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Creativity and Culture: Four (Mis)Understandings

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Part of the book series: Creativity in the Twenty First Century ((CTFC))

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relation between creativity and culture. It explores four ways of connecting the two constructs and explores their theoretical, methodological and practical implications: the creative mind (whereby culture exists ‘outside’ of the person and creativity starts from the ‘inside’), the original creator (whereby culture is associated with ‘sameness’ and creativity with ‘difference’), the rebel (whereby culture is tradition and creativity is progress), and the hero (whereby a contrast is established between high culture and everyday creativity). Each one of these understandings presents specific benefits but also considerable limitations. A sociocultural formulation of creativity as a distributed phenomenon, grounded in acts of collaboration, is advanced towards the end in order to reconnect creativity and culture in a conceptually meaningful and practically useful way.

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Correspondence to Vlad P. Glăveanu .

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Glăveanu, V.P. (2022). Creativity and Culture: Four (Mis)Understandings. In: Lubart, T., et al. Homo Creativus. Creativity in the Twenty First Century. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99674-1_7

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