ABSTRACT
The practice of craft, and the ideas and discourses it engenders, is an especially salient vehicle for contemporary anthropologists to study not only tradition and labor, but also shifting structures of value and identification. This chapter proposes that strategies of naming, claiming, and visualizing are key to our understanding of craft in the north Indian context. It draws on ethnographic studies to elucidate the practices that justify and accentuate class differentiation in different spatial and cultural contexts. Ethnography reveals incongruities between the discourses of knowledge, work, and creativity of those that seek to speak for artisans, and the artisans themselves. This discourse crystallizes in a reflexive and well-articulated narrative of innovation and tradition. By the 1980s, a “new” middle class, buoyed by the introduction of neo-liberalism and committed to private enterprise and consumer capitalism, began to supersede their predecessors.
