Collective Creativity

Art and Society in the South Pacific

Katherine Giuffre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780815346517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317164227
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Collective Creativity offers an analysis of the explosion of artistic creativity currently taking place on the South Pacific island of Rarotonga. By exploring the construction of this art-world through the ways in which creativity and innovation are linked to social structures and social networks, this book investigates the social aspects of making fine art in order to present a 'collective' theory of creativity. With a close examination of tourism, galleries and, of course, the artists themselves, Katherine Giuffre presents a detailed picture of a complex and multi-faceted community through the words of the art-world participants themselves. Theoretically sophisticated, yet grounded with rich empirical data, this book will appeal not only to anthropologists with an interest in the South Pacific, but also to scholars concerned with questions of ethnicity, creativity, globalization and network analysis.

Chapter 1
Networks and Creativity

Creativity happens at many levels: at the level of the culture, at the level of the subculture, at the level of the group, and at the level of the individual. At each of these levels, it is the social dynamic of lived relationships within structures that plays a key role in facilitating (or inhibiting) creativity. This is a study of creativity as a social phenomenon which will examine both large-scale social pressures and opportunities and also creative individuals, especially as they are embedded in social relationships that can enhance or constrict creativity.

Networks of relationships are important. Networks have particular shapes and characteristics, such as hierarchy or density, for example. And individuals, of course, occupy particular positions within those networks—at the margins, say, or as the bridge between two cliques. Although we often think of creativity as an individual attribute that a person possesses to a greater or lesser degree, I will argue here that creativity is very much a social phenomenon and that creativity is in many ways produced by particular types of social structures. Moreover, particular positions and roles within those structures are necessary for creativity to flourish. Creative individuals are embedded within specific network contexts so that creativity itself, rather than being an individual personality characteristic is, instead, a collective phenomenon.

In order to explore creativity as a social phenomenon, it is necessary to have a base in a society—a society largely self-contained, with a high degree of ongoing creative action, and small enough to thoroughly covered. The small island of Rarotonga provides an excellent case study. Culture—both with a capital “C” and with a lowercase one—is vigorously alive, growing and changing, on Rarotonga, the capital of the Cook Islands, a string of 15 tropical islands in central Polynesia. The Cooks have been swept by tumultuous changes during the past 200 years, beginning with the arrival of the first Europeans—which resulted in the decimation of the population—and continuing through to the present profound economic changes based on the explosive growth of tourism and the expanding export market for black pearls. Yet through all of this upheaval, certain aspects of Cook Islands Maori culture have proven extraordinarily tenacious, such as the central place of the ethos of generosity in daily life and the continuing importance of “mana” (moral honor) to the status hierarchy. The tensions between coping with these (and many other) changes while preserving continuity with a rich cultural heritage have, in the past few years, shaped a rapidly expanding world on Rarotonga. Looking closely at that art world, in turn, can provide key insights into critical issues regarding culture wars, identity politics, indigenous rights, and post-industrial economics.

The Rarotongan Arts Explosion

“A sleeping giant woke up this year,” wrote journalist Charles Pitt (28 December 2002, 17) in the Cook Islands Herald at the end of 2002. “That giant was the ‘collective creativity’ of a growing band of local artists not only more confident in their ability, but also more unified in purpose, more positive and assured in outlook and with a stronger, clearer vision of the future. … I suppose that it would be fair to say that in 2002, local art came of age. It was a year of numerous highlights.” Writing that glowing paragraph, Pitt was looking out on an art world that included more fine art galleries per capita than New York City, Paris, or London, art ranging from the most traditional Polynesian carvings through European-style drawing and painting to postmodern multimedia installations, the beginnings of serious attention from the international fine arts world, and a “growing band of local artists” who were making it all happen. Intriguing questions beg to be answered about the awakening of this “sleeping giant:” why and how? Why did this place at this time experience such a surge of artistic production? And how did this art world come to be built?

Crocombe (2001, 193-4) alludes to both economic and political theories as an explanation:

The prominence given to culture here in the 1990s is probably the highest in the region. The government established a ministry of culture with a higher proportion of government money and staff than any ‘rich’ country would consider it could afford. The island of Rarotonga, with only 10,000 people, has competitions for traditional dancing, traditional and modern singing, composing, drumming, guitar and ukulele playing, dress, floral arrangements, making tivaevae, weaving and other handicrafts, talent quests for young women, a ‘queen’ contest for gay men, culinary arts and a range of other forms of expression. All these came into being since the international airport opened in 1974. The main prizes are provided by the airlines and others in the travel industry.

