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- Convenors:
-
Dolores Martinez
(SOAS)
Iza Kavedzija (University of Cambridge)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Creativity
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 8
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to further the discussion of imagination and creativity by focusing on anthropological approaches to innovation. How does the imagined become real? How might anthropologists move beyond ontological discussions of 'being' and onto exploring processes of 'making' and 'becoming'?
Long Abstract:
'The imaginary is what tends to become real', André Breton
Latour's actor-network theory emphasizes how the assemblage of systems of objects and information, rather than 'heroic' individuals, produces the novum (imaginative leaps that are scientifically plausible). In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari's original formulation of assemblage in their long essay 'On Kafka' celebrated the role of the individual in deterritorializing, re-assembling and creating new forms of knowledge, objects, and artwork. Deleuze and Guattari argued that such reassamblages can also reveal the social networks of power. Their analysis of Franz Kafka's writing, which went largely unpublished during his life, also acknowledges that not all creativity need be understood in terms of its perceived originality. Creativity can hinge on the recognition of others, on changes in political context, or within new formulations of knowledge and value.
By asking how creativity is evaluated and recognized across various cultural contexts we can trace the various forms of imagination involved. In this sense, the imaginary becomes real - not only though materialization, but by becoming a social fact. This panel seeks to further the discussion of the human imagination and creativity by turning its focus to the question of innovation: How are individuals or groups encouraged to be pioneering? When is an idea deemed ground-breaking? And how can/does anthropology explore innovation? More importantly, how might anthropologists from various sub-disciplines work together to move beyond ontological discussions of 'being' in order to explore the social processes of 'making' and 'becoming'?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Maruska Svasek (Queen's University Belfast)
Paper short abstract:
Rejecting simplistic oppositions of 'socialism' versus 'post-socialism', this paper will provide an insight into the making, unmaking and re-making of artistic reputations in the Czech artworld,examining dynamics of artistic in/visibility and people-thing dynamics from 1948 to 2018.
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically explores how specific notions of creativity have been defined and promoted in the Czech art world in different political contexts, from the Stalinist 1950s, through the euphoric few years during and after 1989 Velvet Revolution, to the current state of pragmatism, corruption and populism. Focusing on a number of case-studies, it will critically investigate the interplay of politics and the creation of artistic hierarchies within and beyond the Czech art world. Rejecting simplistic oppositions of 'socialist' versus 'post-socialist society', it will provide an insight into the making, unmaking and re-making of artistic reputations, examine the multi-dimensional dynamics of artistic in/visibility, and provide a processual perspective on people and things in movement.
Thomas Hodgson (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on rich ethnographic research, from rehearsal rooms, recording studios and record labels, this paper explores how the algorithms of digital streaming platforms, such as Spotify, are increasingly shaping the creative process of musicians and the kinds of value they produce.
Paper long abstract:
New digital technologies - particularly the algorithms of platforms such as Spotify - are having an unprecedentedly determining and little understood effect on the way music is created and valued. The music industry finds itself in a transitory moment in which these new algorithmic and AI technologies are developing apace. Whilst Spotify's algorithm is already reshaping how music is economically valued - the effects of which are being keenly felt by musicians - advances in AI are raising questions about the role of human creativity itself. How these technologies are configured and deployed - by established companies such as Spotify, Apple and Amazon, as well as by innovative tech startups - will shape the profession of musician for the next 30 years. How are these new technologies shaping creativity? What choices are being made, now, that will shape the future of musical composition and consumption? How are these choices being informed?
Based on ethnographies of rehearsal rooms, recording studios and record labels, this paper resists long established conventions that value must be understood in either economic or gift-based terms, and instead explores the creative process, revealing music's shifting and deeply ambiguous relationship with technology, money and power. At the heart of these insights lie deeper concerns about how algorithms and AI - such as Facebook's News Feed, Google Search and Amazon's Alexa - are increasingly mediating our lives, shaping our moral and ethical choices.
Robert Simpkins (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how street musicians in Tokyo restrict their musical practices to small spaces and tightly bounded social groups in order to create the conditions within which they become recognised as the artists they imagine themselves to be.
Paper long abstract:
Most musicians in Tokyo today are "going nowhere" (Martin 2016). So what do the thousands of musicians and bands who play in the metropolis' five hundred live houses each night imagine themselves to be doing? How do the artists gain a tangible sense of their envisioned musician-selves without industry support or recognition? This paper explores how individuals create and sustain musical authenticity by intentionally limiting the scale of their activities to local neighbourhoods, urban micro-sites and tiny live house communities. Doing so simultaneously involves a shift in the unit of valuation, from fan numbers and record sales to creative output and sharing, and regular emotional release during performances before their peers.
