Craft Embeddedness: Markets and the Quest for Authenticity in Intimate Capitalism

This chapter examines the evolving landscape of craft and its implications for market exchanges, focusing on the embedded relationships between craft producers and consumers. Craft, characterized as an ideology of work resisting the dominance of industrialization and mass production, has experienced several waves of revival throughout history. While contemporary craft hints at alternative social and economic possibilities, the precise nature of these alternatives remains a subject of ongoing exploration. Through an engagement with the embeddedness of craft markets, this chapter explores the relationship between consumers and producers and how they aspire to transcend a purely transactional nature of market exchanges by expressing epistemic, moral, and sensual concerns. When displaying such concerns, consumers and producers are also, we argue, conducive to a quest for authenticity. Taken together, this chapter elucidates how craft embeddedness is to be understood in relation to intimate capitalism.