[Xmca-l] Re: Prototyping

[Greg Thompson]

Oops, I sent this directly to Zaza and not to the listserve and it seems
relevant to the Vossoughi et al paper that Mike just posted. It is in
response to Zaza's list of kukiya-kiya equivalents in other languages:

A personal favorite in English is "jerry-rig". Although I should add that
this has slightly more of a sense of hasty and perhaps a little bit clumsy
assembly - suggested to have originated in WWII as somewhat derisive way to
refer to equipment slapped together by the Germans. Somewhat different from
other contexts where the sense of necessity is emphasized and haste and
clumsiness are less emphasized - if at all. Maybe has something to do with
the tendency in the U.S. to (be able to) rely on "expert" manufacture in
the U.S.

And, I wonder if this might have something to do with different
cultural-ideological contexts of the maker movement vs. kukiya-kiya.
Whereas kukiya-kiya is an act born of necessity, the maker movement has
more of a leisure-class bougie feel to it - an attempt to recover one's
creative species being - if you'll allow the drive-by Marx reference (and
Mike's earlier example seems some mix of the two - a kukiya-kiya attempt to
make ("Engineering") makers out of these kids (something that they
certainly already are in many non strictly "Engineering" ways)).

Zaza, I wonder if this kind of distinction between innovation of necessity
and innovation for pleasure makes any sense for what you see there on the
ground in the kukiya-kiya case as compared to the maker case? Or if this
distinction is perhaps a bit overdetermined and are there actually both
things happening in both cases? (e.g., is there a sense of joy in
creativity and making in the kukiya-kiya case?)

Enjoying your lovely paper as well as the conversation around it!

Very best,
greg

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 11:49 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> For those interested in pursuing the implications of Zaza's work on Kukiya
> kiya and the maker movement fashionable in affluent societies, I suggest a
> new thread with the title, prototyping.
>
> Attached is the paper by Vossoughi, Hooper, and Escudé suggested by Molly.
>
> mike
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
> that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson