The word cræft (pronounced craheft with a soft r and a blur of the a as in “ah” and e as in “yet,” and no distinct syllabic break) first showed up in written texts over a thousand years ago. It was an indigenous Old English word that didn’t make it into modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary offers no contemporary equivalent, but instead refers to “knowledge, power, skill,” and a sense of wisdom and resourcefulness that weighs in even more than physical skill. So we are not talking about craft, which has numerous modern uses–from meaning boutique, as in beer, to created, as in an essay. We are grateful to Alex Langlands for writing a book about this, and we like his attempt to resurface the word as a conceptual and lifeway goal to aim for. As our beliefs are rooted in these times of deep need for transition away from living on the take, this word arrived through a book, but landed in our hearts.
Langlands suggest that a state of being engaged is core to cræft, a state that has been overwhelmed by the transfer of power from local, and often individual, to industrial. He writes, “The point when industrial processes emerged as the dominant means of production was the point at which craft as a form of art emerged–as a self-conscious counterpoint to factory-made goods.” He adds that mechanization has changed how we think and how we establish knowledge, so much so that it is often hard to fully imagine the world before the Industrial Revolution, much less think like the majority of our human ancestors. Rather than see this as progress, it seems more akin to a narrowing of our animal gifts.
The uses of cræft in one old text are best explained as “the organising principle of the individual’s capacity to follow a moral and mental life,” according to historian Peter Clemoes. In Langlands wrestling to try to define the word, he offers this gem:
“When we made things, we acquired a certain kind of knowledge, we had an awareness and an understanding of how materials worked and how the human form has evolved to create from them. With the severance of this ability, we are in danger of losing touch with a knowledge base that allows us to convert raw materials into useful objects, a hand-eye-head-heart-body co-ordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our world.”
The land who is one’s home shapes the cræft, and the cræft then influences the land. To make a cradle that takes tens of thousands of milkweed plants means you understand milkweed, and spend significant energy ensuring their proliferation, so cræft becomes inseparable from both the land and the cræfter. This knowledge is passed from one generation to the next, and as the world changes, so too do the relationships, and therefore the processes.
Langlands ends his 23-page chapter on trying to define cræft with this: “It’s about more than just making. The goal, in being cræfty, is not to use as much as possible of the technology and resources [sic] you have at your disposal but to use as little as possible in relation to the job that needs undertaking. This is the resourcefulness in cræft. Having physical adeptness, strength and fitness represents the power in cræft. And finally, understanding the materials, making critical decisions about how to approach the work and factoring in wider financial and time constraints represents the knowledge in cræft.”
We’d add, just for clarity, that the relationship the cræfter has with the land, the source of all the materials needed to live well, needs to be rooted in deep gratitude and oriented toward the aesthetic of place. And true cræft happens, we imagine, when the cræfter knows she/he/they could not be whole without this place-specific relationship, which includes belonging to a human culture inseparable from the land. In this statement, we realize that cræft is effectually another word for what has become known as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Neither of these, appropriately used, can be separated from place. Both define a culture. So neither wants to be theorized, globalized, or teased out of the worldview of their culture/place.