Introduction: The Anthropology of Creations

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of the contributions to this special issue on the anthropology of creations, and identifies some central concerns and definitions. Juxtaposing emic and etic perspectives, I derive several principles to guide the study of creations. Culture consists of creations, which are products of minds, and exist in three media: thoughts, behaviours and artefacts. Only by being expressed as bodily movement or material culture can creations be transmitted to others. Creations are embedded in webs of mental, behavioural, and artefactual associations that vary across individuals, groups, and time. Imaginations generate creations by representing and manipulating mental images, primarily through recombining and recontextualising elements of preexisting representations. Purposeful imagining is conscious, goal-directed, and subject to agents' executive control. Autonomous imagining generates imagery independent of conscious control, typically in dream or trance; its creations are often attributed to spiritual others. Innovation is the process of imaginative conception, realisation, social adoption, and cultural incorporation of creations. Innovation not only changes but also maintains living traditions.

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

“…5 Each of these topics concerns the way people understand the good and define its proper pursuit. I am also going to put imagination in this group, because it signals the extent to which both the people we study and we as analysts have to recognize the good as something that at least sometimes goes beyond the given, the already there, taken for granted of social life and the world in which social life unfolds (on imagination, see Crapanzano 2004;Lohmann 2010, andSneath, Holbraad &Pedersen 2009). The good in this respect is something that must be imaginatively conceived, not simply perceived.…”

Cutting at the edge: observations on innovation beyond the urban

“…A century ago, Edward Sapir conveyed this point, arguing that creativity is ‘not a manufacture of form ex nihilo ’ (1924: 418). Rather, creation is based on available cultural possibilities, such as traditions, cultural heritage, and shared mental images (Lohmann 2010). Understood in this way, creativity is the range of ‘human activities that transform existing cultural practices’ (Rosaldo, Lavie & Narayan 1993: 5), a transformation also described as a ‘play with form’ (Ben‐Ari & Otmazgin 2020: 3) 2.…”

Fiction in Fact: Ernest Callenbach’sEcotopiaand the Creation of a Green Culture with Anthropological Ingredients

“…Ecotopia is a cultural creation in narrative form that engages the unsustainable culture from which it hales to change it by example (see Lohmann ). All innovations are fictional when first imagined, and all fictions use facts as building blocks.…”