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Status and Context: Sri Lankan Potter Women Reconsidered After Field Work in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Deborah Winslow
Deborah Winslow
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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Extract

In February 1989, in Pune, a city of a million people in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, I visited a simple outdoor pottery workshop. It consisted of a shallow pit kiln surrounded by eleven spaces shaded by gunny sacks on a flat area at the top of stairs leading down to a large river that ran through the city center. The families who used this space were kumbhars, members of a Hindu caste group found throughout the subcontinent. In India to teach, I thought that time spent with these potters might provide a perspective on Sinhalese potters I had known in a Sri Lankan village in the 1970s. The Indian potters were willing, so this first visit was followed by many more over the next four months.

Type
Gendered Economies
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 1994 , pp. 3 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1994

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