About Material Culture
Our Philosophy
Folklorists and anthropologists use the term material culture to describe culture made material. Why borrow a scholar's term to brand and describe a business enterprise? The answer is built into the question, and the question is built into the answer, and each multiply every time humans make a choice of what to produce or what to consume.
Start small. Start by comparing how a single-use plastic cup and an Asheville stoneware mug share a common function, but embody values (and consequences) at opposite ends of contemporary life. Aesthetically and ecologically, economically and culturally, and on a much grander scale, the same can be said of the global billboard and its carbon impact in comparison to the communities of artists—and consumers!—presented in DREAMS OF MY BROTHER.
As a venture dedicated for decades to reviving, exploring, sourcing, preserving and supporting many of the world's traditional arts and crafts, from Turkey to China, India to Ghana, America to Indonesia, we believe it neither foolish to invoke aesthetics and sustainability as a basis for thinking about the future, any more than it is romantic to say that unbridled industrial development has failed and threatens the future of our planet.
To equate the fate of the world's environment to the fate of the traditional arts and crafts is not far-fetched; it is fundamental, we believe, to future survival. "Good design and technology" alone cannot replace the powerful capacity of the traditional arts to employ billions, to reduce the effects of climate change, while also responding to our common need to find work rewarding and to take pleasure in the objects that fill our homes, our lives, and our imaginations.
The traditional arts and crafts and the incredible skills they foster--from farming to weaving, cooking to painting, natural dyeing to hand-spinning, from live dance to live theatre-- may be the best options we have in bringing human needs and desire into balance with the rest of the world in the 21st century.
George Jevremovic
Material Culture, Philadelphia (MaterialCulture.com »)
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