Crafting Innovation, Weaving Sustainability: Theorizing Indian Handloom Weaving as Sociotechnology (original) (raw)
Related papers
Innovation in Indian Handloom Weaving
Technology and Culture, 2018
Handloom weaving is the second most important livelihood in rural India after farming. Improving handloom technologies and practices thus will directly affect the lives of millions of Indians, and this is similar for many other communities in the global South and East. By analyzing handloom weaving as a socio-technology, we will show how weaving communities are constantly innovating their technologies, designs, markets and social organization—often without calling it innovation. This demonstration of innovation in handloom contradicts the received image of handloom as a pre-modern and traditional craft that is unsustainable in current societies and that one therefor needs to get rid of: by mechanization and/or by putting it into a museum. With this research we seek to address three related issues. The first is to deepen our theoretical understanding of innovation by exploring it in supposedly non-innovating contexts, second is the relevance of history of technology for understanding handloom and indeed other crafts as sophisticated socio-technologies. The third is to explore how this broadening of the concept of innovation can inform an inclusive politics of development that positions craft within the innovation framework, rather than in the discourse of traditional technology in need of modernization or preservation. We show how innovations are shaped in interactions between individuals across different user groups and communities by describing the socio-technical ensemble of handloom weaving. This allows us to identify product, market and process innovations in handloom. These innovations include the use of mobile phones to innovate new markets, and the use of computers to speed up calculative functions so that slower and more skilled work can be taken up by weavers, while keeping the product cost-effective.
Sustaining Handloom Weaving and Empowering Artisans Design and Business Education in Maheshwar India
This paper discusses fashion's relationship with traditional craft in India, focusing on the handloom industry in Maheshwar, a small town in Madhya Pradesh state. The organisation Women Weave, founded by Sally Holkar in 2003, has moved away from the silk, cotton and zari (metallic yarn) fabrics and saris that Maheshwar is known for, and is producing its own form of khadi (hand-spun, hand-woven yarn), popular in high-end Indian and global fashion. A recent initiative of Women Weave is The Handloom School (THS), which teaches weavers from different parts of India business, design IT and communication skills with a view to enabling them to connect directly with a high-end luxury market. The school is in its early stages and the curriculum is continuously being revised and adapted. My recent ethnographic fieldwork in Maheshwar and other weaving regions in India has involved learning about the experiences of some of the students and graduates of THS over the past three years. This paper will draw upon these experiences, while presenting some of the challenges the school is facing amidst a broad and lively debate on craft in India within the development, anthropological, design history and material culture discourses.
Nottingham Trent University, 2018
This research critically analyses the recent development of design education for traditional artisans in rural India. It focuses specifically on handloom weaving, which, across rural India is the second largest source of employment after agriculture. Handloom, however, continues to be afflicted by low wages and viewed as skilled labour rather than as a creative profession. The 'informal' embodied knowledge of weavers is widely devalued against 'formal' knowledge gained through school and university education as well as government skill development schemes. A lively discourse currently exists around the problematic divides between urban-educated designers and the artisans who simply execute the work of designers and are excluded from, or unable to access urban design institutes. In this discourse, weavers continue to be perceived as 'artisans' and never as designers, leaving little room to bridge this gap. In the last decade, two educational institutes have been established that challenge this dualism as well as the hierarchies that have formed between the 'artisan' and 'designer': Somaiya Kala Vidya (SKV) in Kachchh district, Gujarat, and the Handloom School (THS) in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh; each forms a focused case study for this research. Both institutes aim to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship, to enable artisans to connect directly with growing luxury markets for authentic, ethical and high-quality craft. Using multi-sited, ethnographic case study methodology, I captured the lived experiences of student and graduate weavers, faculty, staff, founder-directors and other stakeholders of the institutes, to measure the successes and challenges of the two institutes against their stated aims, as well as those of the handloom community and the state. By specifically inter-referencing craft development and education, previously treated as distinct areas, I have aimed to understand the relevance, sustainability and value of handloom in India for the weavers and for contemporary markets. Findings show that design and business education enhances the creative and aspirational capabilities of artisans, as well as their cultural, social and economic capital, as they mobilise within the now globalised spaces of the village and market network. Uncertainties
Mobilising Discourses: Handloom as Sustainable Socio-Technology
Economic and political weekly, 2012
Handloom is much more sustainable than common views and standard government policies recognise. Instead of a linear migration out of weaving into other forms of livelihood, weaving communities show a more strategic mobility – flexibly departing from and again returning to weaving, depending on circumstances. This mobility can be traced in weavers’ discourses about their vulnerabilities and aspirations. This paper shows that the standard image of weaving as premodern, unproductive and unsustainable is produced by being trapped in a progress discourse, a poverty discourse, and a market discourse. An alternative view of handloom weaving as a socio-technology is proposed: understanding handloom as an ensemble of knowledge, skills, technology and social relations explains the continued sustainability of handloom, and also offers clues for socio-technical innovation and an alleviation of vulnerabilities.
