Beauty and Grace in Making Artifacts: An Anthropological Gaze Upon Crafting in the World

My bold suggestions in this paper, as an artisan-anthropologist-therapist, are as follows:
(a) human manufacturing of objects brings about individual/collective (deep
well-being) experiences of beauty and grace and (b)‘making artifacts’ represents an
important ancient continuity in (social-cultural-biological) humanization. Combining
these two assertions suggests a universal existence of ‘crafting in the world’. The
argument was ignited by the termination of both my mother’s and father’s family
blacksmithing workshops in the twentieth century. Being a technical engineer/craftsman
in my first career, and being one of six sons, I was deeply puzzled about why
and how our transgenerational arts and crafting family tradition would die out when
my father closed down his metal construction workshop in 1986. My great-uncles
from mother’s side had already closed down their smithy decades earlier.