Artisanal Culture Research Articles

Kombucha and Water Kefir Grains Microbiomes' Symbiotic Contribution to Postbiotics Enhancement.

Wild artisanal cultures, such as a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBY) and water kefir grains (WKG), represent a complex microorganism consortia that is composed of yeasts and lactic and acetic acid bacteria, with large strains of diversity and abundance. The fermented products (FPs) obtained by the microbiome's contribution can be included in functional products due to their meta-biotics (pre-, pro-, post-, and paraprobiotics) as a result of complex and synergistic associations as well as due to the metabolic functionality. In this study, consortia of both SCOBY and WKG were involved in the co-fermentation of a newly formulated substrate that was further analysed, aiming at increasing the postbiotic composition of the FPs. Plackett-Burman (PBD) and Response Surface Methodology (RSM) techniques were employed for the experimental designs to select and optimise several parameters that have an influence on the lyophilised starter cultures of SCOBY and WKG activity as a multiple inoculum. Tea concentration (1-3%), sugar concentration (5-10%), raisins concentration (3-6%), SCOBY lyophilised culture concentration (0.2-0.5%), WKG lyophilised culture concentration (0.2-0.5%), and fermentation time (5-7 days) were considered the independent variables for mathematical analysis and fermentation conditions' optimisation. Antimicrobial activity against Bacillus subtilis MIUG B1, Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923, Escherichia coli ATCC 25922, and Aspergillus niger MIUG M5, antioxidant capacity (DPPH), pH and the total acidity (TA) were evaluated as responses. The rich postbiotic bioactive composition of the FP obtained in optimised biotechnological conditions highlighted the usefulness of the artisanal co-cultures, through their symbiotic metabolic interactions for the improvement of bioactive potential.

Selection of new lactobacilli strains with potentially probiotic properties

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among food industry producers for functional foods. In this context, the study aims to isolate new lactic acid bacteria strains with probiotic potential that could further be used to obtain valuable metabiotics with good technological potential and health benefits. In the current study, twenty-nine newly LAB strains were isolated from various natural sources, including artisanal cultures (like, kefir grains and kombucha membrane), and selected through fermentation potential on unconventional plant-base substrates, consisting red lentils flour, red potato peel powder, and okara. The strains identified using 16S rDNA sequencing, as Lacticaseibacillus paracasei (encoded BL13, BL80, BL87) and Lactiplantibacillus plantarum (encoded BL21) were further screened considering their in vitro probiotic properties. The safety assessment evaluation highlighted that Lacticaseibacillus paracasei (BL13) and Lactiplantibacillus plantarum (BL21) selected as performant strains have antimicrobial potential against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, being also susceptible to tetracycline, chloramphenicol and ampicillin. Furthermore, Lactiplantibacillus plantarum (encoded BL21) proved good adhesion properties on the HT-29 cell line. These strains are new promising probiotic starter cultures candidates with approachable potential to be used for obtaining functional food and ingredients through fermentation processes, that could offer health benefits.

Finding Social and Environmental Justice in the Fashion Production Chain in Brazil: When Fashion is Created with Nature by Women in Their Communities

Brazil covers a large territory, and although only 15% of its population is distributed in rural areas (IBGE Educa 2015), rural dwellers take on the chief responsibility for conserving local biodiversity. This article uses empirical research with a qualitative approach to present four cases of consolidated communities working with Amazonian rubber, regenerative cotton, weaving and lacework. It shows how rural communities pursue solutions for sustainable livelihoods in their own place of origin through the production of raw materials and products for the fashion chain, ensuring food security, income generation, maintenance of local biomes and gender justice. Particularly, this study examines the role of women beyond their families in ensuring work equity and better income distribution. Design appears as a positive agent, transforming ancestral and artisanal culture and knowledge into product innovation with added value to ensure production viability as well as enhancing community wellbeing.

Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, c.1550–1640

Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, c.1550–1640

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Novel Insights for Metabiotics Production by Using Artisanal Probiotic Cultures.

