“Brimming with ideas. . . . The Origins of Creativity approach[es] creativity scientifically but sensitively, feeling its roots without pulling them out.”—Economist In a stirring exploration of human nature recalling his foundational work Consilience, Edward O. Wilson offers a “luminous” (Kirkus Reviews) reflection on the humanities and their integral relationship to science. Both endeavors, Wilson argues, have their roots in human creativity—the defining trait of our species. By studying fields as diverse as paleontology, evolution, and neurobiology, Wilson demonstrates that creative expression began not 10,000 years ago, as we have long assumed, but more than 100,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Age. A provocative investigation into what it means to be human, The Origins of Creativity reveals how the humanities have played an unexamined role in defining our species. With the eloquence, optimism, and pioneering inquiry we have come to expect from our leading biologist, Wilson proposes a transformational “Third Enlightenment” in which the blending of science and humanities will enable a deeper understanding of our human condition, and how it ultimately originated.

CROSSING CULTURAL BORDERS UNIVERSALS IN ART AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL ROOTS is a book written for art lovers. It describes how artists from prehistoric to modern times have exploited brain systems that evolved for survival to create art that viewers around the world admire today. This neuroesthetic approach to art offers new insights into several universal aspects of art and suggests new solutions to old puzzles, for example: Why is balance around the center pleasing? How do viewers recognize movement, emotional states and intentions in persons depicted in art? Why is 'variety in unity' (diversity of colors and forms organized in patterns) a universal principle in decorative art? How do artists use their visual memory and mental imagery in creating art? This book includes 52 works of art from cultures around the world and from prehistoric to modern times.

In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this Very Short Introduction Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying cutting-edge web sites, alongside the latest research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, provocative book engages with the big debates surrounding our responses to art and is an invaluable introduction to anyone interested in thinking about art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called “art,” and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species’ four-million-year evolutionary history. This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species. In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that “make special,” and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival. Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; “primitive” and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and children’s art. The final chapter, “From Tradition to Aestheticism,” explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art. This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.

"A genuine one-stop reference point for the many, many differing strands of cultural analysis. This isn′t just one contender among many for the title of ′best multidisciplinary overview′; this is a true heavyweight." - Matt Hills, Cardiff University "An achievement and a delight - both compelling and useful." - Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London With the ′cultural turn′, the concept of culture has assumed enormous importance in our understanding of the interrelations between social, political and economic structures, patterns of everyday interaction, and systems of meaning-making. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, the leading figures in their fields explore the implications of this paradigm shift. Part I looks at the major disciplines of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, asking how they have been reshaped by the cultural turn and how they have elaborated distinctive new objects of knowledge. Parts II and III examine the questions arising from a practice of analysis in which the researcher is drawn reflexively into the object of study and in which methodological frameworks are rarely given in advance. Addressed to academics and advanced students in all fields of the social sciences and humanities, The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis is at once a synthesis of advances in the field, with a comprehensive coverage of the scholarly literature, and a collection of original and provocative essays by some of the brightest intellectuals of our time.

Informed by theories pertaining to transnational mobility, ethnicity and race, gender, postcolonialism, as well as Japanese studies, Transnational Musicians explores the way Japanese musicians establish their transnational careers in the hierarchically structured classical music world. Drawing on rich material from multi-sited fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Japanese artists in Japan, France and Poland, this study portrays the structurally – and individually – conditioned opportunities and constraints of becoming a transnational classical musician. It shows how transnational artists strive to conciliate the irreconcilable: their professional identification with the dominant image of ‘rootless’ classical musicianship and their ethnocultural affiliation with Japan. As such this book critically engages with the neoliberal discourse on talent and meritocracy prevailing in the creative/cultural industry, which promotes the common image of cosmopolitan artists, whose high, universal skills allow them to carry out their occupational activity internationally, regardless of such prescriptive criteria as gender, ethnicity and race. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will appeal to students and researchers interested in such fields as migration, transnational mobility, ethnicity and race in the creative/cultural sector, gender studies, Japanese culture and other related social issues. It will also be instructive for professionals from the world of classical music, as well as ordinary readers passionate about Japanese society.

In this book, the first full-length study of its kind in English, Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to innovation in the Wilhelmine Empire (1870s - 1880s) more compellingly than Max Klinger. Morton makes an interdisciplinary examination of Klinger’s early prints and drawings within the context of Wilhelmine transformations, coming to the conclusion that the artist’s work revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of society.