Folklorists and anthropologists use the term material culture to describe culture made material.  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.

As a venture dedicated to exploring, sourcing, preserving and supporting many of the world's traditional arts and crafts, we conceive of material culture as: humankind’s hammered and burnished self-portrait: It includes everything we have consciously made to sustain ourselves throughout existence.  As such, it encompasses art and architecture, clothing, tools, decoration-all manner of thought made tangible in the form of objects.  Its moniker is not necessarily ‘made by hand’ but ‘made by human’.  It is the comprehensive inventory in long-hand of our journey through the dark and mundane, the dream in which seemingly limitless multitudes of ‘candles in the night’ light our way home.  Holding this, we hold material culture.

It is not foolish now 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 threatens the future of our planet.  It is not even incongruous for a business to say so in an advertisement (or on its website).  To equate the fate of the world’s environment to the fate of the traditional arts is not far-fetched, it is instructive:  in contrast to the ‘mixed-media values’ of much of contemporary design, the decidedly old-fashioned, utilitarian, craft values of, for example, the traditional oriental carpet are inextricably tied to the equally old-fashioned technologies (considered nearly extinct only three decades ago) of natural dyeing and handspinning: materials matter. It is not too late to assert that the traditional arts, to the degree that they respond to our common need to find work rewarding, while also allowing us to take pleasure in the objects that fill our homes, may be the best option we have in bringing human needs and desire into balance with the rest of the world.  Taste matters.