One of the least discussed cultural disruptions of COVID-19 is the rise of the artisan economy: the global handicraft industry which expected to be worth $847 billion by 2027.
The artisan economy is the second largest employer in the developing world.
The pandemic contributed to the rise of artisanship – including home cooking, gardening, and DIY crafts.
In his new book, Return of the Artisan: How America Went from Industrial to Handmade, bestselling author and cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken, a Rowayton resident, considers what this means for the future of our work and culture.
From Simon and Schuster, McCracken’s volume explores the evolution of the artisanal movement, from the fringes of the 1970s to the spike of domesticity caused by COVID-19–and what it means for the future of work and American culture as a whole.
McCracken is a much-followed professor whose 2012 book Culturematic was a touchstone for much of American pop cultural expression.
He has advised a host of companies on cultural anthropology, including the Obama White House, Google, Netflix, Nike, Kanye West, and the Ford Foundation.
For a stretch of time so long it dwarfs our sense of scale, we made things by hand. It was only in the last several hundred years that we turned machines into an external self and asked them to take over. And, boy, did they take over. “Satanic mills” ran all day and night, turning the factory into air you couldn’t breathe and noise you couldn’t stand. Increasingly hand-made was a reminder of “the world we have lost,” as Peter Laslett called it, the world before the advent of the industrial. It was the marker of the world before the machines came.
– excerpt from Return of the Artisan