The primary motive for government participation, however, was political. Overtly it saw the stimulation of the creative arts as contributing to nation-building and confidence-building (as described by Sissons 1997, 1999), both of which it undoubtedly was. Covertly, however, the motivation seems to have been party politics. [Funding for culture was used by competing political parties to shore up voter loyalty.] … The economic collapse of the mid-1990s, however, made the government reduce its participation in cultural activity greatly. Now creative expression is initiated more by entrepreneurs and funded by commerce.

Chappell (2003, 48-51) writing in Art News New Zealand, also sees the importance of the larger social context:

So why do the Cooks seemingly produce more artists per capita than their more populous neighbors? … [W]hat does the future hold for those artists who choose to base themselves in Rarotonga? Can this tiny country support a burgeoning art scene? … [I]t now seems Rarotonga has a sizeable critical mass of local artists to support a healthy art scene, and because it remains a safe tourist destination, visitor numbers are set to climb steadily. With its rich local and New Zealand-based expatriate talent, the future bodes well for this quiet achiever in the Pacific art world.

To explain “why” and “how” a place becomes a locus of artistic creativity, it is important to look at not only individual artists, but also larger social systems that allow and encourage their development. In trying to understand the mechanisms that motivate and enhance creativity, social scientists are in the midst of a debate between individual level and socio-cultural level explanations. The main argument in this book is that social structures—especially certain shapes of social networks—are important determinants of the rise of artistic creativity on Rarotonga. This contention is at odds, to say the least, with the ways in which most people tend to think about creativity.

Theories of Creativity

Traditional conceptions of creativity locate the “muse” somewhere in the interior psyche of special individuals who, locked in their garrets, write their sonnets or paint their pictures. Among researchers into the question of the sources of creativity, some psychologists begin by positing creativity as an artifact of mental imbalance Sandblom (1999, 36), for example, writes:

The first question is whether artists are at all to be counted among the mentally normal, a question half answered by the saying, ‘there is no cure for genius’. Aberrant psychic traits which in ordinary people would seem morbid may add to the originality and infatuation of artistic creation; they may even constitute its basis or origin. … The proportion of creators with such a borderline mental constitution has been put as high as 80 per cent. Insanity has at times been regarded as a special asset to the creative mind.

He further goes on to say (1999, 68, emphasis added) that “The neuroses and psychosomatic disorders are of special interest to us as they strongly influence or may even constitute the foundation of artistic creation.” Based on after-the-fact diagnoses of mental illness among artists (most of whom are long dead), Sandblom’s analysis is heavily weighted towards extreme individualism in theorizing the sources of creativity. Sandblom admits that he has done no systematic gathering of data and, in fact, he omits from his analysis those artists who did not exhibit symptoms that he could classify as mental illness, as well as any living artists who might contradict his assessments. Sandblom’s work does, however, show that if one has a presupposition that creativity is the result of mental illness, it is easy to find examples to back up that initial assumption.

Although Sandblom may be at one extreme in the spectrum of creativity research by viewing “neuroses and psychosomatic disorders” as the possible source of creativity, his conjectures fit very well with those of the founder of his discipline. As Csikszentmihaly (1996, 100) notes:

According to Freud, the curiosity at the roots of the creative process—especially in the arts—is triggered by a childhood experience of sexual origin, a memory so devastating that it had to be repressed. … The artist’s zeal in trying to find new forms of representation … [is] really disguised attempts to understand the confusing impressions the child felt when witnessing his parents having sex, or the ambivalently erotic emotions toward one of the parents.

