Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan

Beautiful too look through with excellent text.

Pitelka eschews aesthetic valuations of raku and, instead, explores a socio-cultural history, relating the significance of patronage, power and the creation of origin accounts to the definition and regulation of a tradition. A key to this approach is his quote (on p, 90) from the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu: '[the] work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art.' This is a refreshing and important book, joining Donald Richie's 'Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics' on my shelf. The copy I purchased was covered on virtually every page with underlinings, asinine comments and other involuted ruminations that not only diverted the eye from the text but also gave the lie to the announced statement that the book was in good condition. Beware! Amazon itself suffers without descriptive protocols that make plain that marginalia and other scribbles bear on statements of condition. Caveat Emptor is no defence.

I bought this book after hearing Morgan Pitelka speak. It is very informative and will greatly enhance my understanding of both the art of Raku and the practice of Tea. As a Raku artist, I have found that there is a lot of confusion "out there" on the web regarding Raku, and this scholarly yet approachable book will be a source I can trust whenever I need to give a presentation.

Excellent book, full of helpful info...lot of good detail, good illustrations would higly recommend it to any one interested in pottery

An interesting PhD thesis that claims that a lot of the 'traditional' history about how Raku got started, such as the relationship between Rikyu and Chojiro, is actually insubstantiated and potentially fabricated one or two centuries later when the larger tea schools needed to beef up their image. This claim is based on, among other things, the large number of archeological digs that happened just in the past 20 years. These digs have been referred to in other recent books as well. This is a very informative book, even for someone who didn't know a whole lot of history beforehand.