THE ADINKRA COMMUNITY
One could argue, however, for a community of interpretation in relation to Adinkra symbolism that is not bound by any conventions apart from those imposed by the capacities of the human mind. This possibility of interpretive freedom arises from the relatively unelaborated character of Adinkra symbolism. I have not come across more than one effort, for example, to relate the form of the designs to the ideas they are meant to symbolise. That lack of elaboration implies that the symbolism has not been significantly fixed or reified, as has been done by the elite class of the priesthood in most religious traditions or by the weight of convention emerging from a broader based social symbolisation, as emerges from some symbol systems that are not necessarily religious,as with natural language.
The kind of interpretive community I am advocating, one that is not bound by interpretive conventions, would be something like the open source model in computer programming, but would be something even more open, less constrained in its creativity by the framework of codes that distinguish one programme from another, or one symbolic system from another. The non-representational, often non-naturalistic forms of Adinkra motifs imply the possibility of interpreting them in relation to their established symbolic correlations or simply seeing them in an entirely new light derived from or facilitated by their starkly simple but dynamic designs. Dynamic in terms of their evocation of a sense of movement, a sense of force, accentuated by the polarisation of a black foreground, in the designs themselves, with a white background. These colours refer, of course, to only the print and electronic versions, and even then, not to all of them. But, whatever the colours used, the point remains about their sense of motion, of iconographic inscrutability, of non-linearity of representation in relation to any possible meanings.
The kind of interpretive community I am advocating, one that is not bound by interpretive conventions, would be something like the open source model in computer programming, but would be something even more open, less constrained in its creativity by the framework of codes that distinguish one programme from another, or one symbolic system from another. The non-representational, often non-naturalistic forms of Adinkra motifs imply the possibility of interpreting them in relation to their established symbolic correlations or simply seeing them in an entirely new light derived from or facilitated by their starkly simple but dynamic designs. Dynamic in terms of their evocation of a sense of movement, a sense of force, accentuated by the polarisation of a black foreground, in the designs themselves, with a white background. These colours refer, of course, to only the print and electronic versions, and even then, not to all of them. But, whatever the colours used, the point remains about their sense of motion, of iconographic inscrutability, of non-linearity of representation in relation to any possible meanings.
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