Skills for Work and the Work of Skills: Community, Labour and Technological Change in India’s Artisanal Fisheries

Abstract

Artisanal cultures of work and skills transmission provide a useful point of contrast from which to think about the renewed interest in skills development as a formal, institutionalized process of training and certification for discrete and standardized skills. This article traces the transformation of practices of skill in the context of technological change in the artisanal fisheries of Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, to explore a set of linked questions about skills and work: How expansively or narrowly should skills be understood? What can we learn from traditional modes of skills transmission? As technology makes redundant many of the traditional skills, are we seeing a 'degradation' of work? A focus on fishing, a traditionally caste-bound occupation, also opens up questions regarding the work that skills do within a political economy, both in reproducing a given social order, and in enabling change. In tracing processes of labour recruitment in the mechanized fisheries, the article offers a further reflection, about the extent to which skills matter in securing employment, given the continued importance of networks of caste, kinship and village-based community.

The Circulation and Politics of Knowledge Climate Change and Livelihood Struggles in a Coastal Fishing Community

“…They believe that today the risk emerging out of kolu related events, largely due to the unpredictability of the climate has become part of their everyday lives. Other studies in the region have also mentioned about how fisherfolk are constrained to apply their experiential knowledge to find rich fishing grounds (Sundar 2018). A fisherman commented, earlier we were able to predict accurately the availability of specific fish varieties during particular seasons.…”

Should I Stay or Should I Go? South Indian Artisanal Fishers’ Precarious Livelihoods and Their Engagement with Categorical Ocean Forecasts

“…They are Latin Catholics, state classified as an Other Backward Community (OBC) on the basis of their historical socioeconomic marginality. Apart from fostering grassroot community organization and trade unions, the Catholic Church plays an important role as an intermediary between fishers and state bureaucracy (Kurien 1985;Sundar 2012;Subramanian 2009). While their influence on the social lives of the fishers is indeed FIG.…”

Pathways to Agricultural Skill Development in the Indian Himalayas

“…Women may gain valued skills, yet still have limited scope to leverage them to access higher paid and higher status positions, because taking on these positions may be at odds with domestic obligations and locally salient notions of appropriate women’s working hours (Carswell & De Neve, 2018). In India, caste networks are still the basis for labour recruitment in many sectors, implying that simply gaining skills may not be sufficient to gain access to desired jobs if those skills do not align with one’s traditional caste occupation (Sundar, 2018). When TVET graduates do access jobs, employers may constrain opportunities to make use of skills in desired ways.…”

“…Women’s limited access to capital, labour and land, combined with family expectations that they should be providers of food for the household, may make them less disposed towards developing aspirations for cash cropping; whereas expectations that men should be family ‘breadwinners’ may make them more disposed towards developing skills related to cash cropping (Okali & Sumberg, 2012). The caste and class connotations of particular agricultural tasks and skills also have significant effects on how they are socially valued—as markers of high or low status (Sundar, 2018).…”