A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment

Introduction

Frances E. Mascia-Lees

Once the province of medical science and certain schools of philosophy, the body emerged in the late 1970s as a central site from which scholars across the humanities and social sciences questioned the ontological and epistemological basis of almost all forms of inquiry. In anthropology the body became such a central concept and significant object of study that by the mid-1980s, the study of the body burgeoned into a fully formed subfield: the anthropology of the body. For many anthropologists at the time, it was clear that the questions of power and oppression that were on the agendas of many scholars could not be addressed without first challenging ideologies that naturalized sex, gender, and racial difference through discourses and representations of the body. At the same time, medical anthropologists, imbricated in these agendas in multiple ways, revealed how conceptions of the body were central to substantive work in medical anthropology and began the work of problematizing the body (see Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).

Since then, the body has come to be understood as simultaneously subject and object, meaningful and material, individual and social and has served as the basis of a stunningly large number of inquiries in the discipline. Whether understood as text, symbol, or habitus, the body has proved a fertile site from which anthropologists have mounted refutations of abstract, universalizing models and ideologies and interrogated operations of power, systems of oppression, and possibilities for agency and political change. The volume simultaneously reflects this history of inquiry; represents the most current approaches, insights, and conceptualizations of the body; and illuminates the newest arenas in which it is being investigated. Within its chapters, authors address a broad topic – ranging from aesthetics to virtuality – assess the treatment of that topic within the history of the discipline, contextualize their own research within that history, and demonstrate the significance of their ideas and conclusions for future work in the area.

Two of the most significant insights that have become central to the anthropology of the body since its inception are evident in the title of many of the chapters. The first suggests that the very construct the body, reproduces assumptions about universality and normativity. This necessitates that the body be specified – the virtual body or dead body, for example – or pluralized: thus, many authors focus on bodies, not the body. They, not it, are mediated and hybrid; they are constituted by, and constitutive of, political economic formations, whether colonialism, post-socialism, late capitalism or neoliberalism.

The second insight is that bodies cannot be divorced from their lived experiences, requiring a focus on embodiment: a way of inhabiting the world as well as the source of personhood, self, and subjectivity, and the precondition of intersubjectivity (see Van Wolputte 2004: 259). A focus on embodiment marks an epistemological, indeed a paradigmatic, shift within the anthropology of the body whose significance to contemporary research is reflected not only in the title of this Companion but also in the number of chapters in this volume focused on it: everything from personhood, gender, race, pain, masculinity, and impairment to forms of creativity, legacies of genocide, aesthetics, transnationalism, neoliberalism, avatars, bioethics, and camp are enlivened by being understood as embodiments. The shift to embodiment has required a change in how anthropologists research and write about bodies. Although the best work in anthropology has always had strong ethnographic content, it is nearly impossible today to theorize or generalize about embodiment without mining rich ethnographic details and writing vivid descriptions. The chapters in this volume thus not only represent the main concerns in anthropology today on topics related to bodies and embodiment but also illustrate the deep intertwining of theory and data that has come to characterize the field. Since the 1990s, the emphasis on embodiment has been accompanied by, and intersected with, another significant insight, which appears across many chapters as well: that the senses, emotions, and affect are the essence of our embodied materialities and socialities.

The bodies in this volume are deeply sited; that is, they are grounded in actual worlds. The bodies in some of the chapters stay put in particular geographic locales; in other chapters they move, whether patients or corpses, across international boundaries. A number reside in scientific labs and medical clinics, others in the more ephemeral space of the scientific imagination and cyberworlds, reflecting the ever-increasing recognition of the necessity of examining the cultural and political contexts of the production of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge, expertise, and authority for understanding the lived body today. New theoretical frameworks and agendas are offered in this volume, as are fresh conceptual categories. The hope is that as a compendium of the most current research being undertaken today, the Companion will offer readers not only fresh ideas and insights about bodies and embodiments but also guideposts for launching future research agendas.

REFERENCES

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Margaret M. Lock, 1987 The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1): 6–41.

Van Wolputte, Steven, 2004 Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 251–269.

CHAPTER 1

AESTHETICS

Aesthetic Embodiment and Commodity Capitalism

Frances E. Mascia-Lees

Aesthetics was born as a discourse of the body

(Terry Eagleton 1991: 13)

AESTHETICIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

The aesthetic is a slippery term, with a complicated history in Western philosophy. In the eighteenth century, Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) appropriated it from the Greek aisthētikós, meaning perceptive by feeling, for the name of his new science of sense experience. However, not long after, and due to the complex socioeconomic and political context in which the discourse of the aesthetic was deployed, Kant (1724–1804) transformed it to mean almost its opposite: a disinterested, distanced, contemplative, and objectifying act of consciousness (see Buck-Morss 1992 and Eagleton 1991). Thus, although aesthetics was born as a discourse of the body (Eagleton 1991: 13), referring to corporeal, material nature (Buck-Morss 1992: 6), it transmuted quickly, coming to be a term applied to the rational act of good judgment (i.e. taste) about art and the beauties of nature, and ultimately to a theory of art and beauty. In this conceptualization, art is understood as an autonomous realm of human endeavor separate from social, political, and economic constraints. It is the Kantian notion of the aesthetic as autonomous, removed from normal needs and desires, that has been under critique in the academy for three decades.¹ Critics argue that this construction renders aesthetic experience transcendent, universal, acultural, and ahistorical, when it is actually a handmaiden of privilege masking political interests. Bourdieu (1984) famously critiqued Kant’s conceptualization, exposing his notion of aesthetic appreciation as a form of cultural capital that constructs class identity and maintains class privilege through distinctions in taste.²

The aesthetic has also been of central concern to critical theory. In his analysis of aesthetic theory in Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams suggests why: he identifies it, along with the psychological, as among the two great modern ideological systems of the West (Williams 1978: 129). He, like Bourdieu, critiques the idea of the aesthetic as an autonomous realm, independent of the economic, social, and political. For Williams, this problematically renders the aesthetic asocial, and, in the process, allows the social to be constructed in opposition as a fixed form, rather than experiential process (1978: 133).³ Williams, also warns about another characteristic of the aesthetic under conditions of commodity capitalism: its ability to blunt class-consciousness and revolutionary action through the dulling, the lulling, the chiming, the overbearing of its methods and content-matter (1978: 155–156). With this, Williams joined other cultural Marxists in contesting Kant’s disembodying of the aesthetic, re-embodying it and returning to its original meaning of sense perception.

