ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how two particularly salient categories, artisan and labor, are constructed and subverted throughout the occupational trajectories and life-courses of embroidery workers in India. It considers how local experiences and articulations of work, and engagements with economic and social contingencies blur the boundaries between conceptualizations of “artisan” and “labor.” With an ethnographic lens focused on the “sites” of concept-making, this chapter elaborates on the different meanings of these two categories as they are understood in everyday experiences and in relation to the life-course of embroidery workers. It focuses on critically questioning the broad category of artisan by examining the way it has been constructed in the literature on craft in India. The chapter turns to the literature on craft in India to interrogate the construction of “artisan” within a resilient binary in the scholarship: craft as heritage versus craft as exploitative small-scale industry.
