Subjective Measures and Changing Tools: Rethinking Indigenous Knowledge and Technological Practice in South-Asian Craft Communities

Author
Thamarai Selvan Kannan

Journal
ICON, Volume 30, Issue 2 (2025)

DOI
https://doi.org/10.11590/icon.2025.2.04

Abstract
In South Asia, indigenous knowledge claims have long been entangled with monolithic textual tradition. This article introduces a practice-based understanding of knowledge embedded in craft practices such as instrument making and sculpting. It specifically explores how measures and tools are used as a sociotechnical process in which practitioners frame them as subjective (depending on individual taste) rather than text-based, objective, standard measures. Narratives about craft communities in India have been viewed from labour and agricultural historiographical frameworks which confine craftspeople within the caste and guild structures.

This paper, however, shifts the focus from the labouring body to knowledge practices, drawing on scholarly and methodological frameworks from science and technology studies (STS) and history of science and technology scholarship. By doing this, the article illustrates the practitioners’ craft, the technical tools, and measurement using workshop ethnographies, observation of workshop discussions, interviews, dialogues with the crafts communities, and readings of textual sources.

Ultimately, the paper showcases how one could tinker with historical and anthropological methodology to offer a more inclusive South Asian history of technology—one where the histories of diverse communities and multiple voices could be brought out otherwise many craft practices would never be recorded in canonical texts and colonial archives.

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