It is the danger of the numbing effects of consumer capitalism on the human senses that interests me in this chapter. The impact of the proliferation of commodities on the modern subject was, of course, one of Walter Benjamin’s (1968) central insights. Benjamin was concerned with the phantasmagoric nature of commodity forms, which deceives the senses through an appearance of reality produced by technological manipulation. He warned of the shallow aestheticization of everyday life resulting from this mediation of reality, which disconnects the spectacles of modernity from the political and social trends buttressing them. Drawing on Freud, he argued that to protect the individual from the perceptual shocks of the modern world – produced not only by new technologies of representation and reproduction, but also a profusion of objects in the arcades, industrial production in the factory, and crowds in the street – consciousness must act as a shield, staving off the trauma of excessive stimuli by stopping their penetration deep enough into memory to leave a permanent trace (Benjamin 1968: 242; Buck-Morss 1992). Susan Buck-Morss suggests that this protective mechanism initiated a crisis in perception in which the role of the perceptual system was reversed; rather than opening the modern subject to the world and enabling experience, she argues, its goal became anesthetic: to numb the organism and deaden the senses (1992: 16–18). The consequences for the modern subject were dire: [this] dialectical reversal, whereby aesthetics changes from a cognitive mode of being ‘in touch’ with reality to a way of blocking out reality, destroys the human organism’s power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake (Buck-Morss 1992: 18).

Buck-Morss argues that the deadening of this political response is required by capitalism to produce passive consumers. It was accomplished primarily through an overstimulation produced by manipulating environmental stimuli to control the body’s sensual system (1992: 22).

Theodore Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s (1979) now classic condemnation of the culture industry presents just such an argument: repeated exposure to commodified, mass-mediated entertainment activates and stimulates the senses in order to dull them, undermining the possibility of revolutionary action. However, for them, critical resistance could still emanate from the autonomous realm of high art. In this contention, Horkheimer and Adorno differ from Walter Benjamin, who famously argued in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin 1968) that new technologies of cultural production, such as the camera, might have democratizing and libratory potential and that non-auratic art might even undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium and lead to new forms of collective politics.

By the 1980s, the concern with the stupefying effects of commodity culture became fundamental to a Marxist cultural theory focused on understanding late capitalism. The theorization of the aesthetic was at the heart of this project. Theorists such as Jean Baudrillard (1983), Mike Featherstone (1991), and Fredric Jameson (1984) were centrally concerned with the working out of the changing relationship of the cultural to the economic, and particularly, the aesthetic to commodification. Everything, from the possibility of political change and moral certitude, the nature of consciousness and of the unconscious, the significance and value of art and of everyday experience, the character of subjectivity and identity, and the meaning of the body and libidinal desire, was at stake in these discussions (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 2000).

Echoing Benjamin, but absent his ambivalence toward the aesthetic as at once problematic and a possible realm of liberation, these critics conceived the cultural conditions of late capitalism as an age in which the complete integration of cultural production into commodity production rendered everyday life thoroughly aestheticized (Featherstone 1991; Jameson 1984). They argued that processes that had begun to emerge in modernity under industrial capitalism were completed in postmodernity under late capitalism: the boundary between art and everyday life and the real and the image was fully collapsed, as was the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture and between taste cultures (Featherstone 1991: 65). If Adorno and Horkheimer continued to validate high art as an autonomous realm and site of resistance, and Benjamin found political possibility in modernity’s new media technologies, these theorists occluded any possibility of a critical position, rendering late capitalist subjects completely impotent. The rapid flow of images that came to saturate everyday life produced, they claimed, sensory overload, a waning of affect, and a loss of a sense of depth and history (Jameson 1984), a culture of superficiality (Featherstone 1991: 66), and a world of the simulacrum in which commodities bear no relationship to their materiality but are merely floating signifiers in an arbitrary sign system of taste and lifestyle (Baudrillard 1983).

A major drawback in much of this work is the assumption, rather than demonstration, of a particular experience of commodification and its effects on the human body in the actual everyday life of consumers. Too often, public forms of cultural production – literary, architectural, or otherwise – are read as expressions of the sensory condition of the contemporary subject, whether affectless, anaesthetized, overloaded or, for that matter, endlessly desirous. The exemplar of this approach is Fredric Jameson’s well-known reading of Los Angeles’s Bonaventure Hotel as a disorienting aesthetic space that transcends the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world (Jameson 1984: 83). This dazed and confused consumer is, in turn, understood by Jameson as a symbol of an even sharper dilemma for the subjects of late capitalism: their incapacity to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which they are caught (Jameson 1984: 84).

In the last two decades, anthropology has witnessed burgeoning interest in the senses, investigating how meanings are invested in, and conveyed through, the senses in different cultural contexts (Classen 1997: 405). David Howes (2005) has been at the forefront of exploring the sensory logic of late capitalism. In his material history of the senses under capitalism, Howes argues that everyday life today has become hyperaestheticized through commodity aesthetics, the inclusion of an aesthetic dimension into products through the enhancement of surface appearance (Howes 2005, see Haug 1986). Contemporary consumers are no longer confined to the projection of dream worlds of consumer gratification, Howes suggests; now all the senses are massaged as manufacturers, designers, and advertisers differentiate their products in vying to pique consumer desire and increase market share (2005: 248 and 281–303). Howes argues that this project of instrumentalizing the senses comes at a price to capitalism itself (2005: 248):

Multiplying the sensory stimuli emitted by the merchandise and designing for affectivity (i.e. pleasure with products) was bound to undermine the very instrumentality, the very rationality of the system whose ends it was supposed to serve. The hyperaestheticization of the body of the commodity has deconstructed its utility. With utility now in recession, a space has opened up where people can make sense of things in all sorts of non-commercial, non-rational, ways such as using Lifebuoy soap to give a sheen to one’s skin, or deploying Kool-Aid as a hair dye (2005: 298).

