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In Firozabad—a city in North India which specialises in glass production and is famous for being the centre of manufacturing for the billions of glass bangles worn by South Asian women—the Sheeshgarh caste used to master the most valuable skills. The transmission of these skills to other castes was a central stake, which highlights the relations between labour and capital, between dominants castes, between Muslims and Hindus. Therefore, this paper proposes the notion of trade consciousness to analyse the processes which shaped caste, gender and class relations around the common consciousness to be part of the same activity, the same community of practices. The paper then argues that understanding the way skills are introduced, transmitted and reproduced through master/apprentice relations, the everyday conviviality in the shopfloor, or in the mohallā, constitutes a crucial thread to understand the social transformation in Firozabad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Lave's theorisation of situated learning, this article engages with skills in the so-called 'unskilled' domain of waste work. Waste work involves handling diverse material discards, from household vegetable peelings, metal and plastic scraps, to human and animal faecal material and corpses. In India, forms of waste work are toxic, historically stigmatised, burdened on Dalit and Adivasi bodies, and officially categorised as 'unskilled' work. Based on fieldwork in a town in central India, the paper draws attention to skills in waste work, documenting social practices that involve processes of learning and acquiring skills. Analysing institutions that mediate skill acquisition in waste work, the paper argues that 'skilled' work is politically and socially constructed and materially contingent. The article destabilises reified notions of how work gets classified as '(un)skilled'. Further, the paper reflects on the conflicts and paradoxes that a conversation on skills in waste work throws up: valuing and recognising different forms of waste work while also pointing to their toxicities and struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]