Creation beyond creativity: From the novelty of ends to the renewal of life

Abstract

For the past two millennia, debates around creation and creativity have turned around the question of whether it is possible to create something from nothing, or whether creativity necessarily involves the recombination of elements already to hand. These debates divided theologians and philosophers from classical through medieval times. Following the Renaissance, however, and in the subsequent rise of modern science, creation came to be strongly associated with the recombinant power of intelligent design.

In this talk Tim Ingold will chart how, from the mid-twentieth century, this association went on to underpin the burgeoning field of creativity research in psychology, leading to an exclusive focus on the novelty of ideas and products that left no room for the creativeness of life itself, in its intrinsic potential for renewal. Drawing on the thinking of John Dewey, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, on questions of philosophy, religion and art, Ingold will elaborate on the distinction between novelty and newness, and make a plea for the restoration of the idea of creation not as the proliferation of ends but as the promise of perpetual beginning.

Biography

Tim Ingold (now Professor Emeritus) held the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

In his scientific career,  he began to explore human-animal relations and the conceptualisation of the humanity-animality interface based upon ethnographic and anthropological research on northern circumpolar peoples (e.g. Finnish Skolt Saami; comparing hunting, pastoralism and ranching as al­ternatives to base a livelihood on as well as exploring possible causes for the intense rural depopula­tion in the region, and long term effects of post-war resettlement). Through a reconsideration of toolmaking and speech as criteria of human distinctiveness, he became interested in the connection between language and technology in human evolution. More recently, starting from the premise that what walking, observing and writing all have in common is that they proceed along lines of one kind and another he seeks to forge a new approach to understanding the relation, in human social life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description.

Tim always sought to bring together the anthropologies of technology and art and exploring ways of integrating ecological approaches in anthropology and psychology as well as to establish connecti­ons between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, looking at ways of bringing them to­gether on the level of practice, as mutually enhancing ways of engaging with our surroundings.