Although he suggests this deinstrumentalization might open up possibilities for consumers to reclaim the sensual, Howes pulls back from this conclusion, suggesting that it is unlikely that the sensory profusion of contemporary consumer culture has let the consumer out of the glove (2005: 298). But are there other sites to which we might turn to uncover how members of consumer society today, value, relate and combine the senses in everyday life (Howes, this volume, chapter 15)?

In this chapter, I seek to further Howes’s aim of writing a material history of the senses in commodity culture by focusing on the everyday lives of actual subjects: a group of U.S. consumers who self-consciously consume products associated with the widespread late 19th- and early 20th-century Arts and Crafts Movement, an artistic, philosophical, and socialist movement that arose in opposition to industrial capitalism and had as its expressed goal making the everyday beautiful. My ethnographic investigation shows that outside the realm of commodity aesthetics, mass-mediated entertainment, and the rapid flow of signs and images that permeate consumer culture, there are realms of contemporary life in which the human sensorium is enlivened, rather than deadened. In order to find them, however, we need not only shift location but also our standard conceptualizations about the relationship of the aesthetic to the senses under commodity capitalism. I suggest such a refiguring by treating the aesthetic as Merleau-Ponty does: a way of embodied knowing, a way through which humans respond to forms, shapes, and color, and to light, lighting, shadows, and reflections in ways that take on a life of their own and open themselves up to metaphoric meaning (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 123). New insights emerge if we approach the aesthetic as a form of embodiment, a way of being-in-the-world.

AESTHETIC EMBODIMENT

To focus attention on this Merleau-Pontian conceptualization of the aesthetic and to differentiate it from other modes of embodiment, I use the concept aesthetic embodiment. Although all aesthetic experiences are embodied, not all embodied experiences are aesthetic; thus invoking embodiment alone does not signal the particular nature of the experiences I seek to understand. Employing aesthetic embodiment also helps to clarify the meaning and use of the word aesthetic. In this chapter, for example, I am concerned with the Arts and Crafts aesthetic both as a style and as the form of embodiment it constitutes. I explore aesthetic embodiment as a somatically-grounded, culturally mediated, affective encounter with the beautiful (see Berleant 2004). I focus on the beautiful because it has significant ethnographic salience for the Arts and Crafts population with which I work. I am interested in asking whether Arts and Crafts aestheticizes life in the ways cultural Marxists would predict. To address this issue, it is first necessary to explore why, among consumers for whom the Arts and Crafts aesthetic operates as a meaningful category, certain commodities come to be seen as beautiful and how this form of beauty constitutes a significant dimension of their lived experience. What role does beauty – its creation, presence, and assessment – play in the fabric of their experiences of everyday life?

As a larger research agenda, focusing on different dimensions of aesthetic embodiment should reveal significant insights about how the aesthetic constitutes a lived world. E. Valentine Daniel’s 1994 comparison of beauty and pain as aesthetic experiences in The Individual in Terror is particularly instructive. Focusing specifically on the relationship of beauty and pain to language, he argues that both are concerned with the sensory ... with throbbing precepts that push against the conceptual membrane that encloses the world of active semiosis of articulate speech (Daniel 1994: 233). Pain and beauty are also similar in that both put language on trial; but they do so in different ways: beauty finds language wanting because of beauty’s profound inexhaustibility; pain finds language wanting in pain’s excruciating particularity (Daniel 1994: 233). Beauty’s mode of signification is found in iconic signs – in metaphors and in objects that partake of beauty’s qualities. Thus beauty’s objectification is generous, opening out to the world, inviting further signs, objects, and interpretants; pain, by contrast closes in on itself; it finds affirmation not in its extension but intensification (Daniel 1994: 233).

If aesthetic embodiment constitutes particular ways of being in world, then style, according to Merleau-Ponty, is a way of inhabiting it, a coherent orientation toward the world and a way of expressively appropriating it (see Singer 1993). Here, style is not meant in its more colloquial sense as a veneer over things that can be extracted and identified on its own, but instead, a way to characterize the persistence and characteristic manner of appearance that we recognize in other things without having to constitute them explicitly (Singer 1993: 234). This manifestation is greater than surface appearance alone. Rather than being something distinctive to be discerned, style is the characteristic of a thing that elicits a perceptual and implied motor response in which both perceived and perceiver are joined in the style of intercourse from which their identity emerges (Singer 1993: 234). Style is, in this sense, experiential and inextricably connected to an object’s particular materiality, as Vivian Sobchack’s description vividly captures:

Style is ... the thread running through all the properties of the thing and in a person’s interaction with that thing ... The glasslike feel, brittleness, tinkling sound [of a drinking glass] and such have an accent, an atmosphere, that also encompasses the over-glass-sliding movement-of-the-finger or the bent-shooting-out-finger-striking-tinkling-evoking-flick movement of the hand (quoted in Barker 2009: 3).

Arts and Crafts today can, of course, be understood as a style in the vernacular sense: many consumers identify it by a set of external characteristics and appreciate it for that appearance. However, it is not with these consumers that I am centrally concerned in this chapter, but those for whom Arts and Crafts style provides a coherent orientation to the world. These are consumers for whom affect and intellect come together in an aesthetic sensibility that produces a particular somatic mode of attention (Csordas 1993).

The original Arts and Crafts Movement, as I discuss in more detail below, was grounded in Marxist principles, which tied the political to the aesthetic by locating beauty in non-alienated labor; celebrating equality, community, and immersion in the details of daily life; and linking respect for others with an aesthetic sensibility. For many producers and consumers of Arts and Crafts today, beauty is an expression of an aesthetic philosophy embedded in these political and ethical commitments. The aesthetic embodiment of Arts and Crafts, for them, is a full experience in which beauty resides neither in the object nor the eye of the beholder, but is constituted through experiences connecting mind, body, individuals, and community. Just as the Japanese tea ceremony, described by Dorinne Kondo, can be understood as a confluence of religious and philosophical beliefs with an aesthetic that locates beauty in the mundane (Kondo 2005: 192–211), so too can Arts and Crafts be seen as a complex ethical-philosophical-style nexus, with beauty sited in the everyday. However, while the beliefs of the tea ceremony are given life through ritual enactment with transcendence as its goal, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, as we will see, is an intersubjective lived experience of immersion in the everyday. For the consumers who are the focus of this chapter, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic is thus more akin to what Robert Dejerlais has called an aesthetics of everyday life, a particular form of the embodied values that govern how they go about their daily lives (Desjerlais 1992: 14).

