Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: an Introduction

Anthropology, Liep argues, escape the processes in which it is enmeshed, of cultural commoditization and the consequent aestheticization of everyday life. The difference between improvisation and an innovation, then, is that the one works within established convention while the other breaks with it, but that the former characterizes creativity by way of its processes, the latter by way of its products. The creative individual, it is commonly supposed, is one who is prepared and able to make a break with socially imposed convention. The notion that once they cease to be ‘new’, persons and things can no longer be deemed creative or have any bearing on what comes to pass, is a corollary of the backwards reading that judges creativity by the innovativeness of its results rather than by the improvisations that went into the processes of a producing them.