circle and I was excited to see the works of everyone I've been knitting with this summer. I was floored by the level of skill, creativity, and pure artistry of the crafts I saw. There was quilting, woodcarving, doll making, painting, and more. But my real interest is in the fiber arts, and the knitting, crochet, embroidery, and yarn spinning I saw were remarkably beautiful. It was extra exciting to look at this year since I now know several of the entrees from the knitting circle!

Yet something that was unnoticeably absent from the display was tatting, a form of lacemaking originating in the 19th century. Tatting had been a category for judgement at the fair in years prior, but given that there were no entries for it this year, it's been scratched from the roster and will not be included in years to come.

About a month ago, while many members of the knitting circle were preparing to submit their creations to the fair, one member was stressing about the lack of tatting being entered. She urged us all to pick up tatting, lest it disappear from the fair forever! Yet nobody did, not even herself. I made excuses to myself. I'm busy enough with knitting and crochet as is. It's complicated and the resources/tools are probably expensive. There's nobody around to learn tatting from anyways. Will I ever pick up tatting? Unsure, but at this point in my life I'm unwilling to.

And so, tatting was gone from the Western Montana fair. When a craft dies in a community, does it even make a sound? The fairgoers sure didn't notice its absence, and I myself only just learned what tatting even was a month ago and have never seen it in person. I imagine that most are unfamiliar with its existence.

I find this whole notion of endangered or extinct crafts incredibly interesting and heartbreaking. Traditional crafts are heavily undervalued and underappreciated in our current society and economic model. It's definitely a complex issue, but I believe there are a few main explanations for this:

1. New technology takes the cake

   Sure, the traditional way works. But modern machines can do it faster, more precisely, and for WAY cheaper (who wants to pay for an artisan when a factory can do it for less?).

2. Many crafts are simply antiquated and no longer considered necessary or worthwhile to society

   This ties in heavily with industrialization, but I honestly think it's more the fact that many crafts are not capable of being mass replicated. Well, at least not without serious labor concerns. For example, crochet is unable to be replicated by machines (the hand motions/degrees of freedom are too complex), meaning if you see an exceptionally cheap piece of crochet at a retailer or online shopping, there is without a doubt some kind of labor exploitation going on. Even a headband or the skimpiest summer top takes a crocheter considerable time!

   In a globalized, post industrial society, we prefer the mass-produceable and marketable. Is having homemade, tatted lace on your apron really necessary? Or can you just buy an apron with a cute pattern from amazon for 15 bucks and call it a day?

   Colonialism plays a large role in this too. There are indigineous crafts that have been given no space to exist in our society because the colonizer did not deem them worthwhile. Things that are deemed worthwhile and allowed to cross over from the subaltern tend to be bastardized and appropriated. Think dreamcatchers.

   The reason I've made this separate from number 1 is because rather than technology offering a better method for producing said craft, there is simply no room in modern society for the craft to even exist, mechanized or not.

3. Many traditional crafts are womens' work, therefore their value is unrecognized

   This isn't the case for every endangered craft, but it is for many. Traditionally, women performed labor that was significantly less recognized than the work done by men. They were tasked with childrearing, housekeeping, clothmaking, cooking, and more. Many traditional crafts come from a continued tradition of womens' work, such as knitting, lacemaking, and weaving. Under capitalism, this type of work is simply not very profitable. Quilting takes an absurd amount time, yet many people are unwilling to pay a fair amount for the time it takes someone to make a quilt. It's because as a society we do not recognize this work as that valuable, and a large part of it stems from sexism!

   I mean look at the term 'arts and crafts.' We make a clean distinction between sophisticated disciplines like painting and sculpture and those far more simple, unnecessary, grandma activities like knitting and lacemaking. To a consumer, "crafts" are deemed less serious, important, and valuable than "arts".

To sum the issues up, there are longstanding cultural traditions such as certain crafts that are incompatible with our society. This is because we value the processed, the industrial, the mechanized, the profitable, the sellable, the marketable, the new, and the practical. An antiquated skill, technique, or way of doing things is not encouraged or even allowed to survive. These issues compound over time and less and less people are willing to take up learning a craft that may have been passed down in their family or community for hundreds of years.

I see this as akin to the crisis with endangered languages. When we lose a language, we lose a whole expression of human thinking. A unique expression of human reality. An entire medium for culture. Oral tradition. Hyper-specific vocabulary to local geography, flora, and fauna. Jokes. Much like endangered languages, there are entire lists of critically endangered crafts. There are hundreds more from around the world not included on any list. Nobody will even notice when they're gone. When we lose a craft, we lose part of our history as a species.

The same member who brought the tatting issue to my attention is also always urging us to submit any sort of craft to the fair, this year or next. "People need to know we do this," she says every week. "They need to see what we do!"