The complexity of this nexus makes the Arts and Crafts aesthetic a rich site for understanding it as a form of embodiment and style. But the Arts and Crafts Movement is fascinating for another reason: its philosophical tenets are implicated in the very discourse of theorists of the aestheticization of everyday life such as Benjamin. He, like other cultural Marxists, was influenced by the ideas of the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris (1834–1896), a pioneer and leader of revolutionary socialism in Britain at the end of the 19th century. For example, Morris’s claim for the uniqueness of art objects against the mechanical fragmentation of aesthetic experience provides the foundations for Benjamin’s later aesthetic critiques (King 2008), while Morris’s articulation of pleasure, desire, beauty, and socialism resurfaces in theorists within Western Marxism, such as Guy Debord (McDonald 2006). Thus, Morris’s ideas are important not only for understanding contemporary Arts and Crafts consumers, but also some of the fundamental ideas of cultural Marxism that have framed aestheticization of everyday life arguments. Starting with Morris, rather than, for example, Adorno, alerts us to an alternative way of thinking about the relationship of the senses to consumer capitalism.

THE U.S. ARTS AND CRAFTS REVIVAL

Although the popularity of the original Arts and Crafts Movement both in Britain (c. 1880–1910) and the United States (c. 1895–1913) was vast at the turn of the 20th century, with World War I it fell from favor as consumer demand for household commodities declined. By the 1930s, designs by William Morris and other Arts and Crafts artists became rarefied, available only to connoisseurs. And yet 50 years later, in the 1970s in the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement experienced a renaissance now spanning over four decades, making the current revival more than twice as long-lasting as the original impulse. Today the Movement and the appeal of its aesthetic is immense: a dizzying array of Arts and Crafts objects can be purchased and the aesthetic can be explored at conferences and art shows and in museums, at a range of tourist sites, and through scores of popular magazines, books, and websites devoted to it. However, although the original Arts and Crafts Movement has been explored in hundreds of books, academic journals, and conferences, with new work published monthly in such fields as material studies, design history, and cultural science studies, the revival goes largely unexplored and unexplained. Popular magazines and coffee table books showcase it but little, if any, serious scholarly work has been conducted, whether in cultural studies, consumer studies, sociology, or anthropology.

The roots of the U.S. Arts and Crafts Revival are not well documented, but it appears to have been initiated in 1966 with a book by John Crosby Freeman entitled The Forgotten Rebel: Gustav Stickley and his Craftsman Mission Furniture, focused on the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the United States. Stickley imported Morris’s ideas and published them widely in his periodical, The Craftsman. But it was not until the early 1970s that the rediscovery of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic began to clearly emerge in response to two exhibits mounted in 1972: Princeton University’s The Arts and Crafts Movement in America and the Pasadena Art Museum’s California Design 1910 Exhibition. Two years later one of the original Stickley companies in upstate New York was bought and began to reproduce original designs. Early consumers were primarily collectors with significant purchasing power, although less wealthy buyers sought objects that were affordably priced (http://www.craftsmanhome.com/news/2006/index.html, accessed May 11, 2009). As antique items became increasingly scarce and expensive in the 1990s, a few craftspeople began to reproduce earlier designs while many more began to produce original work that interpreted the vocabulary and philosophy of the original Movement, often creating fresh, contemporary designs (Ewald 1999: 8), even as traditions are venerated: Arts and Crafts artisans are extremely knowledgeable about their predecessors, educated in both their philosophy and techniques (Ewald 1999: xii and 15). Aided by the Internet, the sale of handmade crafts has expanded significantly in the last decade.

The revival of the U.S. Arts and Crafts Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s is coincident with the emergence of a post-Fordist economy and the development of the postmodern culture theorized and critiqued by aestheticization of everyday life theorists. There is no doubt that the revival is part of this larger context in which culture became a primary site of identity creation and commodity culture a primary source for the raw materials for constructing notions of self. At the same time, the Arts and Crafts Revival was a reaction against the exploding consumerism and heightened sensory overstimulation of the period, and like many craft revival movements, it turned to an idea of a simpler past as site of amelioration. The desire to look back was also, of course, part and parcel of this moment in which authenticity, the past, and tradition were on sale everywhere, for example, at tourist sites, museum shops, and theme parks. The revival is thus deeply embedded in consumer capitalism. This, I suggest, makes it a particularly interesting site for assessing the relationship between late capitalism and the senses. As I will suggest, it is not sensory overload that results from beautifying the everyday, but its opposite: it increases sensitivity to everyday life.

This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted over a two-year period among a particular segment of the Arts and Crafts Revival: people who attend the annual Grove Park Inn (GPI) Arts and Crafts Conference in Ashville, North Carolina to both study the Arts and Crafts Movement and to purchase handcrafted objects for their homes from skilled craftspeople. Each year thousands of Arts and Crafts consumers – mostly white and educated – travel to the GPI Conference. As with most craft consumers in the United States, the majority of attendees are middle class, and more specifically, middle-middle class. Over 1,300 people registered for the 2010 conference while another 3,000 came as walk-ins, mostly individuals living within three to four hours driving distance from Ashville. However, registered attendees came from all over, including outside of the United States, but tended to be from the mid-West, upstate New York, and, to a lesser extent, the West.

Established in the 1980s, the GPI Arts and Crafts Conference is the most important event of the year for Arts and Crafts enthusiasts. The conference is an interesting hybrid, combining lectures, small group discussions, and an artisan craft show with as many as 125 exhibitors. The conference format underscores the centrality of intellectual pursuit as an appeal of Arts and Crafts consumption. Indeed, for some individuals, the Arts and Craft aesthetic has become meaningful only through study. The attendees with whom I work – both craftspeople and consumers – are not only conversant with the history of the Arts and Crafts Movement, especially the ideas of William Morris and Gustav Stickley, to which I turn in the next section, but are also nothing less than passionate about it, eclectically merging ideas from both the British and U.S. Movements into their craft designs and consumer choices.

