Exploring culture as lived experience
I just offered a very interesting course of two weeks to design
students in their first-year foundation. To sound very official and
serious, I called it CULTURE and COGNITION. This is the 4th time I am
offering this course and each time I was able to fine tune it and this
year it really went off very well.
Hope some of you would give me feedback about the course.
I have uploaded the same for discussion at the academia site. Please
feel free to join. The link is
https://www.academia.edu/s/30a4f65a8c/from-knowing-culture-to-being-culture-an-experiential-enquiry-into-the-meaning-of-culture?show_pending=true
The subheading for the course was ' from Knowing culture to Being
culture- an experiential exploration to understand culture as lived
experience.' Naturally, it meant discarding the frozen notions about
the 'Indian culture' and explore one's own growing up process, the
context of one's life and the factors that formed one's 'beingness'.
The primary objective of the course was to enable self-exploration, to
regain 'cultural' self-respect, to understand the context and the
conditions that were responsible for their formation and how they,
knowing and unknowingly contribute to the making of 'culture'. One
could say that it is this total context that is culture, which is also
being formed and transformed and the cognition is the connection that
establishes between us and the culture (context)
One of the things that are very difficult is self-reflection because
we do not have the 'mirror' that enables us to see ourselves
critically. This is also because we only encounter our types, formed
in a similar way, with similar worldviews, likes and dislikes
aspirations etc. Modernity has ensured that we all fit into the mold
with the illusion of freedom, creativity or the lack of it, etc.
There were other purposes as well for conducting the course. One was
to make them aware of their illusions about education, knowledge,
development etc and the other was to make them understand the process
of westernization and what it means to be culturally rooted. It is
difficult for the so-called educated to face their mediocrity as they
are conditioned to believe that they are educated.
The process was to enable them to see through these myths and develop
the courage to explore deeply. Naturally, it meant that deal with the
habits and notions acquired due to schooling and learn to see afresh
life around them.
Therefore, I have been taking the students to the nearby villages
where the vestiges of the traditional culture are still there and
enabling the students to see the 'other' without their schooled
spectacles. So I also prepared them to observe without the biases.
Often we assume that they are behind us, in the path to development
and that they belong to the same culture as we are in terms of
aspirations and hold the same world- view. This is far from truth. The
village people of this country belong to a very different cognitive
domain, naturally with a different world -view.
So, after a few days of 'preparation', the students were taken to
three villages near Hyderabad (around 100 km away) and did about a
weeklong interaction with each day reflecting on their experiences.
The shift that took place between their first day and the last day was
so dramatic.
There were two types of students- one that had no prior experience of
village life and the other who did have experience and felt inferior
about their connection. So, in their first visit, all of them saw only
poverty, illiteracy, lazy, dirty and backward people.
So the students were directed to see through these biases by making
them document the village life. The first two-three days were kept
only for making friends, talking about their life etc and then two
days for drawing and the final two days for taking photos. The last
two days were kept for reflecting on the documentation.
Actually, the so-called educated Indians and the illiterate Indians
belong to two different and diametrically opposite cultural paradigms.
Educated Indians are uprooted from their cultural roots, made to
believe in their schooled knowledge, and even made to feel inferior to
the western culture from where their 'knowledge' has come. Whereas the
illiterate Indian is rooted in their context, leading a sustainable
and eco-friendly life by rediscovering through experience the
knowledge of his ancestors and even responding creatively to the
changes that modernity is imposing on them.
So, as students began to uncover the true strength of the village
people they began to reassess their own 'knowledge' and the notion of
development etc. They found that most people in the villages have far
more knowledge about farming, cooking, healing and various other kinds
of skills and on top of that, they were very contented, happy and even
generous, in spite of their 'poverty'.
The 'design' aspect in communities are very different from the way
modern person approach design. The focus of solving the problem with
whatever exists make this very process oriented, unlike a modern
educated person who is product oriented. The focus is on not
developing a particular product to solve the problem but to make use
of what is available. So, in 'illiterate' village communities jugaad
is a way of life and not a special ability. Their sense of beauty is
also organic and rooted in their context unlike the educated whose
aesthetic sense is totally western.
Another important aspect to pay attention is the way people recycle
almost everything and use it until the material totally disintegrates.
The very notion of waste is absent from their consciousness. The
students did good documentation of several examples of recycling.
Their ability to connect with the real 'nature' of things is
noteworthy and they are able to be very apt in their solutions.
Overall, it was a life-changing experience for most of the students as
many of them shared the feeling of being humbled by the whole
experience.
So this is also an invitation to see India without the western
framework in general and the 'designer' bias in particular.
--
Jinan,
TEXT DISTORTS, DIGITAL DESTROYS, WORLD AWAKENS
http://jinankb.in/
http://existentialknowledgefoundation.org/
http://rethinkingfoundation.weebly.com/
http://sadhanavillageschool.org/
https://www.youtube.com/user/sadhanavillagepune
https://www.youtube.com/user/jinansvideos
www.re-cognition.org
https://independent.academia.edu/JinanKodapully
09447121544
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