A  criatividade do vivenciar

Tim Ingold

doi:10.21665/2318-3888.v12n23p305

Authors

Tim Ingold University of Aberdeen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6703-6137

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21665/2318-3888.v12n23p305

Keywords:

Aspiration. Attention. Calligraphy. Concrescence. Copying. Creativity. Doing. Education. History. Imagination. Improvisation. Innovation. Lace-making. Music. Notation. Ontogenesis. Performance. Time. Undergoing.

Abstract

Creativity is often portrayed as an X-factor that accounts for the spontaneous generation of the absolutely new. Yet the obsession with novelty implies a focus on final products and a retrospective attribution of their forms to unprecedented ideas in the minds of individuals, at the expense of any recognition of the form-generating potentials of the relations and processes in which persons and things are made and grown. In these processes, practitioners are characteristically called upon to copy the works of past masters. However, though they may be guided by a script or score, every practitioner has to improvise his or her own passage through the array of tasks the performance entails. With examples from music, calligraphy and lace-making, I show that the wellsprings of creativity lie not inside people’s heads, but in their attending upon a world in formation. In this kind of creativity, undergone rather than done, imagination is not so much the capacity to come up with new ideas as the aspirational impulse of a life that is not just lived but led. But where it leads is not yet given. In opening to the unknown – in exposure – imagination leads not by mastery but by submission. Thus the creativity of undergoing, of action without agency, is that of life itself.

Translation: Beto Vianna

Submission: May 15, 2024 ⊶ Accepted: June 3, 2024

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Author Biography

Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

Timothy Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Saami and Finnish peoples of Lapland and has written on comparative issues of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on the role of animals in human society, issues of human ecology and evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. He has since explored the links between environmental perception and skilled practice, with a view to replacing traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission with a relational approach focusing on the growth of embodied skills of perception and action in social and environmental contexts of development. His most recent research has followed three lines of inquiry that emerged from his earlier work on the dynamics of pedestrian movement, the creativity of practice and the linearity of writing. He retired from the University in 2018, but continues to research and write as an independent scholar.

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