Changes like these in the creative process have been foreshadowed. Shinji Miyadai (1995) has noted an increasing pattern of communicative behaviour among young people in Japan characterised by division into small, isolated groups: what he called 「島宇宙」("island universes"). Since this time anthropological literature has demonstrated how the act of imagining new selves and lifestyles into being involves a concomitant change in the scale and frame of reference of social behaviour (Kavedzija 2017; Yamakoshi and Sekine 2016; Slater 2015; Obinger 2015; Cassegard 2013).
Accordingly, where others have hitherto illuminated macro-scale networks and international flows within Japanese music scenes (Novak 2013; Matsue 2008; Condry 2000), I emphasise how "island universes" comprised of street corners and smokey basements act as the dominant sites of creative musical practices in Tokyo today.
Iza Kavedzija (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of recognition and enskilment in the creative activities of young contemporary artists in Osaka, Japan. It argues that making in this context is to a large extent a collective process, one that often occurs at the boundaries of recognizable genres.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary artists in Osaka have tended to reject the widely recognized path to becoming a 'successful' artist, namely affiliating with a gallery and presenting their work in Tokyo and abroad. Not being bound by expectations freed them to explore genres they did not previously work in as well as the liminal zones between them. Drawing on ethnographic research with these artists and an analysis of their own understandings of the creative process, this paper seeks to interrogate the concept of creativity and its social conditions. The standard romantic 'Western' discourse of creativity highlights the creative genius of a lone individual creating in relative isolation and producing innovative work in a moment of inspiration. More recently, a second narrative of creativity has emerged, of incremental change, less focused on creation de novo and more on processes of copying and improvisation (Sennett 2012; Wilf 2012; Nakamura 2006; Hallam and Ingold 2007). The ethnography of Osakan contemporary artists points to a third narrative of creativity, one which problematizes the very idea of mastering a genre, and of creativity as reliant on recognition. In this narrative, the impulse to make is fostered and nurtured collectively, in an atmospheric way; 'who' and 'what' is recognized is dissolved in these spaces of creative collaboration.
Hoi Yan Yau (Lingnan University) Heung-wah Wong (The University of Hong Kong)
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates anthropologically the social process in the spread of Japanese popular-cum-cultural products in Hong Kong. Creativity is defined by the historical effects, which depend on the reciprocal mediation between the Japanese popular cultural products and the Hong Kong society.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an anthropological attempt to understand the nature of creativity through the investigation of the spread of different Japanese cultural products into postwar Hong Kong including TV dramas, popular music, food, and pornography. We will show each of these Japanese popular-cum-cultural products has different historical effects, which is contingent on the reciprocal mediations between the Japanese popular cultural product and the Hong Kong society. We argue that the major methodological focus should be put on the dynamics of the reciprocal mediations which involve the producer/exporter on the Japan side, the importer/promoter and consumer on the Hong Kong side, and their complex negotiation. For in the complicated negotiation, the Japanese cultural products are not only reproduced but also creatively produced and more importantly the property and character of their historical effect are specified. This speaks to the fact that creative process is always simultaneously a forward-looking and a retrospective process; it also highlights the fact that the mode of creativity is dependent on the dynamics of the reciprocal mediations. Through such theoretical framework and its associated methodological focus we are able to explain why in some occasion particular individuals are considered as big creators and why in other occasion certain collectivities such as social groups, companies, or even the Hong Kong society or culture as the creator. We can also account for why creativity is relative to the context in which creative processes occur as well as why the result of any creative process is not predictable.
Chihab El Khachab (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how "invisible" labour is recognised among artistic and technical workers in the Egyptian film industry. Innovation, in this context, is the ability to avoid having one's work "reified", i.e., become invisible and forgotten once it is invested in concrete production practices.
Paper long abstract:
Against the tendency to ignore the concrete effort invested in making creative products, anthropology has been instrumental in highlighting the "invisible" labour involved in creative processes. What has been less explored is that within these processes, workers tend to ignore the effort invested by other workers in a similar manner, producing what I call "reification". This concept emerges from a genealogy of theoretical works extending back to Georg Lukács, who considered reification as an extension of Marx's commodity fetishism into the sphere of production. Much like consumers, then, producers transform their own relations of production (e.g. the legwork involved in making creative products) into relations between things (e.g. audio-visual material).
This paper explores the workings of reification in Egypt's commercial film industry, arguing that it is integral to the way in which "innovation" is perceived by filmmakers. The paper describes how reification occurs at every juncture in filmmaking and how workers try to overcome it via various means of recognition, before their labour is ignored or forgotten. What is considered innovative, in this context, is only ever attributed to a handful of "artistic" workers at the top of the filmmaking ladder, whereas all remaining work is invariably reified. This constant erasure of labour raises a different question concerning innovation: not a question about what is innovative, but rather, who is allowed to be innovative? The overarching project is to understand how workers value their work under conditions where it is consumed by the very things that they produce.
