Craft as education: Bridging the tradition and innovation divide in handloom weaving

Lunch Lecture by Annapurna Mamidipudi (Doctoral Candidate, Maastricht University)

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 rural producers. By analyzing handloom weaving as a socio-technology, it becomes possible to show how weaving communities are constantly innovating their technologies, designs, markets and social organization—often without calling it innovation. I use the  ‘invention’ of the ‘Traditional Uppada Jamdani’ in the village Uppada that never had such a technique to illustrate this. This demonstration of innovation in handloom contradicts the received image of handloom as a pre-modern and traditional manual labour 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 Annapurna Mamidipudi seeks to address three related issues. The first is the importance of understanding handloom and indeed other craft production systems as sophisticated socio-technologies. The second is to deepen the theoretical understanding of innovation by exploring it in supposedly non-innovating contexts. The third is to explore how this improved understanding of innovation in handloom can be used to explicate an important role of craft as education. To this end, she will elaborate on a concept of innovation that is applicable in contexts where tradition and continuity are more valued than innovation and change.

About the speaker
Annapurna Mamidipudi is carrying out her PhD research in Maastricht University.  She was trained as an engineer in Manipal, India. She set up and worked for fifteen years in Dastkar Andhra, an NGO which is based in Andhra Pradesh to support craft and handloom livelihoods through intervening in technology, marketing, design and policy. Her PhD project conceptualizes handloom weaving as a sustainable socio-technology, as an equitable economic activity, and as embedded knowledge for sustainable societies. Her publications include: A. Mamidipudi et al. 2012. "Mobilising Discourses." Economic & Political Weekly 47 (25: 41-51); “Saris of Andhra Pradesh.” in M. Singh. 2010. Saris of India, Development Commissioner Handlooms: 218-241.

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About IIAS Lunch Lectures

Every month, one of the IIAS researchers will present his or her work-in-progress in an informal setting to colleagues and other interested attendees. IIAS organises these lunch lectures to give the research community the opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas.