Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America - Anthropological Perspectives

Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.

About the author

Ernst Halbmayer is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, University of Marburg, Germany. Among his recent publications are Indigenous Modernities in South America (Sean Kingston, 2018), and Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica: Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo-Colombian Area (Routledge, 2020).

Anne Goletz is a doctoral student and research associate at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Marburg. Currently she forms part of a German-Polish research project about Indigenous graphic communication systems between Mexico and the Andes, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

Product details

• Authors: Ernst Goletz Halbmayer
• Assisted by: Anne Goletz (Editor), Ernst Halbmayer (Editor)
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.06.2023
• EAN: 9781805390060
• ISBN: 978-1-80539-006-0
• No. of pages: 290
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); South America, Cultural Studies, Sociology: customs & traditions, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Customs & Traditions, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Social and cultural anthropology, Cultural studies: customs and traditions, Anthropology (General); Cultural Studies (General)