There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix.



The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relationship between creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself.



Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression.

About the editors

Elizabeth Hallam is Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. Tim Ingold is Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen.

Contents

1. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction

Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen



2. Improvisation and the Art of Making Things Stick

Karin Barber, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham



I. Art, Intellect and the Attribution of Creative Agency



Section Introduction

Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen



3. Design, Innovation and Agency in Pattern Construction

Amar Mall, Department of Anthropology, University College London



4. Creating or Performing Words Visually

Fuyubi Nakamura, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford



5.Creativity, Subjectivity and the Dynamic of Possessive Individualism

James Leach, King's College, University of Cambridge



II. Creative Appropriations and Institutional Contexts



Section Introduction

Melissa Demian, Department of Anthropology, Emory University, and Sari Wastell, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London



6. Creating Ethnography: Differing Notions of Creativity in Anthropological Knowledge

Production, a Maori/European Example

Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London



7. Just Like the Greek Polis: Creativity, Authenticity and Political Legitimacy in Kabylia

Judith Scheele, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford



8. 'You Knit me in my Mother's Womb': Creativity and Creation in English Baptist

Understandings of Assisted and Assisting Conception

Jeanette Edwards, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester



III. Creativity and the Passage of Time: History, Tradition and the Life-Course



Section Introduction

Sharon Macdonald, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, and Eric Hirsch, Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University



9. Tradition and the Individual Talent: T.S. Eliot for Anthropologists

Felicia Hughes-Freeland, School of Social Sciences, University Wales, Swansea



10. Back to the Future: Temporality, Narrative and the Ageing Self

Catherine Degnen, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle



11. Performing the World: The Imaginative Link between Action and History

Kirsten Hastrup, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen



IV. The Creativity of Anthropological Scholarship



Section introduction

Mark Harris, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews and Clara Mafra, Anthropology, State University of Rio de Janeiro



12. From Documenting Culture to Experimenting with Cultural Phenomena: Using Fine Art

Pedagogies with Visual Anthropology Students

Amanda Ravetz, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University



13. Creativity in Anthropology and Fiction Writing

Trevor Stack, Hispanic Studies, University of Aberdeen, and Robey Callahan, St Austell, Cornwall



14. 'Radio Elicitation': New Directions in Radio Research

Richard Vokes, School of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury, New Zealand



Epilogue



15. A World Without Anthropology

Clara Mafra, Anthropology, State University of Rio de Janeiro