Word of the Issue – Sauvage

Each issue we aim to publish one word that has particular, though largely lost, relevance and meaning to rediscovering CRAFT in the flesh that is as a whole with all the fragments joined up.

So it is our intention to find where CRAFT is hiding today, in all the nooks and crannies and hidey holes. We want to join up all these fragments to show the re-joined up meaning of CRAFT as a whole. Many key words have, in years gone by, had another meaning one that we need to recover and apply to our present situation if we are ever going to grasp sustainability sustainably. As these meanings have lost out in use, so has CRAFT as a ‘joined-up’ practice also passed from our thinking and understanding. This is almost modernity’s reconciliation with the archaic, where we need to recover these meanings so we can think and then act anew about our position.

This Issue’s Word – Sauvage

Sauvage comes to us from the Old French today in English as Savage (red in tooth and claw – nature and evolution are brutal). Originally however it had two meanings this modern meaning and a more archaic one as in fully and directly engaged, wild, enthusiastic, experiential, mimetic, immediate expression of, uncomplicated by civilisation (even a tincture of Pagan) as in Sauvage or Prime’itive, so in re-inventing the west we can go back to the beginning as we go forward.

Including the sauvage crafts such as: bush crafts, ~ mechanic, ~ whacker, ~ hacker, ~ tracking, ~ lawyer, ~ philosopher, ~ music, ~ pilot, ~ track, ~ chef, ~ carpenter, ~ ranger, ~ dancer, ~ tucker, bodger, knaver, juggad, journeyman. Sauvage has an alternative meaning, now almost completely lost, that does not necessarily interpret as brute, rather it means as above a certain ‘wisdom of the wild’ esp. as we see in indigenous cultures. Sauvage as uncivilised does not mean uncultured.

We see a certain analogue for sauvage between bush (in the Australian context), volk (as in the German sense), indigenous and mythopoetic. This is a sort of linguistic hidey hole where the fragments of ‘sauvage’s’ second meaning can still be found – Linguistic archaeology.

Discuss - One Comment

  1. Iona says:

    This initial issue looks terrific. I look forward to many insightful articles on the Bush-mechanic ethos and lifestyle.
    Iona

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