Language and the Shape of the Worldview

Abstract

Categories shape change and in turn are shaped by change. But unlike design, the relationship between multiple categories in craft is held constant by the community worldview which determines and limits the acceptability of variation and change in an artifact by the members. It is at the worldview acceptable common intersection points of the multiple ways of categorisation that Benarasi craftsmen are able to produce and change a Khilona (Benarasi wooden toy). Understanding change in artifacts through and between community accepted categories instead of studying them in isolation apart from their natural groupings facilitates the decoding of change as acceptable/ unacceptable or typical/ un-typical rather than original/new or innovative/traditional. The former distinctions of acceptability and typicality are essential for designing artifacts that are culturally relevant to a community in a globalized context. Therefore, this study presents a category based method of change to elucidate craftsmanly methods for designing artifacts for acceptability as well as novelty in the absence or lack of explicit means of information transfer.

Here, thinking was elicited indirectly through the decisions of the craftsmen embodied in the typical members of the community held categories captured through the Benarasi lexicon - that is the Khilona itself. Features of the precedents of 40 Khilonas and the Khilona under analysis were compared in detail. The relationship between the precedent and the Khilona revealed the sources and kind of change and the deviation determined the extent of change within the same category, between two categories, in the fuzzy boundaries of a category or with an un-situated artifact as found relevant.

Apart from improvisation, the method of induced or willful assimilation of non-Benarasi features was found to be the largest source of change in the production of Benarasi Khilonas. The process of assimilation was complete when (a) the Khilona was consistently sold in the market, (b) the craftsmanly thinking of making was horizontally transferred from craftsman to craftsman for up gradation and from craftsman to apprentice for learning, (c) the Khilona was included in the traditional categorisation and (d) was christened in the local language by the community. For instance the assimilated East European pecking toy is called Chugti chidiya in Benaras.
It was further deduced from the feature analysis of artifacts that the method of Assistive assimilation of three practices – 1) Non-community artifact or Client order 2) Craft practice and 3) Assistive trigger for assimilating 1 & 2 often brought about change that bordered close to innovation in Benarasi Khilonas. Here, the assistive trigger facilitated the assimilation of the features of the client order with that of the craft practice through a new meaning, material or manufacturing technique willfully introduced by the craftsman.

As the hold of the worldview governed ‘myths, taboos and traditions’ reduced, categories became increasingly flexible, permitting event disruptive change to occur and be accepted in their fuzzy boundaries. Here, fuzzy boundaries seem to be a potential space for acceptance and occurrence of un-acceptable change, in an otherwise worldview governed craft practice.