Zeeshan Hyder Mir (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
zeeshan.mir.25@ucl.ac.uk

Made in Kashmir: The Endurance of Pashmina Weavers in Global Capitalism

My doctoral project is an ethnographic exploration of Kashmir’s pashmina: a commodity of economic and cultural singularity, uniquely tied to the region. Recently, Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, was designated a Creative City by UNESCO and a ‘World Craft City’ by the World Craft Council. These designations crystallise a constitutive tension at the core of this project: pashmina is valorised globally even as its weavers are marginalised and rendered invisible within the very hierarchies of value their labour produces. Therefore, through this commodity, I explore how global circuits of capitalism and local artisanal traditions, under the conditions of political conflict, interact to shape the socio-economic realities and everyday endurance of Kashmir’s pashmina weavers.

Methodologically, the project draws on participant observation, weaving as a method, object interviews, and supply chain mapping. All of this will take place, across twelve months of fieldwork, in areas of Kashmir, New Delhi, Mumbai and Scotland, following pashmina as it moves from a household to global luxury markets. Drawing on my positionality as the member of a weaving family in Kashmir, I structure the project by examining three interlocking dimensions of endurance: a pashmina loom as an anticipatory infrastructure around which household futures are organised, and then, consistently deferred; kinship as a relational web that absorbs economic shock where market frays and state looks away; and exhaustion as a form of transmissible intangible cultural heritage.

Principal supervisor: Prof. Susanne Kuechler