ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the platformization of crafts and artisanal work in Bangladesh. As digitization and e-commerce are hailed as modes of regenerating in an industry caught between automation anxiety and cultural revival, social entrepreneurship emerges as the agent driving such transformations. In a country where a limited section of the population can access the internet, social entrepreneurs and artist entrepreneurs represent two different agents that can capitalize on changes in the artisanal sector. But discourses and structural transformations relying on such individualistic actors, I argue, are not well-suited for the artisanal sector in Bangladesh. Artisanal work has geographically located histories that have evolved through collective practices. Narratives centred around entrepreneurship leave little space and agency for collective actors for whom cultural revival is not rhetoric for national pride but a question of livelihood.
