Creative economies of culture in South Asia : craftspeople and performers / edited by Anna Morcom and Neelam Raina.

Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2025.
  • ©2025
Description
xvii, 220 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Details

Subject(s)
Editor
Series
Routledge contemporary South Asia series ; 163. [More in this series]
Summary note
"This book explores crafts and performing arts of South Asia through a focus on labour and livelihood. It brings to light little-researched angles of social and political economies of culture and ways in which they have shifted and changed in different historical eras and different political, economic and social formations up to the present. In particular, through this focus on labour and livelihood, the contributors analyse the extensive parallels and similarities of arts and crafts on the one hand and music and performing arts on the other, ranging from questions of lineage, transmission, class/caste/community, professional versus amateur performers and artisans, to the impact of globalisation, neoliberal reforms and mediatisation. Given the role of gender inequalities and differences within caste/community-based cultural production in South Asia across visual, material and performing arts and crafts, this interdisciplinary perspective will be particularly salient, and link together broader sociological and historical trends in South Asian cultural or creative economies. The book explores labour and livelihood through a gamut of crafts and performing arts ranging from courtly and classical to commissioned to mass-produced, and in epochs ranging from colonial or feudal to globalised and neoliberal. In the process, it revisits, refines or revises notions of social and cultural capital, of socio-economic mobility, of the value, role and agency of crafts and performing arts, and the status of their artisans and performers. Original chapters written by contributors with an interdisciplinary background look at the survival and adaption of traditional artisanal communities, traditional forms of practice, historical shifts such as colonialism, industrialisation and nationalism as well as modern industries and institutions including technologies of mass production and creative entrepreneurship. The book contextualises current debates within art, craft, music and dance in South Asia. It develops new theoretical understandings of creative culture through a focus on labour, and contributes to a range of social sciences, arts, and humanities disciplines, including South Asian studies, Ethnomusicology, Crafts and Design, Economic Anthropology, (Historical) Sociology and (Historical) Economics, Cultural History, Human Geography, and Creative Industries and Economies"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
  • Creative vocabularies of work and value in South Asia : a foreword / Nitasha Kaul
  • Living, adapting, and creating : craftspeople and performers in South Asia : a foreword / Daniel Neuman
  • Introduction. Living, adapting, and creating : craftspeople and performers in South Asia / Anna Morcom and Neelam Raina
  • Musical unfreedom and the drummers' dilemma : cultural labour and the value of music in Indian caste society / Brahma Prakash
  • Ul̲aippu : performance as labour in a Tamil theatre tradition / Hanne de Bruin
  • Narratives of craft and power in Sindh, Pakistan / Seher Mirza
  • Artistic labour at stake : the case of South Indian courtesans' changing patterns of professionalism in colonial and post-colonial India / Tiziana Leucci
  • Women, crafts and landscapes : acknowledging cultural rights for sustainable development / Zahra Hussain
  • The performance of payment : differentiating devotional, erotic and classical performing arts in India / Anna Morcom
  • Materializing insurgency : walnut-wood carving and the material culture of conflict / Nikita Kaul
  • The Tawa'if in colonial India : changing livelihoods and emerging technologies (1790s
  • 1920s) / Shweta Sachdeva
  • Remaking labouring lives through crisis : artisan weaponsmiths in colonial North India / Amanda Lanzillo
  • Court music outside the court : defining the 'professional' musician in nineteenth-century Bengal / Richard David Williams
  • The hand in the song : understanding performative labour, gender, and livelihood in the arts of Chitrakar women of west Bengal / Priyanka Basu
  • Kashmir's crafts women : tacit, embodied knowledge and its value in post conflict reconstruction / Neelam Raina
  • Kanchipuram as brand value : weaving, marketing tradition in South India / Arti Kawlra
  • Drumming, value, and patronage in a Himalayan village economy / Stefan Fiol
  • Globalities and temporalities of artisanship : lessons from an Indian wood art industry / Thomas Chambers
  • The gramophone, the concert stage and the Hindustani musician as commodity-fetish / Dard Neuman
  • The business of Kollywood dance in Chennai, India / Kristin Rudisill
  • Surviving revivals : or why the work of resuscitating Indian crafts is never done / Clare M. Wilkinson and Alicia O. DeNicola.
ISBN
  • 9781138492172 (hardcover)
  • 1138492175 (hardcover)
  • 9781032887982 (paperback)
  • 1032887982 (paperback)
LCCN
2024035899
OCLC
1464273865
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