Freud’s theory falls flat in its lack of explanatory power, certainly, although it struck a chord among early twentieth century thinkers steeped in the Romantic ideals of artists as lonely and tortured geniuses driven by subconscious erotic impulses beyond their understanding or control. The stereotype promulgated by Freud’s idea continued to have force well into the twentieth century (and even further). One need only remember the conflicted, highly sexualized depiction of Michelangelo put forward in the tellingly named popular novel and film The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Some researchers, however, put the source of creativity not with mental illness, but merely with special brain functions that may be biologically selected. “Perhaps the first trait that facilitates creativity,” according to Csikszentmihaly (1996, 52, emphasis in original), “is a genetic predisposition for a given domain. It makes sense that a person whose nervous system is more sensitive to color and light will have an advantage in becoming a painter, while someone born with a perfect pitch will do well in music.” Although there is an important distinction to be made between a theory that “makes sense” and a theory that is true, Csikszentmihaly explains how evolution plays a role in this process using a similar type of reasoning (1996, 109):

By random mutations some individuals must have developed a nervous system in which the discovery of novelty stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain. Just as some individuals derive a keener pleasure from sex and others from food, so some must have been born who derived a keener pleasure from learning something new.

For the moment, we have no way of testing Csikszentmihaly’s theories. Although he claims that they “must” be true, Csikszentmihaly can only speculate.

Other psychologists place the sources of creativity neither with evolutionary wiring nor with mental illness or trauma, but instead with the restoration of mental health. For example, Gedo (1990, 37) argues that:

… the resolution of certain severe intrapsychic conflicts may unleash a great creative talent previously stymied by guilt or anxiety about the fruitful exercise of such powers. To be specific about the case of the patient I am describing, she could not become an acclaimed artist as long as she was afraid that such success on her part would so overwhelm her intimates that it would condemn her to solitude—a conviction she had gained as a result of innumerable painful experiences within her family of origin.

Although Gedo presents a specific case to buttress his argument, his use of the phrase “acclaimed artist” is worth noting. Acclaim, as many of the researchers discussed below will note, is generated not by the artist, no matter what her mental state, but by the social world outside of the artist. Legions of aspiring artists have failed to achieve acclaim despite passionately wholehearted pursuit of it. Acclaim is not in the power of the artist to bestow on her own work. Like Csikszentmihaly’s use of “do well” in the passage on above, Gedo here is trying to negotiate the extremely tricky terrain between “creativity” and the recognition of such. This line of thought begins to open up at least one of the social dimensions of creativity: how, in fact, can we tell creativity without reference to the social world against which creativity posits itself? As White (1993, 187) notes, “Creativity is inescapably social by its main criterion that others not have uttered such an artwork before.”

In an attempt to determine specifically what makes the creative individual create, some psychologists have looked very closely at those acknowledged as being creative (again facing of the problem of disentangling the “creative” from the “acclaimed as creative”) in an attempt to find their distinguishing characteristics. In interviewing almost a hundred highly successful a priori defined “creative” people in many fields about their backgrounds, habits, ideas, and attitudes, Csikszentmihaly (1996, 10) finds, as an example of the characteristics that separate the creative individual from the rest of us, that, “In fact, creative people are neither single-minded, specialized, nor selfish. Indeed, they seem to be the opposite: they love to make connections with adjacent areas of knowledge. They tend to be—in principle—caring and sensitive.” Ng (2001, 293), however, in his study of 344 university students in Singapore and Australia found, as his title states so succinctly, that “Creators are dogmatic people, ‘nice’ people are not creative, and creative people are not ‘nice’.” To add to the confusion on this point, Albert (1990, 23, emphasis in original) takes a third tack and argues that:

The eminent seem to protect themselves from distractions and intrusions that social and work involvement, and, for many, intimacy, may bring into their life work by psychologically distancing themselves. This is not the same as a schizoid or repressive personality; it is a style of coping that is remarkable selective and allows the individual to work alone, an important ability that characterizes many highly creative persons.

This is only one example, but in looking for personality characteristics that correlate with creativity, the mass of psychological research seems inconclusive, at best. In fact, Csikszentmihaly finds a whole laundry list of creative characteristics with regard to which, however, the creative people that he interviewed varied wildly. As one example of this, he notes that “Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.” (1996, 65) He also notes that creative people are both responsible and irresponsible, rebellious and traditionalist, energetic and quiet and restful, and so on. Yet, despite the difficulties in finding individual psychological characteristics that could account for creativity, many psychologists argue that the individual level analysis is the course of inquiry to pursue. “While not wishing to minimize the influence of social and historical processes,” Albert (1990, 19) writes,

one needs to remember that, regardless of when, where, or how eminence is achieved, it is achieved through the decisions, efforts, and long-term performances of an individual—without whom there would simply be nothing to concern ourselves with, to observe, to respond to, to note, to count, and to evaluate in any place or at any time.