The importance of education for Arts and Crafts consumers could be taken to support Bourdieu’s claim that aesthetic consumption is really about cultural capital; some Arts and Crafts consumers certainly gain status and prestige based on their knowledge of a tasteful aesthetic. This is especially so for collectors of rare and antique pieces, but less significant for middle-class consumers. Knowledge of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic as a source of symbolic capital is compromised somewhat for these consumers: although the style is widespread, it is not part of mainstream understandings of art and beauty, making it at best an ambiguous signifier of taste and class. Indeed, consumers who attend the Grove Park Inn Conference note that the majority of people they know have very little understanding of what the Arts and Crafts aesthetic is really about. As one attendee put it, my friends think it involves making potholders or containers out of Popsicle sticks.

Individuals who attend the conference come not only to be educated but also to view and buy items for their home and to socialize with other Arts and Crafts enthusiasts, whether consumer, educator, or craftsperson. What is particularly significant to consumers at the GPI Arts and Crafts Conference is that it is a place where they can not only learn more about Arts and Crafts from seminars and lectures, but buy handicrafts directly from the very craftspeople who make them.

THE IDEOLOGY OF AN AESTHETIC

The original Arts and Crafts Movement began in Britain as a reaction against modernity and the excesses of Victorian society. It was driven by the desire to improve the working conditions of the working class (Kaplan 2004: 11) and to secure the value of skilled craftsmanship in an age dominated by machines (see Owen 2004). Adherents criticized the mass production of material goods, which they saw as resulting in cheap, poorly made and tasteless commodities. William Morris, the leader of the Movement, is considered by some to be one of the greatest revolutionary figures in British labor history. But Morris was not only a socialist activist: he was also a poet, novelist, bibliophile, translator, and architectural preservationist. He designed and made furniture, textiles, stained glass, tiles, carpets, murals, wallpapers, books, type, and more. According to his biographer E.P. Thompson, Morris was the first creative artist of major stature in the world to take his political stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise, with the revolutionary working class (Thompson 1955 [1976]: 727). Andrew Hemingway argues that it was Morris’s very vocational location in the art world that gave him a particular opportunity to articulate ... the aesthetic positions that could be said to be inherent in Marxist Theory (2006: 17).

What linked Morris’s socialism to his aesthetic principles was his conceptualization of work as naturally pleasurable and beautiful if carried out under the right conditions, evidenced in the Arts and Crafts Movement slogan, Joy in Labor. Morris was the first social thinker to apply the Marxist theory of labor to art, drawing on Marx’s dictum that the free and unrestricted exercise of the labor process is manifest in creation in accordance with the laws of beauty (Arscott 2006: 9). For Marx, art mediates between the senses and the intellect, between cognition and feeling and is a means to transcend the present and transform the dormant into the actual (Solomon 1979: 82). Recognizing the transcendent and revolutionary potential of Marx’s aesthetic dialectics, Morris envisioned a non-repressive social order founded on the reintroduction of the aesthetic into the labor process (Solomon 1979: 79). For Morris, all work done with pleasure is art; as he put it, real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labor. By situating beauty in labor, Morris expanded the category of the aesthetic and radically redefined it.

Combining Marxist ideas with those of art critic John Ruskin, Morris proposed that bringing beauty into the lives of people of all classes could counter the ills of modernity. Like Ruskin, Morris extolled the virtues of handicraft, turning to craftsmanship as a site from which to reunite what industrial capitalism had torn asunder: art and labor, mental effort and manual achievement, and work and play (Owen 2004: 25–26). Because Morris followed Ruskin, who valorized the medieval past, his turn to that period for a model of production has been seen by some critics as part of the 19th-century Romantic Movement that condemned industrial society and sought a return to nature and the past as solution. However, Morris himself viewed the Romantics as wallowing in nostalgia; he turned to the medieval past for artistic inspiration, deploying it to critique present conditions under industrial capitalism (Ward 2009). He and his followers were neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern, accepting the use of machinery as long as craft workers were not exploited and the quality of the output was high (Kaplan 2004: 11).

Morris and his followers sought to eliminate the hierarchical boundary between high art and craft, seeking to change the status of the decorative arts from trade to that of art (Crawford 2004: 23). The Movement’s name reflected this commitment: it was coined in 1887 by a group of British designers who founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society as a place where applied art would be equally valued with fine art (Crawford 2004: 36). Concerned specifically with the decorative arts and with craft production within the domestic sphere, the Arts and Crafts Movement sought to break down the Victorian separation of the public and the private, the factory and the home, the workplace and the family (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 2000). Movement leaders spread their philosophy through public lectures and political writing, while, at the same time, putting theory into practice through a range of political projects: for example, they found employment for the impoverished, fought for improved working conditions for the working classes, and developed institutions to train unskilled and increasingly deskilled workers in craft production, many of them immigrants and women who swelled the ranks of the poor (Kaplan 2004: 17). The Arts and Crafts Movement also established numerous guilds and art societies that produced handcrafted products, some of which were dominated by men, but others that not only employed women but were also exclusively female-based.

Morris consistently identified daily life as the domain in which beauty, pleasure, and happiness could be freely available to all and believed that the everyday is the measure of everything (Perkins 2010: 30), constructing which Peter Stansky (1999) has called an ideology of the radical domestic.⁴ Because everyday life, for Morris, was the site of sensory, embodied experiences and the domain of work, he contended it was meaningless to consider revolutionary change in class relations, the means of production, or the distribution of wealth without taking this into account: if work was not part of the pleasure of our lives then the revolution would remain incomplete (Perkins 2010: 3–4). Beyond the realm of work, Morris argued for paying attention to, and taking a pleasurable interest in, the details of daily life, which included an awareness of everyday objects and places, an aspect that Morris emphasized in his essays on design, architecture, and interior decoration (Perkins 2010). The true secret of happiness, he argued "lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life" (Morris 1887: 94, emphasis in the original).