Wild probiotic consortia of microorganisms (bacteria and yeasts) associated in the artisanal cultures’ microbiota (milk kefir grains, water kefir grains and kombucha) are considered valuable promoters for metabiotics (prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics and paraprobiotics) production. The beneficial effects of the fermented products obtained with the artisanal cultures on human well-being are described by centuries and the interest for them is continuously increasing. The wild origin and microbial diversity of these above-mentioned consortia give them extraordinary protection capacity against microbiological contaminants in unusual physico-chemical conditions and unique fermentative behaviour. This review summarizes the state of the art for the wild artisanal cultures (milk and water kefir grains, respectively, kombucha—SCOBY), their symbiotic functionality, and the ability to ferment unconventional substrates in order to obtain valuable bioactive compounds with in vitro and in vivo beneficial functional properties. Due to the necessity of the bioactives production and their use as metabiotics in the modern consumer’s life, artisanal cultures are the perfect sources able to biosynthesize complex functional metabolites (bioactive peptides, antimicrobials, polysaccharides, enzymes, vitamins, cell wall components). Depending on the purposes of the biotechnological fermentation processes, artisanal cultures can be used as starters on different substrates. Current studies show that the microbial synergy between bacteria—yeast and/or bacteria—offers new perspectives to develop functional products (food, feeds, and ingredients) with a great impact on life quality.

Time‐traveling colors: Artisanal dreams and digital fabrication

AbstractIn the 15th century, the miniaturists of the Timurid court in Herat conceive colors that seem to be made of pure light, without weight and volume. Their luminous colors synthesize a unique worldview from the anti‐materialistic teachings of Mani, the Sufi “world of imagination” and the alchemists' principles of transmutation. Five centuries later, our digital technologies seem to offer us such disembodied colors, which used to be the artistic dream of an artisanal culture. Pixels replace pigments, light‐colors replace matter‐colors. With the booming animation and game cultures, Tokyo becomes one of the first places that pixels invade in the 80s. A group of Japanese architects and artists seeks to express in their creations the ethereal dimension of the pixels' electronic light. Through a spatio‐temporal leap, the miniatures, as a historical reference point, reveals the emerging chromatic trends in contemporary architecture and visual culture. Could the invention of pixels be after all, stemming from an ancestral aspiration of mankind based on the sensorial and intelligible duality of his nature?

Life Below Water: Role of Traditional Artisanal Fisheries to Ensure Sustainable Tourism in Karimunjawa Island

The society of Karimunjawa Island is one of a highly enticing tourism destination that maintains the rich practice of artisanal fisheries based on traditional culture and people consensus. This study focuses on artisanal fisheries conducted by Bugis and Bajau nomad descent. Thus, it examines the pattern and dynamics of Bugis and Bajau artisanal fisheries culture in Karimunjawa. They perform alternate short range and nomadic fishing, as well as fishing for market supplies nor solely domestic supplies in which consider ecological conservation and sustain tourism. By means of qualitative method through literature studies and interviews, this research offers case study-based solution to support Sustainable Development Goals number 14, Life Below Water, in which unfolds the method of the Karimunjawa Bugis and Bajau style of artisanal or small scale fisheries through selective fishing gears for subsistent purpose. This research concludes that Bugis and Bajau artisanal fisheries result to minimized exploitation as well as mindful fisheries that preserves underwater biodiversity and supports Life Below Water, which eventually engenderrs cultural-based sustainable tourism in Karimunjawa Island, Jepara regency, Central Java, Indonesia.

“Our whole domain was a Garret”: Robert Bloomfield and Laboring Class Life-Writing

ABSTRACT Although he was most commonly regarded as a poet of the rural world, Robert Bloomfield's success as a writer is inextricably linked to the urban and artisanal culture that shaped both his sense of self and others’ perception of his work. Initially celebrated as a stand-in for “Giles,” the farmer's boy of his first and most successful publication, Bloomfield's status as a ladies’ shoemaker at the time of the poem's composition led to the development of a tension between different ways of viewing the author and his achievements. This article brings to light two hitherto neglected works which provide new information about Bloomfield's life prior to achieving fame, and which illuminate his attempts to reconcile his own experience of life with the way in which this was represented and marketed by others.

Radical republicanism and solidarity

This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power.

