Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay focuses on recent developments in the pedagogy of craftspeople. Beginning with an overview of post-Independence national design institutions, the essay focuses on more recent textile craft schools and training centres for hereditary and new craftspeople. These are staffed and often managed by hereditary craftspeople. Corporate philanthropy at various scales funds these institutions. Students learn to analyse hereditary craft, make it contemporary, learn about marketing and business practices. These organisations mark a shift in the terms set by colonial, statist and welfarist approaches to craft. Notions of ‘authenticity’ recede as pedagogy becomes dialogic and focuses on innovation. This creates a contingent sovereignty based on recognition and entrepreneurship. This study allows us to offer an art history of contemporary textile craft and an ethnography of the way gender, community, practice, labour, market and philanthropy are configured in such learning programmes.
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