Lisette Josephides (Queen's University Belfast)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the extent to which real worlds are created through imaginative narrative. I examine three kinds of narratives: the self narratives of village people, science fiction writing, and planetary ethnographies that consider how to live on other planets.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I consider the extent to which real worlds are created through imaginative narrative. I examine three kinds of narratives: the self narratives of village people in conditions of change, science fiction writing, and planetary ethnographies that consider how to live on other planets. While self narratives combine imagination, experience, traditional myths and wishful political statements, to create a new world on the demise of the old, they can also be interactive exercises that to some extent must cover up individual creativity, in order to avoid accusations of lying and self-aggrandizement.
By contrast, science fiction writing is imaginative fantasy by definition. Unsurprisingly, some anthropologists have turned to science fiction writing, while astrophysicists have undertaken 'earthly ethnographies of other worlds' (exoplanets). These genres give rise to questions of world building and specifically about the ability of humans to dwell in other spaces than earth:
• Consider the imagination, which does not bind us to earth or any reality (Casey's 'pure possibility'). We can make ourselves at home in any environment in which we can breathe, eat and drink.
• Consider how the self/person is created in societies on earth; through care, empathy, self-externalization; fine judgment exercised in opting for attachments to shed and which to retain in specific contexts (Latour, Stengers).
• Dwelling in space calls for a return to things themselves (metaphysics). Metaphysics is not tied to a concrete place on earth, but a virtual place in the intellect and the imagination.
Timothy Jenkins (Cambridge University)
Paper short abstract:
Flying saucers are imaginary objects which, for a short period, shaped a scientific hypothesis - the 'interplanetary' hypothesis of early 50s Intelligence work - and then gained an independent afterlife with a variety of traceable effects: a case study of creativity and unintended consequences.
Paper long abstract:
In flying saucers, we have an example of a virtual object with multiple real effects in the world. Going back in time, it is possible to trace their pre-history, prior to the Cold War, in the ideas of Theosophy, spread through pulp magazines in the first half of the twentieth century. However, flying saucers emerged as a topic of concern to U.S. Air Force Intelligence in the period between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. They gained greater substance with the deployment of a Home Radar System in the early 1950s in the context of a fear of Russian Intercontinental Ballistics Missiles, appearing on radar screens as Unidentified Flying Objects. By the time the Intelligence services sought to demythologize these creations, in the early 1950s, they had escaped into the public sphere. By tracing their history, largely through their effects, we can follow the life of these imagined objects of thought in several spheres, beginning with military and technological institutions and documents, then, nearer at hand, in the domestic realm, including accounts of abduction, and, simultaneously, far away in the justification of and ambitions for the Space programme. These moves are recorded in contemporary media: stories, films, television and, latterly, the Internet. This is an instance of a discarded scientific hypothesis - the 'interplanetary' hypothesis - with a brief life and a long afterlife.
Katherine Swancutt (King’s College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the dreams of 'native' ethnologists among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, who re-envision their animistic cosmology in light of priestly, ethno-historical, and archaeological evidence. It shows how dreams launch imaginative rewritings of cosmographic history.
Paper long abstract:
The ethnographic dream is typically envisaged as the product of Euro-American voyages to remote corners of the globe, where fieldwork findings are gathered and later transformed into the fame-building projects of Anglophone anthropology. What happens when this vision of ethnographic dreaming is inverted, to reveal the dreams of 'native' ethnologists and anthropologists elsewhere in the world, whose own scholarship launches innovative visions of their cosmology, history, and political positioning? Since the 1980s, ethnic minority scholarship in China has expanded dramatically, and especially among the Nuosu (known in Chinese as the Liangshan Yizu), who have produced their own field of study called 'bimo culture', which draws upon the millennia-old textual and ritual repertoires of their animistic priests.
In this paper, I offer an ethnographic case study of the 'eureka' moment that arose among several Nuosu ethno-historians during my 2015 fieldwork in Yunnan province. These scholars introduced a radically revisionist view of the Nuosu 'heavens' or 'ancestral afterlife' world, citing their ethno-historical creativity, Nuosu etymological reconstructions, and archaeological findings from the 4,000 year old Bronze Age Sanxingdui Culture in neighbouring Sichuan province. Tellingly, their new cosmographic vision did not go unchallenged, but opened up a debate within their institution about the noumenal qualities of the Nuosu heavens and whether anyone can fully know them. This debate invites us to reflect on how any ethnographic dream might unfold, ontologically-speaking, as an imaginative work-in-progress that (due to its scholarly underpinnings) always tests the boundaries of its unique cosmographic purview.