Citizen-Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar ed. by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr

Reviewed by: Citizen-Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar ed. by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr M. Ryan Floyd Citizen-Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar. Edited by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. pp. xiv, 275. $34.99, 978-1-61117-750-3.) Historian Walter Edgar has produced many books, directed the University of South Carolina's Institute for Southern Studies, and continues to host a weekly radio show, Walter Edgar's Journal. Throughout his career, Edgar has influenced numerous scholars and the public, and in Citizen-Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar, Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. presents a series of essays that recognize Edgar's contributions to South Carolina and its history. The book begins with essays by Edgar's friends and colleagues that focus on the role he has played in their lives and in the historical profession. Following the personal tributes are short chapters on South Carolina history that expand on Edgar's own work and that underscore his role in moving the field forward. In the first section of the book, Brinkmeyer brings together Winston Groom, Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, Harris Pastides, and Mark M. Smith to express their [End Page 238] appreciation of Edgar's character and talent. These longtime friends and colleagues provide laudatory accounts of their connections to Edgar, discussing his life as a student, soldier, and scholar. Brinkmeyer follows this section with twelve chapters addressing topics from South Carolina's past and present. Larry D. Watson notes in "The Grand Jury in Colonial South Carolina: An Index of Societal Concerns" that jury records provide a lens into the daily lives of everyday South Carolinians. Watson includes colorful and insightful accounts of grievances placed before the grand jury, demonstrating the extent and breadth of the issues that it addressed. In "The Worlds of John Tunno: Scottish Emigrant, Charleston Loyalist, London Merchant, 1746-1819," Barbara L. Bellows uses John Tunno's story to explore the experiences of Loyalists during and after the American Revolution. She notes that they faced social and economic distress and, in Tunno's case, left everything behind to flee South Carolina. John M. Sherrer III's "Rediscovering Milo H. Berry: Columbia Artisan and Businessman, 1843-1907" demonstrates that there was a strong artisan culture in Columbia that deserves more attention from historians. Focusing on Edgefield County in his chapter, Orville Vernon Burton argues that most citizens emphasized local concerns throughout the Civil War and that nationalism increased only as the war concluded and as the Lost Cause ideology emerged. Bernard E. Powers Jr. discusses the development of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church from its pre-Civil War beginning through its expansion during the era of the New South. Powers also points out that the AME Church and its leaders were key contributors to the civil rights movement in South Carolina and the nation. Peter A. Coclanis, in "Another 'Faithful Index': Inventive Activity and Economic Innovation in Nineteenth-Century South Carolina," uses patent data to discuss South Carolina's intellectual life between 1776 and 1865. He explains that the state not only focused on profiting from a slave-based agricultural system but also embraced intellectual and technological progress. Brinkmeyer also includes chapters that address post-Civil War issues and that stress the past's enduring influence on South Carolina and its citizens. Charles Joyner, for instance, explores the long fight over flying the Confederate battle flag above the state capitol. Joyner examines southern views on honor, the myths surrounding southern heritage, and the link that many white southerners have made between the flag and their regional identity. In the chapter "Walter Edgar and the Southern Military Tradition," Andrew H. Myers summarizes historians' arguments about the existence of a martial tradition in the South. John M. McCardell Jr. argues in "William Gilmore Simms and His World after the Civil War: A New Look at Joscelyn" that southern literature provides a window into the views of white southerners during Reconstruction. Focusing on Simms's novel Joscelyn (1867), McCardell delves into Simms's perception of the causes of the war and his reaction to the changes in southern society. James C. Cobb, in his essay, discusses...

Skills for Work and the Work of Skills: Community, Labour and Technological Change in India’s Artisanal Fisheries

Artisanal cultures of work and skills transmission provide a useful point of contrast from which to think about the renewed interest in skills development as a formal, institutionalized process of training and certification for discrete and standardized skills. This article traces the transformation of practices of skill in the context of technological change in the artisanal fisheries of Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, to explore a set of linked questions about skills and work: How expansively or narrowly should skills be understood? What can we learn from traditional modes of skills transmission? As technology makes redundant many of the traditional skills, are we seeing a ‘degradation’ of work? A focus on fishing, a traditionally caste-bound occupation, also opens up questions regarding the work that skills do within a political economy, both in reproducing a given social order, and in enabling change. In tracing processes of labour recruitment in the mechanized fisheries, the article offers a further reflection, about the extent to which skills matter in securing employment, given the continued importance of networks of caste, kinship and village-based community.