Design Education and Handloom Weaving in India
This paper discusses the paradigms, aims and methodologies of my PhD research which I began in October 2014. The handloom industry in India currently employs over 4 million people and continues to be an important part of the economy, social life and identity of traditional weaving communities all over India. Following a series of declines over the course of the last century, due to industrialisation and imitated imports flooding local markets amongst other factors, recent development initiatives are helping to position these crafts in high-end urban and international markets. A new approach to craft development has been design and business education for artisans This research focuses on two case studies of education institutes, unique in India for providing long-term formal education for rural artisans: Somaiya Kala Vidya (SKV) in Kachchh, Gujarat, and the Handloom School in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh. SKV is sensitive to local methods, scale of craft production and traditions. The Handloom School invites weavers from all over India via local NGOs. Both institutions aim to enable artisans to connect directly with high-end clients. The research addresses a number of questions, including: how do educators and artisans balance local knowledge with contemporary design and business concepts? Who owns traditional and other designs? What is the value of handloom fabrics amongst both the weavers and the market? This paper discuses the research to date and the approaches employed to analyse the effectiveness of these institutions in nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship in the handloom sector, and to what extent they enable artisans to design and make craft products attuned to the demands of the contemporary market.
Towards a theory of innovation in handloom weaving in India
2016
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Text, 2020
Northeast India is a region defined by diverse and ancient tribal communities, by fertile lands and rice-based agriculture. This article presents the eri silk weaving communities of the Ri Bhoi district in Meghalaya, examining how artisanal knowledge exists and interacts alongside the natural environment and the shifting social world. It explores where it resides, how is it used, and how is it transmitted. It positions handspun and handwoven eri silk textiles as the product of a sustainable lifestyle, as indicators of social change and as tangible expressions of an interethnic identity. The interaction between the Karbi, the Khasi Bhoi and the Khadar Lyngdoh tribes of the Ri Bhoi district is the ethnographic focus of this article. Textiles, techniques and motifs are identified to illustrate cultural assimilation within the Ri Bhoi district, forming an identity that moves beyond the rigid framework of distinct ethnic identity. This article draws on doctoral research on the eri silk weavers of the Ri Bhoi district and sustained interaction with the artisans in different capacities; as a textile consultant prior to the research and as an entrepreneur and friend beyond fieldwork.
Constructing Common Knowledge: Design Practice for Social Change in Craft Livelihoods in India
Design Issues, 2018
From a policy point of view, the nine million craftspeople in India are underdeveloped economically and in need of expert design interventions to adapt to the market. Within nationalistic projects those same craftspeople are transformed into a heritage that needs to be preserved, rather than having a trajectory into a promising future. Is there an escape from these discourses of poverty or museumization when thinking about craftspeople? In response, this article investigates how design can be key to achieve social change that craftspeople desire. I propose that designers intending to mitigate vulnerability in livelihoods of craftspeople have to design not towards a pre-determined set of desirable economic outcomes, but include social and cultural outcomes. Using empirical examination of designer narratives as base, this article extends constructivist STS concepts of “cultures of technology” to “cultures of design” to elaborate three lenses to analyze design practice: Intervention, w...
Design Issues, 2018
Introduction How can design practice mediate deepening economic, social, and cultural divides between traditional craftspeople and modern markets, to make design truly a paradigm for the social change desired by craftspeople? How can expert design practitioners effect social change, when modern markets risk appropriating traditional craftspeople as labor, albeit skilled labor, and either disenfranchising them as objects of charity, or museumizing them as cultural heritage? 1 In this paper, I focus on accounts from designers who work with people in vulnerable craft communities. 2 The accounts reveal that seeing craftspeople not as consumers of design expertise but as active producers of cultural value is an important step toward their emancipation.