We are Arnaud Kaba, anthropologist, and Shankare Gowda, Sociologist, we ask for your help to carry out our visual anthropology project on glass workers in Firozabad, in North India Firozabad's bracelets are worn by almost all Indian women, and their lamps and handicrafts are massively exported to Europe. Yet we know very little about the hands that make them, sometimes with pride and virtuosity, often with pain.

Your financial assistance will be invaluable and will contribute to the realization of anthropological short film on glass workers in Firozabad. Working with Pascal Bernhardt, documentary filmmaker, cameraman and anthropologist by training, will help us to perfect a visual method of technography and perform a narration of the subjectivities of glass workers described in everyday life situations. The visual aspect is only one component of a broader research carried out since September on the glass cultures of Firozabad, stretched between valorization of the skills and confrontation with exploitation. We will give an account of this ambivalence, between fascination and suffering, which binds glass workers to the shiny material that nourishes and corrodes them. We will dive into the lives of the actors and start from their relationship to the material, to the techniques, to explore the way in which their subjectivities are shaped by the work of glass.

The team

Arnaud Kaba

Post-doctoral fellow at ICAS: MP, Delhi and at the Max-Weber Kolleg, Erfurt.

After a PhD at the EHESS on metallurgical workers in Bhopal and their confrontation with uncertainty, Arnaud Kaba is carrying out a new cycle of research on the glass cluster of Firozabad. He is performing an ethnography onf the worker's collective subjectivities thanks to an anthropology of techniques, an anthropology of the glass worker's memories based on the collection of life narrative and on a participating observation of the everyday life of labour.

Shankare Gowda

Independant sociologist

After a JNU PhD Shakare Gowda, specializes in Urban sociology and in direct support to the field within research teams. He notably worked with Véronique Dupont (IRD) on the slum of Katarpur (Delhi), and co-published numerous articles with her, as well as with Rémi de Bercegol (CNRS), on the medium-sized cities of Uttar Pradesh, on water distribution networks in Delhi and finally on plastic recyclers. He has co-directed People of the waste, a documentary on Delhi waste workers. He is now co-directing this documentary on Firozabad.

Link to the People of Waste documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZROTSb2TRsk&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0fOmgIWakR1r0TUaZ0F9aLyTr_YhjP7m3Azj_bGA3xLVxbrJIkDt3o_sg

Pascal Bernhardt

Visual anthropologist and documentary maker

Pascal Bernhardt has worked for the last 3 years as a cameraman, assistant director and research assistant on the ERC ARTIVISM project in the context of which he experimented and refined on different fields of this research methods. He therefore lived with actors whom he followed, camera at hand, in their processes of exchanges, elaboration and creation of ideas, of their technical realization (construction of chariots, masks ...) until the cathartic phases of the carnivalesque performativity. His techniques consists in the creation of an audiovisual language descriptive of gestures, bodies, thoughts and subjectivities expressed in free flow and in situation

The city of glassmakers

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