In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with innovation in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.

Birgit Meyer(PhD cultural anthropology, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She is co-editor ofMaterial Religion and the Berghahn seriesMaterial Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement. Recent publications includeAesthetic Formations. Religion, Media and the Senses(ed, Palgrave 2009),Things. Religion and the Question of Materiality (ed with Dick Houtman, Fordham 2012) andSensational Movies. Video Vision and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015).

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement
Maru¨ka Sva¨ek

Chapter 1. African Lace: Agency and Transcontinental Interaction in Textile Design
Barbara Plankensteiner

Chapter 2. Heads against Hands and Hierarchies of Creativity
Tereza Kuldova

Chapter 3. The Social Life of Kottan Baskets
Kala Shreen

Chapter 4. Art and the Making of the Creative City of Chennai, India
Amit Desai

Chapter 5. Approximation as Interpretive Appropriation
Arnd Schneider

Chapter 6. Positioned Creativity
Øivind Fuglerud

Chapter 7. We paint our way and the Christian way together
Fiona Magowan and Maria Øien

Chapter 8. Undoing Absence through Things
Maru¨ka Sva¨ek

Chapter 9. The Eye Likes It
Stine Bruland

Chapter 10. Narratives, Movements, Objects
João Rickli

Chapter 11. The Art of Imitation
Rhoda Woets

Afterword
Birgit Meyer

Index