Lecture image placeholder

Premium content

Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.

Monthly subscription - $9.99Pay per view - $4.99Access through your institutionLogin with Underline account
Need help?
Contact us
Lecture placeholder background
VIDEO DOI: https://doi.org/10.48448/yh2d-ms53

technical paper

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

November 18, 2021

Baltimore, United States

The Creative Potential of Kinship: How Shi`i Iraqi Women Are Making Home in Metro Detroit

keywords:

cultural production

material culture/materiality

creativity

“Creativity” is an exemplary case of what Bonnie Urciuoli termed a “strategically deployable shifter”: that is, an indexical term mobilized by diverse actors toward divergent ends. Across communities of production and practice, creativity can circulate with wildly different (often competing) meanings. Creativity has been explored as a human good necessary for flourishing in modern life through notions of holistic wellness, spiritualized aesthetics, and cultural hybridity. The term has also acquired singular value in the production of commodities, functioned as a neoliberal imperative, and as a more general gloss for innovation, subaltern frugality and precarity. Despite or perhaps because of this semantic excess “creativity” is celebrated and presumed to be invaluable in a range of contexts. In turn, it is worth exploring why and how the term creativity has acquired such ideological density, channeled by semiotic and material cultural means and situated in everyday routines. Towards this end, this panel features five anthropological case studies in which “creativity” is the focus of (meta)cultural labor and poses a series of comparative questions. How does the meaning and valuation of creativity shift across communities of practice? In what ways is creativity incorporated into broader social projects?  And, ultimately, toward what practical and ideological ends is ‘creativity’ being strategically deployed at this moment in history?

Downloads

Transcript English (automatic)

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Ethnographic Engagements with Nonsecular Medical Anthropology
invited talk

Ethnographic Engagements with Nonsecular Medical Anthropology

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

18 November 2021

Similar lecture

Cloth Imaginaries: Exploring Creativity in Indonesia and India
technical paper

Cloth Imaginaries: Exploring Creativity in Indonesia and India

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Urmila Mohan

18 November 2021

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Lectures
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2023 Underline - All rights reserved