Relational care and ordinary repair in diverse craft economies

Abstract

The commentary attends to India's rapidly changing craft economy to notice how individual economic actors in the craft sector make complex and often contradictory ethico-political choices realising hopeful possibilities. Through the mode of care and repair, the commentary examines how the artisans operating within diverse economies negotiate with exploitative labour regimes and survive a dwindling craft sector. It considers how a woman owner-artisan creates an atmosphere of togetherness and extends her notion of family by cooking for her team of workers. Care ethics, in this analysis, is not only a gendered feeling but realigns with co-dependent economic exchanges essential for collective survival. The second case focuses on the everyday repair of musical instruments as an alternative act of ordinary ethics. The commentary argues, even when these small doings do not bring immediate and intentional change in the economic organisation of the two crafts, they require pivotal consideration as already existing alternative value systems anchored within everyday world-making practices.