To Plurality and Synthesis — Tradition, Objects, and Body: An Anthropological Design Didactic Principle

A fragment of a broader enquiry on flexibility, this piece is an appreciation of the plurality of actors and dispersed factors of human conditions within the design practice. A primary mark is the academic learning domain of the so-called Western rites and their contemporary derivatives. Anthropological perspectives of this heritage, incited by the Maussian thoughts on techniques, are the conceptual framework for considering the major themes of interest. With that in mind, while understanding inherited incompetency to apprehend varied accounts, thinking, and sources beyond one's own cultural milieu and similar contexts — the concepts looked into here are employed to confront boundaries of cultural and societal and to shift focus to the realm of the individual as a premise of plurality. This notion of envisioned plurality is mainly examined through distinct human features isolated from the known structures of shared traditions and heritage while acknowledging the formative effects of their social origins. Contrasted to the process of blending (of elements like behaviours, ideas, and experiences) that usually lead to modern ethical commonalities, social cohesion, historical traditions, and symbolic bonds — the synthesis issue discussed here is a divergent procedure. It is a revelation of the obvious. Individual traits (elements) reserve their primary form and join into a loose network of heterogeneous experiences of others, synthesising new appreciation, not decorum. Inevitably, this sort of synthesis also leads to potential structural formations, the nature of which is yet to be speculated. Other sub-themes and fine points of interest are — tools of knowledge, material aspects and products of cognition, physical objects as didacts, and knowing-through-making. An overarching dialectical umbrella will operate as a conveyance of comprehension to yield relevant practical points of academic learning.