Artisanal culture in early modern Iberian and Atlantic worlds

Artisanal culture in early modern Iberian and Atlantic worlds

Interactions of Portuguese artisanal culture in the maritime enterprise of 16th‐century Seville

Interactions of Portuguese artisanal culture in the maritime enterprise of 16th‐century Seville

Industry and Desire: Forging New Bonds

Victorian scholarship has long subscribed to a form of technophobia adopted from the Tory critiques of industry, principally by John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, and subsequently taken up by the Marxian critical tradition. By opposing the machine to the organic and the mechanical to the vital, this anti-industrial stance pleaded for the return to a pastoral, artisanal culture often linked with an idealised recreation of the Middle-Ages. In recent years, as the computer dissolved the boundary be...

Centres of artisanal culture: discussions on provincial art museums and the handicraft industry in the first quarter of the 20th century

This article deals with the complex of issues concerning the definition of provincial art museums and industrial (applied) art museums in Russia’s cultural life during the early twentieth century. А movement for aesthetic education in the late nineteenth century led to the increasing importance of decorative art and the spread of museums exhibiting such objects. The ideas of German and English art critics and museum workers were widely recognised in many countries, including Russia. In the 1910s, the role and significance of local art museums and industrial art museums in Russia pertained not only to aesthetic issues, but also economic ones. This article analyses archival materials related to the committees established at the Institute for the History of Arts (Petrograd) during the spring and summer of 1917 following the meeting of representatives of the sciences and the arts: here, the creation of a special Ministry of the Arts was discussed. One commission was devoted to the art and handicraft industry. A programmatic report was delivered by V. Ya. Kurbatov, a prominent art historian and researcher of the culture of St Petersburg. The principal propositions of the report can be analysed in the context of other speeches by the same author. In his reports, Kurbatov put forward the idea of establishing museums directly connected with the economic development of the regions rather than ones solely used to conserve and exhibit certain types of objects. He proposed the establishment of a new kind of museum – ‘museum-workshops’. Turning to similar initiatives abroad (e. g. the ideas of A. Lichtwark, a museum curator, reformer of aesthetic education, and the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle for many consecutive years) helps us to clarify the pragmatic aspect of the project. In a sense, one can see a parallel between these projects and the attention given by the Soviet government to provincial museums, from which the authorities also hoped to receive direct economic benefits. Consequently, when it comes to issues surrounding museums, it is possible to see another dimension of the interaction between the centre and province aimed at forming a culturally homogeneous space for both the empire and the Soviet state.

Microbial changes of natural milk cultures for mozzarella cheese during repeated propagation cycles

Natural milk cultures are undefined starters produced by a selective treatment (milk pasteurization, incubation at high temperature and backslopping), and used for the production of Mozzarella cheese. The objective of this study was to monitor the microbial composition (at or below the species level) and the variability of two model laboratory cultures (LC) and an artisanal culture (NMC) produced at a dairy plant over 13 reproduction cycles using culture independent and dependent methods. PCR-DGGE of V3 region of 16S RNA gene and of a fragment of the lacSZ operon of Streptococcus thermophilus proved that the cultures were dominated by S. thermophilus but other species (Lactobacillus delbrueckii, L. helveticus, Lactococcus lactis, enterococci) were present. These results were partially confirmed by culture dependent analysis. Molecular identification and typing (RAPD-PCR and lacSZ PCR-DGGE and partial sequencing of serB in S. thermophilus) confirmed NMC had the highest diversity, while the two replicate LCs diverged at some early stage. Variability in acid production activity and in aroma production was also observed, and was highest in NMC. S. thermophilus bacteriophages were detected by multiplex PCR.

Bioeconomic analysis of small-scale cultures of Kappaphycus alvarezii (Doty) Doty in India

Commercial culture of red algal seaweeds, particularly Kappaphycus and Eucheuma, has increased significantly in recent years and, since 2008, has surpassed the production of all other farmed seaweeds. A number of countries have analyzed the feasibility of small-scale culture of Kappaphycus as a method of alleviating poverty in low-income coastal communities. In this study, a bioeconomic model for individual and artisanal culture of Kappaphycus alvarezii is constructed. The results of the study show that using the base model, the net present value is positive at the 6-month mark, once the business has started, and that the internal return rate is 210 %. These results are explained by the small investment required for a raft culture system. Sensitivity analysis shows that the business tolerates important unfavorable variations in the critical economical, technological, and biological variables. Finally, the results suggest that this type of culture can fulfill an important social role as long as conflicts for marine space usage are resolved, climate conditions are favorable, and diseases and epiphytes are controlled.

