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The Creative Imperative
Expanded concepts of agency permit us to question what or who can be an active participant in creative activity, allowing us to revisit the debate on authorship. We can ask whether creativity might be regarded as a form of social interaction. How might we understand creativity as the interaction of people and things rather than as an outcome of action?
Whilst creativity is often perceived as the product of the individual artist, or creative ensemble, it can also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating individual or group creativity. Creativity may be regarded as a performative activity released when engaged through and by a community and thus understood as a process of interaction.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.09.2011 - 16:34
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Creativity as a Social Relation?
Social science in general and anthropology in particular has long attended to core concerns with the structure and form of societies, and with the constant interplay of individual and collective elements. These concerns are obvious: how we understand the emergence and form of human worlds necessitates an approach to creative agency alongside the conditions under which that agency is exercised. As Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. But recent scholarship in the field of anthropology has taken theorising beyond the familiar impasses of structure and agency through an emphasis on practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977) and on to the embodied and improvisational nature of knowledge and social action (e.g. Ingold 2000, Hallam & Ingold 2007). Creativity is central here. But creativity conceived not as individual genius (an approach that generates questions about how the individual and the collective collide; one clearly linked to other assumptions Westerners make about the bounded-ness of individual minds, and the proprietary nature of the self), but creativity as an emergent (and necessary) aspect of social relations.
Elisabeth Nesheim - 27.08.2012 - 13:33
