A local textile workshop encounters jacket designs through overseas shopping apps. It also makes embroidered garments and teaches the craft. Compare three possible outcomes after the overseas styles arrive.
Sell imports alongside local work
- Products: The shop adds the same imported jackets sold in several countries. Its range becomes more similar to shops abroad.
- Teaching: Its embroidery classes continue. Twelve learners complete the course this year, the same number as last year.
- Local practice: Imported sales alone do not show dilution. In this account, craft teaching continues alongside the new products.
There is cultural spread and some growing similarity in products. The evidence does not show that the workshop's teaching has declined.
Combine the designs and teach the craft
- Design: Makers combine the overseas jacket shape with local embroidery patterns in one garment.
- Knowledge: New learners practise the embroidery and can explain the meanings of the patterns they use.
- Wider culture: This supports continuity in a particular skill. It does not establish that every local practice is secure.
Combining influences is hybridisation. Learning the skill and its meaning shows how adaptation can accompany cultural transmission.
Replace making and teaching with imports
- Workshop: The owner switches entirely to imported stock and ends both garment making and the weekly craft classes.
- Learners: The experienced makers retire without training replacements. None of the younger staff can perform the full technique.
- Scope: Transmission has weakened here. Other workshops may still teach the craft, so this does not prove its disappearance everywhere.
The loss of making, teaching and skill is evidence of dilution at this workshop. The conclusion rests on those changes, rather than simply on the foreign origin of its stock.