2020, Vol. 2, Issue 2, Part A

author(s)
Aravindh Panikkaveettil, Jishnu K and S Harikumar

abstract
The economies and societies of the Third World countries are dotted with traditional communities who engage in craft traditions handed down across generations as a means of livelihood. Irrespective of the setting, artisan communities have been observed to be an impoverished lot, with many communities being encapsulated in a vicious circle of poverty. The globalization and integration of markets often left artisans on the precipice of ruin, with their livelihoods becoming uneconomical and fraught with bottlenecks. Tourism has proved to have often play a major rule in shifting the fortunes of artisan communities, causing a shift of products from ‘quotidian’ or common products, to exquisitely crafted ‘elite’ artefacts. The present paper attempts to look at how tourism has influenced the changing fortunes of artisanal communities in the Global South during the last three decades of globalization. The experiences from different settings have been congregated based on a thorough review of existing literature to draw parallels between unrelated communities and their relative experiences. The study concludes that along with State support and emergence of artisan co-operatives, the tourism industry has been a ‘big-push’ factor that has helped traditional communities to break free from the vicious circle of poverty that had consumed their lives.