Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe / Edition 1

by Maruska Svasek, Birgit Meyer

Overview

In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with 'innovation' in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785331831
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Series:	Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement , #6
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Maruska Svasek is Professor of Anthropology at the School of History and Anthropology at Queens University, Belfast. Major publications include Mixed Emotions. Anthropology of Feeling (Berg 2005) Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production (Pluto 2007), Emotions and Human Mobility. Ethnographies of Movement (Routledge 2012), Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions (Berghahn 2012). She is co-editor of the Berghahn series Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement
Maruška Svašek

Chapter 1. African Lace: Agency and Transcontinental Interaction in Textile Design
Barbara Plankensteiner

Chapter 2. Heads against Hands and Hierarchies of Creativity
Tereza Kuldova

Chapter 3. The Social Life of Kottan Baskets
Kala Shreen

Chapter 4. Art and the Making of the Creative City of Chennai, India
Amit Desai

Chapter 5. Approximation as Interpretive Appropriation
Arnd Schneider

Chapter 6. Positioned Creativity
Øivind Fuglerud

Chapter 7. ‘We paint our way and the Christian way together’
Fiona Magowan and Maria Øien

Chapter 8. Undoing Absence through Things
Maruška Svašek

Chapter 9. ‘The Eye Likes It’
Stine Bruland

Chapter 10. Narratives, Movements, Objects
João Rickli

Chapter 11. The Art of Imitation
Rhoda Woets

Afterword
Birgit Meyer

Index

What People are Saying About This

Patrick Neveling

“This is an amazing book, a page-turner, a true game-changer, one of those grand oeuvres that an academic discipline produces once a decade at best.” --Patrick Neveling, Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University

John Gledhill

“This book is certainly a tour de force … it [offers] a fresh theoretical approach that is rigorously tested in terms of evidence and against alternative interpretations … a profoundly critical work.” -- John Gledhill, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester

Editorial Reviews

"The editors' and contributors' point about the relative and collaborative nature of creativity is well made in the volume, and the ethnographic examples shine interesting light on diverse corners of culture while pinpointing a number of shared issues." - Anthropology Review Database

"This book is an important contribution to the growing literature on appropriation and the aesthetics of change. Conceiving creativity as process rather than outcome is the key argument of the book whose contributors discuss the argument in numerous ways and case studies." - Peter Probst, Tufts University

From the Publisher