Negotiating Craft Livelihoods in West Bengal: A Sociological Study of Dokra Artisans

Contemporary development discourse often frames artisanal craft as a site of either cultural continuity or terminal decline, a binary that overlooks the structural reorganization of production under neoliberal market integration. This research moves beyond these reductive binaries to examine the structural transmutation of artisanal labor under the pressures of neoliberal market integration. The study utilizes an interpretive framework based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork between 2024 and 2025 among Dokra artisans in Bikna village, West Bengal. Data collection involved immersive observation, and forty-five semi-structured interviews with artisans and intermediaries, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Drawing on Tsing’s concept of friction, the research reveals that market integration is an unequal and unstable process that reshapes the domestic sphere. Kinship-based apprenticeship functions as a stratified labor regime that differentiates authority and risk along generational and gendered lines. Integration – mediated by NGOs and cooperatives – produces a frictional economy where bureaucratic gatekeepers redistribute market volatility downward while concentrating authority upward. Synthesizing Mannheim’s theory of generations, the paper introduces the concept of a reflexive artisan generation to theorize youth disengagement from Dokra craft as an adaptive rejection of inherited precarity. By reconceptualizing the transmission of craft knowledge as the intergenerational redistribution of risk, the study illuminates the structural contradictions inherent in craft commercialization.