Making with limits:an ethical education for precarious life?

• In Event: KEYNOTE Anthropologists speak about "Education beyond the human"

Proposal

This paper is a considered reflection on what is now almost ten years of working alongside a historical community of silk weavers in Kanchipuram, India: one that has been targeted for over twenty years by Right to Education policies that enforce compulsory formal schooling as the means of protecting children and young people. In particular, protecting them from work on the hand-looms that have, for centuries, produced the kanjeevaram sari; and that children, for generations, have lived and learned on. In my work, I have followed cohorts of Kanchipuram’s children as they were moved off the loom and into classrooms – only to then move onto assembly-lines and contract work. Classroom spaces, relations and routines, I have argued, served to (re)make young bodies cheerfully accepting of precarious life on 24/7 assembly-lines.
In this paper, however (and given sympoiesis), I want to focus on the loom as an ‘other’ means – a vernacular, situated and material means – of life-making. After all, Boas – physicist as well as (founding) cultural anthropologist – insisted on the earthy materials of cultural life, of (wo)men who, in (re)making the material world for life, made themselves in turn (Stocking 1966). Apprenticing on the looms has always been about learning as much as earning: about making a life as much as a livelihood. The silk and gold skeins of warp that, in their expensive brightness, their proclivity to snapping and “wastage,” and their atmospheric sensitivity, have materialized the unique kanjeevaram sari and its contrast-colored wedding-raasi (fortune), have also fashioned the way of life that is silk-weaving: the rain- and ­raasi-bound ‘seasons’ of production that make life and mark its limits in Kanchipuram. Indeed, mastery on the loom is primarily a sensual education in feeling one’s way to the tensile limits of the silk thread; with apprenticeships, the daily educational practice of a materialist ethics geared towards minimizing “breakage” and “wastage.” In the late-modern drift towards knowledge societies and immaterial labor that drive current educational demands – and given the modernist paradigm of limitless growth that has rendered the very materials of life limited – what can loom-based ethics against wastage offer educational policy today?
Drawing on Sennett’s (2008) celebration of the making homo faber, reversing modern education’s prejudice favouring her thinking sapien(t) cousin, and on my participation in life in a weaving community, I want to argue for a materialist approach to learning as educationally and ethically appropriate in this ecologically precarious moment: an embodied education of making life and livings with (material) limits. As the international education/ development field, faced with the challenges of sustainability and youth unemployment, turn to vocational education – to the German dual system of apprenticeships, in particular – (how) can anthropological attention to the everyday education of silk-weaving apprentices against wastage inform such a turn?

Author

• Miriam Thangaraj, University of Glasgow