Craft Kits and Art Kits as Therapeutic Modalities

Across the long twentieth century, craft kits and art kits associate with conflict and trauma, both physical and psychological. This paper approaches the topic by considering the social significance of using kits in discourses of therapy. Fariello (2011) contributes the notion of craft not as a thing but a process of making by hand having ethical and moral significance. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1977, 1990, 2000) offers a critical perspective on constituting subject dispositions within a social system. Drawing from this scholarship and from primary texts and images, I take a comparative approach to analyzing an Artfiber kit for a smoking stand, 1925, and Art Packs and craft kits, ca 2015. I aim to distinguish how discourses of healing and wellness distinctively yet similarly mobilized their users' attention and involvement. At either end of the century, what explains kits having these propensities? One possibility is they share roots in major social institutions and forces—medicine, psychology, the military, education, law, and art. These institutions peg kits to their users developing knowledge self-reflexively and treat it as an index of self-change if not transformation. In question is the creation of the knowledge—does it come from kits’ components, or from users relating body and mind, or a process or object, along with its nature—is change in subjectivity tantamount to the knowledge, or is the knowledge something else? How does this knowledge align kit users with institutions’ visions of society, and what opportunities to problematize these visions do kits afford?