Abstract
AbstractThis paper seeks to link anthropological and economic treatments of the process of innovation and change, not only within a given ‘complex system’ (e.g. a cosmology; an industry) but also between systems (e.g. cultural and economic systems; but also divine and human systems). The role of the ‘Go-Between’ is considered, both in the anthropological figure of the Trickster (Hyde 1998) and in the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Both figures parlay appetite (economic wants) into meaning (cultural signs). Both practice a form of creativity based on deception, ‘creative destruction’; renewal by disruption and needs-must adaptation. The disciplinary purpose of the paper is to try to bridge two otherwise disconnected domains – cultural studies and evolutionary economics – by showing that the traditional methods of the humanities (e.g. anthropological, textual and historical analysis) have explanatory force in the context of economic actions and complex-system evolutionary dynamics. The objective is to understand creative innovation as a general cultural attribute rather than one restricted only to accredited experts such as artists; thus to theorise creativity as a form of emergence for dynamic adaptive systems. In this context, change is led by ‘paradigm shifters’ – tricksters and entrepreneurs who create new meanings out of the clash of difference, including the clash of mutually untranslatable communication systems (language, media, culture).
Highlights
This paper seeks to link anthropological and economic treatments of the process of innovation and change, within a given ‘complex system’ and between systems
It may seem perverse to start a presentation on ‘cultural science’ with a picture of a coyote, even one that seems so well able to ‘paddle his own canoe.’. It transpires that the Coyote of North American mythology, and his equivalents in other lands, may provide the solution to a problem that any attempt at ‘cultural science’ needs to address
Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture (1998), presents Coyote as the appetite-driven, deceiving, thieving, whatever-it-takes trickster, who steals from the gods, travels the open road, and plans to eat your children
Summary
It may seem perverse to start a presentation on ‘cultural science’ with a picture of a coyote, even one that seems so well able to ‘paddle his own canoe.’. In relation to human sense-making, how is it possible to identify and track causal sequence, dynamic process, and rules of transformation; and even to ask to what extent the same ‘algorithm’ (an ‘abstract series of steps’: Arthur: 180) applies across seemingly disparate domains or activities (e.g. Alex Bentley’s ‘random copying’ theory)?5 Such questions are in contradistinction to a by- standard or everyday focus on structure, opposition, and the politics of difference in cultural studies; a perspective inherited from structuralism, semiotics and continental Marxism of the 1960s and 70s and institutionalised as ‘normal science’ in the ‘new humanities,’ focusing on identityformation (individual and collective), discursive power, contextualised meaning, and the practices of ordinary life. In order to study culture itself more adequately, it is necessary to renew what can be meant by ‘cultural studies.’ For instance it needs to include population-wide macro-systems as well as micro-descriptions, and to account for change from an evolutionary perspective rather than from an oppositional one, while at the same time not letting go of its interest in meaning, identity, situational context, textual and discursive forms and histories, and the politics of knowledge and culture
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