Abstract

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.

“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

Birgit Meyer (PhD cultural anthropology, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She is co-editor of Material Religion and the Berghahn series Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement. Recent publications include Aesthetic Formations. Religion, Media and the Senses (ed, Palgrave 2009), Things. Religion and the Question of Materiality (ed with Dick Houtman, Fordham 2012) and Sensational Movies. Video Vision and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015).

Maruška Svašek is Reader in 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.