Uncertainty in traditional handicraft tourism: a material temporality study

Tourism is increasingly intersecting with traditional handicraft, with attention shifting from finished craft objects as tourism souvenirs to tourists’ experience of observing and at times participating in the craft-making process itself. Existing studies have largely approached this encounter through the lens of commercialisation and external impacts, paying insufficient attention to how material temporality and uncertainty fundamentally reorganise traditional handicraft tourism from within. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen, a historically significant centre of ceramic production, we examine how tourism’s temporal order reshapes the socio‑material relations of craft practice in settings where craft-making is opened to tourists. Our empirical study argues that tourism reorders the temporal conditions of handicraft practice, exposing new uncertainties. Craftspeople and sites respond through three redistributive mechanisms, eventisation, selective presentation and embodied coordination. The study advances tourism geographies engagement with materiality by placing material temporality at the centre of analysis, and reconceptualises uncertainty as a relational and dynamic socio-material practice. It also reframes tourism’s influence on craft as both external and internal. Internally, tourism redistributes uncertainty among craftspeople, spaces, and moments.