117 – Techne and mêtis in industrial South Asia: Ethnographic and historiographic approaches to working-class knowledges and politics

October 1, 2025
1:45 pm
Triplex 1016
In their concern to bolster domestic capital and attract foreign investments, governments across South Asia give high priority to skilling workforces. In this panel, we aim to critically engage with practices of skilling and their underlying ideas of skill in different industrial milieus across South Asia. We take a bottom-up approach on the topic that explores how the abstract textbook, techne knowledge of industrial skills is disseminated in engineering colleges, vocational training centres, and company in-house training processes, how it relates to the concrete, practical mêtis knowledge that workers apply, produce and circulate in their everyday practice at industrial worksites, and what forms of consent or dissent to industrial regimes this effects. Drawing on classical insights from the sociology and history of labour as well as recent interventions from phenomenological anthropology, we conceive the experience of industrial workplaces, labour processes, and the skills required for them as embedded in wider economic, political, social, and cultural structures. And we invite participants to address – grounded in their own, original ethnographic and/ or historiographic data – one or more of the following questions: How do specific junctures in the capitalist development of particular places and/ or industries shape the experience of work; how are notions and categorizations of different skills (or their lack) established in everyday encounters at work, in union politics, in labour colonies, and how are they renegotiated and contested in these contexts; how are categorizations, contestations, and renegotiations of un/skilled work and workers informed by likewise renegotiated and contested notions of gender, age, and caste; and how far do these processes entrench divisions among workers or momentarily transcend them.

Convenors

Arnaud Kaba
Christian Strümpell

Presentations

Skills, caste, and class in an eastern Indian steel town, 1950s-2000s
Strümpell Christian - Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Max Weber Stiftung, New Delhi, India
Transnational Skilling: ReConfiguring The Urban via Used Cars and Electronics
Rathore Gayatri - PRODIG, Paris1 Pantheon Sorbonne, Paris, France
The global part of the local: circulation of techniques and value of know-how among the glassmakers of Fīrozābād
KABA Arnaud - Département d'anthropologie et de sociologie, Paris 8, PARIS, France
Producing Skilled Nurses: Education Programs in an Indian Corporate Hospital
Jürg Bühler - Dept. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland