From Physical Structure to Pragmatic Experience: A Synthesis Review of White-Collar Miao Batik Costume Wearing

Among the Miao communities of Danzhai County in Guizhou, China, the white-collar Miao (Bailing Miao) are distinguished by festive costume in which batik, rather than embroidery or silverwork, carries the central decorative and symbolic load. Decades of scholarship have documented the motifs, structure, and cultural semantics of this batik. What remains unsynthesized is the experiential knowledge of the women who both make and wear it. This article reports a synthesis review that integrates three research streams: craft practice as experiential knowledge, dress and wearing as embodied experience, and pragmatist aesthetics with aesthetic interaction. Eighty-one sources were analysed using a literature review synthesis method in which points of departure (PODs) from each stream were identified and crossed. The crossing supports a layered theoretical argument: in the case examined, maker and wearer may coincide in one body; making-cognition and wearing-cognition are proposed as a continuous embodied system; and the wearing moment may reactivate sedimented craft knowledge as pragmatic experience. The review closes with a theoretical proposition that organizes pragmatic experience through three proposed foundations and four phenomenological elements—somatic, kinaesthetic, cultural-affective, and temporal. The Design-User System Assessment (DUSA) framework offers a complementary evaluative lens for examining selected aspects of this experience through its formal, functional, meaningful, and emotional dimensions. Read through Ingold's concept of correspondence, wearing a batik costume can be interpreted not as the consumption of a finished object but as the continuation of a relationship that making began. The proposition offers design researchers a way to treat ethnic costume wearers as knowing bodies rather than as carriers of pattern inventory.