ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of materials and memory, and then progresses to consider how these ideas of the prototype have been shaped in anthropological scholarship on art. The technician who translates the pattern's visual design into the digital code (as artist) produces the cards (as index) after the model of Jacquard's technique of weaving (the prototype). Having examined the issue of prototype on a small scale, with individual artists and craft production, the chapter considers larger social practices and the role of prototypes in these larger systems. There are few ethnographic case studies more pertinent to capture the relevance of inquiring into the prototype, its workings, and its social effects than the graphic system of Australian Aboriginal Peoples of Central Australia, first described by Nancy Munn in her path-breaking study of Walbiri Iconography.