Morris’s call for a special kind of attention to the everyday was a response to the phenomenological problems endemic to modernity and the capitalist mode of production described by aestheticization of the everyday life theorists such as the acceleration of life, alienation from the body, and the deadening processes of everyday, monotonous routine. Against this, Morris called for attention to, and interest in, mundane details and the familiar, whether in work or home decoration (Perkins 2010: 6). For him, everyday encounters with material spaces and objects always have an affective potential with power to express the kind of life which [we] live (quoted in Perkins 2010: 8) and, as Perkins points out, to spark a desire for a different kind of life (2010: 8). Because everyday life is indissolubly connected to material objects that furnish daily life, Morris also argued that the decorative arts connect people to a past, calling attention to every step to that history of which ... they are so great a part. (quoted in Perkins 2010: 9, 40). It is interesting to note here Benjamin’s (1999) disagreement on this point: he argues that the idea of the interior as a space of refuge and the domestic object as site of holding tradition is itself a consequence of the distinction between public and private produced under industrial capitalism. For him, this emergence is related to the misplaced belief that the immateriality of proverbs and stories in an earlier time can be provided by material substitutes (see Benjamin and Rice 2009). Nonetheless, Morris’s call to beautify the familiar was linked to his radical belief in a profound transformation of everyday life that would free work from alienation and institute equitable and pleasurable forms of social life (Perkins 2010: 18). Yet, Morris was no naive socialist; he warned against faith in partial reforms. He argued that the transformation of social conditions required nothing less than a takeover by open revolution of all the means of production.⁵

What was important to the Arts and Crafts Movement, then, was not merely or even primarily the particular look of an object but the mode in which it was crafted, the sensuous and intellectual labor that went into making it, and its integration into the everyday life of all classes (Crawford 2004: 59). The Arts and Crafts aesthetic is therefore better understood as an approach to the making and dissemination of objects based on socialist principles than as a unified style based on specific design principles (Kaplan 2004: 11).

This does not mean that there were no shared design ideals within the Arts and Crafts Movement: indeed it is the reciprocal mapping of political commitments onto shapes and forms that constitutes the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Arts and Crafts objects were distinguished by their individuality and qualities associated with the Movement’s philosophy that arose in response to the decorative excesses and cheap quality of Victorian mass-produced goods. These design ideals reached their height in the U.S. Arts and Crafts Movement through the ideas, designs, and products of Gustav Stickley: solidity in construction, simplicity, honesty to materials, and fidelity to place, the latter based on a respect for local traditions (Crawford 2004: 59–61).⁶ Functionality and utility were key to the Arts and Crafts ideal as well. Consequently, Arts and Crafts manufacturers and craftspeople using a simple design and natural, high-quality materials produced virtually every item used in daily life. Although Morris did not reject the machine as long as it did not rule labor, Stickley actively embraced it. His intent was to change the conditions of industrial work, using the machine to better the lives of all people. He, thus, used factory methods to produce basic components and utilized craftspeople to finish and assemble the product. Because of this, he, more than Morris, was able to keep prices low and bring the reform aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the middle and working classes, thus fulfilling more fully the design for the masses ideology in the United States than in Britain.

In line with Morris’s radical domesticity, Stickley advocated the democratization of design, and campaigned for houses that would give the working class as much respectability as the wealthy (Winter and Vertikoff: 1996: 18). He argued that the root of all reform lies in the individual and that the life of the individual is shaped mainly by home surroundings (Stickley 1909). In the United States during this period, a range of social reformers with a commitment to social justice sought change by way of housing: social workers, labor unionists, feminist, architects, and artisans all called for a beautiful home with a beautiful heart⁷ at the same time that elected officials introduced policies encouraging home ownership to increase the political and economic stability of the nation (Maddex and Vertikoff 2003: 12). This commitment to the home led Stickley to design not only relatively inexpensive furniture, but affordable houses as well. Consequently, in the United States, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic is associated historically not only with the democratization of consumption, but also with the American Dream and the growth of the suburbs.

Stickley’s Craftsmen homes, as they were called, were to a large extent modeled on the bungalow, originally an Anglo-Indian construction used for summer housing. By definition simple homes designed for living, bungalows lent themselves well to the ideals of Stickley and other Arts and Crafts architects and builders. They were designed to create an interior space consistent with living a life of the Arts and Crafts ideals of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness. The exterior exhibited design elements consistent with the Arts and Crafts philosophy as well, as Stickley’s description of the bungalow as ideal house-type suggests. The bungalow, he says,

never fails to harmonize with its surroundings because its low, broad proportions and absolute lack of ornamentation give it a character so natural and unaffected that it seems to blend with any landscape. It is beautiful because it is planned and built to meet simple needs in the simplest and most direct way (http://www.fine-woodworking-for-your-home.com/artsandcraftsstyle.html, accessed November 20, 2010).

From the turn of the century until the 1930s, bungalows were the preferred house type in the United States, especially among the working class. As families increasingly sought the American Dream, bungalows were built by the hundreds of thousands and were constructed through multiple means reflecting their cross-class appeal: some were expensive and architect-designed homes, others were built from plans found in catalogs of house designs (planbooks), and others were prefabricated, constructed as kit houses and sold by such merchandisers as Sears Roebuck. They also had cross-gender appeal. Although U.S. notions of home have long been deeply gendered (see DiLeonardo 2004: 135–151), both men and women were central to the Arts and Crafts Movement, attracting male interest in the structure, contents, and interior design of homes while, at the same time, providing women with professional opportunities, many of whom overcame gender obstacles to found businesses, invent technology, and build economic markets (see Zipf 2007).⁸ Today, many Arts and Crafts adherents, both women and men, own bungalows, which they have often painstakingly restored to their original Arts and Crafts condition.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF AN AESTHETIC

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

(William Morris 1880: 76)

Beautiful is the key word used by GPI Arts and Crafts Conference producers and consumers to describe Arts and Crafts objects. This notion of beauty is grounded in Movement ideas about the relationship of beauty to labor and social justice. Because form, function, political ideas, and ethical commitments are imbricated in this notion of beauty, it is not possible to extract any simple idea of the beautiful related only to the materiality of an Arts and Crafts object. A human rights attorney at the GPI Conference voiced this clearly: the politics is central; beauty is in the philosophy of non-exploitation. Indeed, for some consumers, the explicit purpose of attending the GPI Conference is the opportunity it affords them to buy products directly from the person who makes them, thus participating in an exchange they see as non-exploitative and circumventing the depersonalized sphere of consumer capitalism, at least is some aspects of their life.