Tintorería y Medicina en la Valencia del Siglo XV: El Manual de Joanot Valero by Lluís Cifuentes i Comamala and Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave (review)

Reviewed by: Tintorería y Medicina en la Valencia del Siglo XV: El Manual de Joanot Valero by Lluís Cifuentes i Comamala and Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave José Pardo-Tomás (bio) Tintorería y Medicina en la Valencia del Siglo XV: El Manual de Joanot Valero: Lluís Cifuentes i Comamala and Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2011. Pp. 328. €24.00. There is growing historiographical interest in craft knowledge, techniques, and practices, especially in the early modern period. It is also becoming increasingly necessary to acknowledge the important role played in the so-called scientific revolution by certain groups of artisans who improved and extended their procedures and skills, as well as their linguistic and visual mechanisms for communicating and circulating their knowledge, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Artisanal knowledge and practice was disseminated in printed books, of course, but also in manuscripts, which were produced in a wide variety of forms and had diverse contents. The book under review here is an excellent example of how to create an edition of this type of manuscript. The authors are acknowledged experts in the transmission of knowledge in the area of the western Mediterranean between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, both in university circles—especially in medicine and natural philosophy—and in artisan culture, which in this particular period underwent changes and developments that would transform the technological environment familiar to Europeans. Lluís Cifuentes leads an important project at Barcelona University that is building up a digital corpus, in Catalan, of science and technique in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Sciència.cat). It promises to be a model for similar future academic projects in other vernacular languages or in Latin. His coauthor, Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave of Córdoba University, is a renowned expert in the technical literature of medieval Spain, particularly in the Castilian language. The two of them have combined their complementary professional skills to edit with extreme care a hitherto unknown manuscript. Tintorería y Medicina is a collection of 150 recipes for textile dyes, stain [End Page 968] removers, and medicinal remedies, especially aimed at ailments or health problems affecting dyers. The manuscript is primarily written in Catalan, although parts of it are written in an Aragonese heavily influenced by Castilian. Its author was Joanot Valero, a young dye-works apprentice originally from Aragon who was living in the city of Valencia when he wrote the manuscript’s sixty-eight pages between 1496 and 1501; at the end of it, Valero added four pages of accounts, which have proved to be very useful in the process of building a picture of the author and his context, in particular his relationship with his master in the Valencian dyers’ guild. Cifuentes and Córdoba have also managed to reconstruct part of Joanot Valero’s later professional life, which continued to be linked to the dyeing profession in the old kingdom of Valencia. The manuscript is preserved on a 1960s microfilm in the Biblioteca de Catalunya (National Library of Catalonia) in Barcelona, which granted permission for the publication of this edition, as the whereabouts of the original is not known. The edition includes an extensive introductory study by the editors (pp. 13–140) that aims to set the manuscript in local, regional, European, and general contexts, rather like in a set of concentric circles, which means that the reader is able at any moment to compare the case at hand with other similar ones, and at the same time appreciate its peculiarities. The editors show us that Valero’s manual should be understood in the context of two great intellectual and social processes taking place in western Europe from the mid-fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The first is the appearance, growth, and circulation of what the classical Germanic historiographical tradition labeled Fachliteratur. The second is a historical process of broader scope for European history, what has come to be termed “the vernacularization of science, medicine, and technology.” Diverse social groups were involved in both processes; among them, artisans stood out, making a place for themselves in the traditional estates...

Medieval and Early Modern Artisan Culture

As an economic category, artisans are typically bounded by two historical markers: on one side, the rise of urban centers in the medieval period, and on the other side, the reorganization of commodity production as a result of industrial capitalization in the early modern period. As much as by their manufacturing and retailing work, premodern artisans may be recognized by specific social practices, such as guild membership, devotional associations, relations to community and nation, and distinctive gender organization. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the period that witnessed artisans’ greatest influence, their identity was largely relational, defining itself from and against those who shared overlapping interests: merchants, waged laborers, and women. In addition, the premodern period saw important shifts in the epistemological status of “craft,” “art,” and “knowledge,” which began to create cultural divisions between artisan and artist, artisan and scientist. The essays in this volume explore artisan culture from a variety of perspectives, analyzing the representation of premodern artisans as distinctive cultural producers and considering artisans’ dynamic participation in the realms of literate, legal, and devotional culture.