> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: [[Kaamya Sharma]] > Reference:: Sharma, Kaamya. 2019. “Hand-Crafted Identities: Sartorial Taste and Belonging amongst Elite Women in Urban India.” _Journal of Material Culture_, May, 1359183519846155. > Date:: 2019 > Tags:: #warp #India #naturaldyes > Claim:: [[Counter claim - Craft is just for rich people]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Underpinning the craft world is a presumption that appreciation of handmade is a matter of taste, whereas it's true purpose is to reproduce hierarchies between classes. ### Highlights > They may have made a little more as weavers, but they thought it’s respectable to have a blue- collared or white-collared job and go in an air-conditioned van to work and come back clean and the wife respects you > But only craft world interlocutors used dichotomies of natural and synthetic fabrics to propagate a discourse of what I term ‘sartorial biomorality’. > The devaluation of caste-based hand labour in Tamil Nadu draws on a history of Periyarist scepticism regarding the impracticality, elitism and deceit of craft as a desirable economic end. > Wilkinson-Weber and DeNicola (2016) question the impossibility of revival given the scope of the affective, economic and political investment that has gone into craft; they write, ‘revival is always just about to be done, resuscitation is on the verge of being accomplished – for this, the artisan (or the practice, or the product) must always be in a condition to require it. > The handloom sari, rendered as a form of biomoral–aesthetic praxis, allows for craft world members to assert their superiority over a galaxy of social others – women of the lower classes with their ‘flashy’ tastes, middle- class consumers of synthetic fabrics, male weavers, a nouveau riche mercantile elite and everyone else outside the craft world.