Paper short abstract:

What does an anthropology of craft communities tell us about the nature of knowledge, it's politics, and transmission? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of handloom-weaver communities, the paper explores how learning and negotiating craft knowledge and new skills shape aspirations and identities.

Paper long abstract:

Craft apprenticeships are complex webs where identities, histories, learning, and livelihoods get intertwined. This paper will draw from the ethnographic findings from fieldwork done among handloom weaving communities based in India to explore how communities transfer their knowledge and skills and generate a sense of agency. Handloom weaving is learnt within the domestic setting and passed on from one generation to the next through an informal embodied apprenticeship. Through a multi-sited ethnography of handloom weavers in Kamrup in Assam, Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh and Kota in Rajasthan, and Gujarat, I examine how women-weavers engage variedly with their own traditional knowledge and with recent design and skill intervention programmes. The transmission of traditional knowledge and acquisition of new skills have had an impact on the relationship to work which, traditionally is a customary activity intimately tied to their social cultural identities of gender, caste, and religion. Technology and digital platforms have played a part in bringing forth new products and identities of the artisans. I locate the sites of resistance, tension, and negotiations with ideas of authenticity, tradition, modernity, and skill. The paper will discuss how artisans continue to learn and practice their craft with other auxiliary skills, innovate, negotiate, resist, and perform their identities challenging contemporary discourses on development and education.