When asked to characterize a particular object’s sensual and physical appeal, consumers use a range of qualities, including visual form, tactile sensation, weight, balance, and dimensionality: for example, they have identified the solidity of a bookcase, the smooth feeling of the matte surface of a vase, the texture and concreteness of a ceramic tile, the exquisite handwork of an embroidered table runner, the durability of a table, the erectness of the straight lines of a chair, and the radiant ray flakes of a quarter-sawn oak buffet. Because Arts and Crafts objects are, for the most part, domestic items to be used not merely displayed, it is not surprising that the haptic⁹ senses figure so centrally in these descriptions along with the visual. Fisher (1997) notes the significance of haptic engagement with an object: The haptic sense, comprising the tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses ... renders the surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside, on the skin’s surface, and in external space (http://www.david-howes.com/senses/Fisher.htm, accessed November 1, 2010).

Because for GPI consumers, the haptic senses are central, they are prevented from keeping a distance from the subjective character of the experience (Marks 2002: 211). As Classen (2005) points out, this tactile quality is a characteristic of textile handicrafts that are made for use, such as clothing, cushions, and carpets, which have traditionally been in the realm of women’s work. Embroidery, a central handicraft of the Arts and Crafts Movement, adds a further tactile dimension to textiles, she suggests, by creating designs in relief (Classen 2005: 230). The physical contact and intimacy of the experience of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic through the haptic senses produces what Mădălina Diaconu has called an aesthetic of immersion (http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=385, accessed November 1, 2009).

Interestingly, although touch has historically been contrasted with vision, which is associated with the male and distanced engagement, touch with the female and close engagement, some scholars have suggested that the haptic mode of apprehension need not be in direct opposition to the visual. As Deleuze and Guattari (2004) have argued, haptic space may be as much visual or auditory as tactile. Thus, the haptic and visual may slide into one another, producing a form of perception that recent film critics have recognized as haptic visuality. This is elicited by intimate details that encourage a small, caressing gaze which, as Laura Marks (2002) suggests, is a characteristic of such crafts as weaving, embroidery, and decoration, each of which figures prominently in the Arts and Crafts tradition. It is also the defining characteristic of any page of Morris’s illustrated Chaucer, or other publications from his Kelmscott Press,¹⁰ or his and his colleagues’ wallpaper designs, composed of crisp, abundant, and densely repeating patterns influenced by natural forms with no vague or indeterminate elements or lines.¹¹ This is an important dimension of my own experience of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. As I stand close to these objects with eyes scanning every detail, it feels as though I am touching them with my eyes.

For some GPI Conference attendees, the overall experience of beauty involves the faculty of interoception, the process through which we gain awareness of our own bodies and locate our own experiences. This is vivid in this description by a consumer who had a chance encounter with an Arts and Crafts object that moved her: As I came around the corner, my body responded to a beautifully shaped vase whose being there I don’t think I had even consciously registered. It seemed instantaneous and I felt an intense rush through my body. I felt off-kilter, almost stopped in my tracks as I just stood there and soaked it in.

This description is reminiscent of Elaine Scarry’s generalized characterization of the experience of beauty: beauty, she asserts, quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living (1999: 24). Of course, not all Arts and Crafts lovers experience beauty this way, but the consumer’s description of her engagement with the vase above suggests that some of these sensations are involved; it also suggests that her experience of an object of beauty is capable of drawing her into the world by decentering her. Sobchak (2004) suggests one possible implication: as her embodiment is extended in the moment in which her responses take place, before they are registered by conscious thought, she cedes her subjectivity to the object.¹²

The Arts and Crafts aesthetic is not simply about objects, but about practices of decorating and furnishing that construct interior spaces. Spatial experience is always embodied and multisensory, organized by vision, hearing, and the haptic senses, reflecting the bodily experiences of weight, mass, density, pressure, humidity, temperature, presences, and resonances. While preliminary home tours suggest how, within the spaces of their houses, Arts and Crafts consumers feel the dimensionality of the spatial context, the demands of the particular layout, the arrangement of furnishings on them, and the impact of ambience, more observational material is needed before a full analysis is possible. What is clear is that multiple elements combine to produce an Arts and Crafts atmosphere, an overall feeling that is most often described by consumers as soothing, tranquil, harmonious, or warm: simple geometric lines; plain and unadorned surfaces; the sturdiness and solidity of the furniture; a preponderance of wood with deep, rich finishes; an emphasis on horizontal lines; the use of subdued earth tone colors; and a preference for soft lighting, produced by mica or stained glass shades. As one person put it, the the best way I can describe my Arts and Crafts living room is that it has soothing simplicity.

To create interior spaces, Arts and Crafts consumers engage in the skillful process of constructing recognizable assemblages that are more than the sum of their parts (Watson and Shove 2008: 71). In answer to my question about the timing of the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Revival, one interviewee pointed to the appeal of creating a totality in the face of the fragmentation characteristic of life in the United States in the middle decades of the 20th century:

The Arts and Crafts Revival was a response to the atomization of everyday life in the 1950s and 60s. To get women back into the home after World War II, they were offered convenience. Everything could be broken down into a task that there was an appliance for. And the trend in science was to know about the smallest parts of things. Arts and Crafts brought the whole back in.

Various consumers remarked on the careful choices and decisions entailed in purchasing, grouping, and arranging objects to create a space that produces and elicits qualities of the lived experience they desire, whether simplicity, orderliness, tranquility, centrality of family, or a combination. As Bruce Johnson, organizer of the GPI Conference, says of the assembling of his possessions:

Our Arts and Crafts collection is a combination of refinished antiques, a few precious pieces with their original finish, a dining room table and a floor lamp I made in my workshop, and works by contemporary craftsfirms. I made a decision years ago that has since defined our collection: we could only buy those pieces we could actually use while raising two sons and several dogs and cats in, as it turns out, five different houses over the course of thirty years.