The social world of opportunity and constraint, even of defining or recognizing the “creative,” is banished from consideration.

With the advent of neuroscience into their domain, one branch of psychology can turn once again to the workings of the brain without having to rely on the Freudian catch-all of childhood sexuality. Gedo (1990, 35) optimistically writes: “I am tempted to define creativity … as the healthy enjoyment of the search for novelty. The neurophysiologists tell us that the propensity for such exploration is actually wired into the brain.” The actual biological source of creativity, however, continues to elude the neurophysiologists.

Another group of researchers, however, has begun to look at the way that social components play a role in the development of creativity by, for instance, putting individuals into the right social climate to foster creativity. Csikszentmihaly (1996, 8-9) notes that:

… [C]enters of creativity … tended to be places where wealth allowed individuals to learn and to experiment above and beyond what was necessary for survival. It also seems true that centers of creativity tended to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease.

The anthropological literature backs up this point with an abundance of studies of instances of cultural creativity in response to the challenges brought about by the transition to modernity. In his thoughtful and compendious anthology, Locating Cultural Creativity (2001), John Liep as gathered together a series of insightful essays discussing the creative process in a variety of settings and from a variety of different viewpoints. As Liep himself (2001, 6-7) notes,

The production of cultural forms is not the creation of something out of nothing. Every creative effort must emanate from familiar forms and methods of production. … The immediate background is always the experience of those concerned … [and] when conventional understandings are discredited or no longer able to explain altered conditions, the need for creating new cultural schemes to account for life in the world becomes acutely urgent.

Liep goes on the argue that, “It would also seem that the potential for the most striking and novel forms would involve the crossing of the largest cultural distance, if this could be measured.” (2001, 7)

Moreover, the limits of creativity are also socially determined. Borofsky (2001, 68) argues that, “Creativity cannot be too radical if it is to be viewed as such. Otherwise, it is not seen—by others in the society—as creative; it is seen as something more akin to indecency, absurdity, or a violation of the law. Creativity, I am saying, constitutes an historically negotiated judgment. It is culturally defined, culturally framed.” That is, by its very nature, creativity has at least the social elements of recognition and understanding by an audience of others. The ways in which those others respond to the “creative” act or object is culturally determined. As Baxandall (1972) reminds us, the twenty-first century viewers of Renaissance frescoes are participating in a profoundly different experience from the fifteenth century audience for whom the frescoes were originally intended. Creators are inextricably linked to those for whom they create and, therefore, to specific circumstances of creation. Hastrup notes that, “Meaning cannot be private. Had the Argentinian tango-makers or the Indonesian poet not spoken within a conversational community, their inventive verses could have been discarded as irrelevant, maybe mad.” (2001, 38)

Moreover, even consumption can become “creative production” as the bricoleur refashions meanings in response to the pressures of modernity and postmodernity. Lofgren writes:

When consumption was redefined as ‘cultural production’ or ‘symbolic production’… [c]reativity became, in some ways, the weapon of the weak—a positive strategy of resistance. … [C]ultural creativity … is seen as enriching, elaborating, ‘thickening’ local lives, a process through which people make their everyday existence colourful, unique, specific, distinct and above all positive. It is also a concept mainly for the age of modernity (and postmodernity); there is sometimes a compensatory ring to it: being creative is how we cope with the vicissitudes of modernity. (Lofgren 2001, 73-7)

Lofgren reminds us that it is the creation of meaning, rather than the creation of objects, that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface Art: Performance, Identity, and Ownership
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Networks and Creativity
• 2 Te Enua Ou Tumu Te Varovaro: “The Misty Land Whence Comes the Thunder”
• 3 Developing an Art Market at Home and Abroad
• 4 The Artists I: Local, Foreign, and Foreign Locals
• 5 The Artists II: Social Networks and Making Art
• 6 Re-evaluating Creativity in a Changing World
• Appendix A Basic Network Concepts
• Appendix B Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index