The handmade's tale

Just as the word "organic" conjures up images of the pure and the pristine in our minds, so does the word "handmade" evoke thoughts of the life cycle of a product as one where the human hand is ubiquitous in all stages of the making.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a Professor of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College, clears misconceptions surrounding the word "handmade" in context of Etsy's recent decision to allow sellers to apply to peddle items they produced with manufacturing partners, as long as the sellers are able to demonstrate the "authorship", "responsibility" and "transparency" that are "intrinsic" to the handmade items.

Etsy's policy has angered buyers who believe that the "machine" part of the policy will taint the purity of human made handicrafts.

Dr. Barber argues that very rarely in the human history of making has anything been made that's a hundred percent "hand crafted."

Etsy’s latest move is entirely in line with the history of handmade goods, a history that is more complicated than the simple term “handmade” implies. The artisans have run head-on into the problem that led to the Industrial Revolution: Making things by hand is slow. Really slow.

Even the handloom that symbolized the tool with which luddites rebelled against the mechanization of European factories in the 19th century, "already had mechanical aids in the form of a complex of wooden bars and thread loops to open the passages for the weft thread to go across the cloth."

The one instance of an entirely handmade item is the fragment of an Egyptian linen from around 2,500 B.C. housed currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 

Fine as silk, 200 threads to the inch, the linen had been hand-split and spliced end to end to make the thread.

Dr. Barber's advice to customers who are migrating from Etsy to Zibbet which claims to have "purer artisanal" interests, is to acquire a sense of history in order to see that the history of the handmade artifact is in itself implicated in that of machines.

Ultimately, it is the human care, effort and ingenuity used to create an object that is important, and not whether it fits the exact definition of “handmade [...] Just because an object includes manufactured parts doesn’t mean it can’t reflect the touch of an individual creator’s hand: the subtly uneven knit, the finger-marked clay, and all the other happy unmechanical surprises of human quirkiness.