Book project
I am currently writing a book based on my PhD research.
The book shows how craftswomen in Madagascar facing environmental threats to ancestral reed-weaving livelihoods have built new craft expertise and communities around embroidery, a craft introduced by a sustainable development project. I take an interdisciplinary approach that draws on scholarship in craft, textiles and material culture anthropology to foreground the craft process and makers’ own perspectives. The book demonstrates the complexity of this transition as women individually and collectively renegotiate their relationship with ancestral practice and navigate social, practical, creative and ethical dimensions of change.
Conventional approaches to craft in development typically underplay local textile histories and cultural understandings and underestimate the importance of social relationships and embodied knowledge held by makers. Traditional projects prioritise perspectives from the global north and view change through the lens of project activities, artificially separating making from the social worlds it inhabits. In contrast, my research uses makers’ understandings to explore this change in the context of the local community and landscape of livelihoods. I examine social relationships that shape the ways new craft becomes socially embedded in craftspeople’s lives. In doing so I demonstrate the incongruity between makers’ understandings and development project priorities.