As some conference attendees attested, the conscious and deliberate juxtaposition and contiguity of objects enables a heightened awareness of their central values and of the everyday, which, for many of them, they suggest, helps counter the inattentiveness to the familiarity and routine of the domestic environment that characterizes daily life for many people in the United States today.

Taking a genuine interest in details, paying attention to the familiar, and looking at everyday objects differently are crucial dimensions of the Arts and Crafts philosophy that are clearly of real significance to consumers. That an immersion into the everyday lies at the center of the Arts and Crafts experience of beauty is clear in the following statements of GPI Conference attendees: one stated, You don’t just design a house and fill it with stuff. Art and design and day to day have to merge. Another describes the overall experience of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic this way: "We are able to touch and feel the stuff and embrace the philosophy even if we don’t live it entirely. Today part of it is also about having a personal aesthetic; you can mix reproductions with originals, but everything has to be beautiful. It makes you be aware of every aspect of daily life."

Thus, for many of the people with whom I work, Arts and Crafts is an aesthetic of attending, a way of living that immerses them in their surroundings, grounded in what Sobchack would describe as a corporeal and affective adherence to the objective world, one which expresses their desire to enfold objects (2004: 288). For these GPI attendees the desire to enfold objects and be enfolded by them is multilayered and stems from a combination of the nature of craftsmanship itself and the Arts and Crafts philosophy.

The making of a craft object involves a transformation of perception into objects, ideas, and practices and demands specialized knowledge of materials and their properties and a high degree of motor/muscle skills (Risatti 2007). At the height of their talents, skilled craftspeople are able to bring all this together performing in a way that is often described as effortless. Their mind is necessarily engaged with intellectual, abstract, and conceptual problems concerning form and expression as their skilled thinking hands execute the objects physical construction (Risatti 2007: 191). As the craftspeople with whom I work attest, craftmaking is a process of mind and hand working seamlessly together; it is itself a phenomenological investigation, or as Merleau-Ponty might put it a philosophical inquiry, one in which the laboring body of the craftsperson comprises his/her being-in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 169).

During the creative process, the craftsperson is passionately devoted to the world’s objectivity, experiencing, as Sobchack describes it, both "a sensual and sensible expansion of one’s subjectivity and an enhanced awareness of what it means to be material" oneself (Sobchak 2004: 290, emphases in original). This complementary co-constitutive experience we have of ourselves and others as material objects is a corporeal form of engagement Sobchack calls interobjectivity (2004: 296). She suggests that it provides the material foundation of our aesthetic behavior: it allows us to understand in a primordial way the general pervasion in existence of material sense-ability (Sobchack 2004: 290).

Handicraft also constitutes a way of being in the world for GPI Arts and Crafts consumers that is predicated on connection, both phenomenological and social. Conference attendees explicitly trace the appeal of handcrafted work to the inextricable link of creator, object, and consumer. The physical processes left by craftspeople’s hands in their phenomenological investigation provide consumers access to the embodied act of making, and seems to invest the object with a vitality capable of countering commodity fetish. Unlike the manufactured commodity, the craft object does not appear falsely as an active agent capable of commanding attention and determining desire, while, simultaneously, blinding the consumer to the suffering and exploitation actually embedded in the commodity’s production (Bennett 2001). Indeed, Arts and Crafts artisans refer explicitly to their joy in labor, reiterating the central philosophy of the Movement. As the motto on one craftsman’s business card reads: My life’s work is also my life’s passion. Thus, the Arts and Crafts object attracts attention precisely because the labor of the craftsperson is evident in it. It is not a de-socialized and singular material entity, a thing whose physical substance is purely self-contained; instead it is part of a nexus of relationships to both the social and material world (Cerni 2007: 3). When GPI Arts and Crafts consumers purchase a craft object and enfold it, they enfold the craftsperson whose body and subjectivity are already enfolded in the object. Their experience of the handicraft emerges from a process that is both interobjective and intersubjective (see Sobchack 2004).

The value of the relationship between producer and consumer has reciprocal appeal: many GPI consumers state that buying a product from its maker provides them with an alternative to buying mass-produced items, affording them an ethical position that allows them to navigate at least some aspects of consumer culture, even as they know they cannot escape it. It also offers them a defense against mass-produced anonymity and provides them with a way of being in the world that is embedded in humanistic values and human relations. It offers the producer an experience of non-alienated labor and it provides both consumer and producer with an experience of authenticity and intimacy. As one furniture maker put it, I derive great pleasure from making something for someone else: it is very personal, very intimate, very satisfying.

Buying a handicraft is not only a way to resist mass production, but also to rein in its excesses. As Howard Risatti suggests, with the sheer quantity, quality, and size of mass-produced objects that exist today, there is little to give an absolute perspective and value to things, to anchor them except their comparative size or price (Risatti 2007: 200). This, he argues, can feel limitless and unsatisfying. But with a craft object, its scale, size, and shape are a reflection of the properties of materials as they can be worked by the hand and used by the body (Risatti 2007: 200). This is a significant component of the appeal of Arts and Craft objects for many GPI Conference consumers who seek to bring living down to livable range, a sentiment also expressed as a desire to downsize and create a home, rather than a show house, where family comes to relax and enjoy. In this regard, the appeal of the Arts and Crafts philosophy to many GPI consumers today parallels its attractiveness to original movement adherents who opposed the excesses of cheap goods and mass production, as is evident in this statement made by Stickley in 1901:

We need to straighten out our standards and to get rid of a lot of rubbish that we have accumulated along with our wealth and commercial supremacy. In many ways we have wasted and misused so many of our wonderful natural resources. All we really need is a change in our point of view toward life and a keener perception regarding the things that count and the things that really burden us (Quoted in Vesely 1986: 44).

A scaled-down life is a meaningful one for many Arts and Crafts consumers who connect their appreciation of the Arts and Crafts Movement and its aesthetic with an ethical commitment not just to non-exploitative labor but also to the larger world in which they live. This is reflected in many of their backgrounds as teachers, social workers, psychologists, and counselors. It is not unusual to find among GPI Conference participants individuals who have spent a good part of their life involved in what they feel is meaningful service, whether a human rights lawyer, a retired teacher who has spent a lifetime