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The Keble Review 2013
Creativity Cluster
‘Creativity is a beautiful concept to contemplate,’ says Dr
Lambros Malafouris, the leader of the Advanced Studies
Centre’s Creativity Cluster, “It’s not only a crucial aspect of
human life, but it’s also fundamental to understanding the
complexity of the mind and its evolution”.
Despite its importance, there is a great deal we do not know about
creativity and how it works. This is something that Dr Malafouris and
his collaborators are keen to address. At the core of the Advanced
Studies Centre approach is interdisciplinarity and the potential for
developing new ideas that this brings. The core members of the
Creativity Cluster cross disciplines, including Anthropology (Professor
Steve Rayner), Archaeology (Professor Chris Gosden, Dr Lambros
Malafouris and Professor Tom Higham), Geography (Professor Sarah
Whatmore) and Neuroscience (Dr Simon Butt). This interdisciplinary
approach is further illustrated by the breadth of the many eminent
speakers who have come to Keble to contribute to the work of the
Keble scholars and give lectures over the last three years, as well as
Dr Malafouris’ ongoing fieldwork in Greece and his publication of a
major book on the theme of Creativity.
The Keble Review
talked to
Dr Malafouris and asked him some questions about the work of the
Cluster and his own research interests within it.
Why creativity?What are themajor questions you ask in the Cluster?
Looking at the human past, creativity is clearly one of the features
that set us apart from any other species. But, maybe more than any
other time in human history, it is now, in the present, that we are
compelled constantly to improvise and innovate. And yet, many of
the really big questions about human creativity remain wonderfully
unanswered. What is creativity? How and where does it grow? Why
do humans need to improvise new things? The challenge for our
Cluster is to try answering some of those questions, but also to raise
new ones.
So are you basically trying to understand the mental processes
that spark and support human creativity?
Yes, to some extent that’s certainly true, but we are doing more than
that. You see, creativity is both a mental and a physical process. One
feature that differentiates our approach to the study of creativity is
that we look at it as a distributed process that comprises both neural
FIELDWORK PROJECT: At the Potter’s Wheel. A Comparative Ethnography of Creative Gesture and Improvisation
Based in ceramic workshops in Greece, Dr Malafouris has been carrying out an ethnographic study of the creative aspects of pottery making (see images above). His
fieldwork, funded by Keble Small Research Grants, is part of a broader comparative anthropological study of the embodied aspects of improvisation in different forms of
situated practice. The project’s aim is to challenge the conventional distinction between creative cognition and creative action and to offer an ethnographically based,
naturalistic account of the cognitive ecology of creativity.
