The Creative Spark

January 15, 2017
An anthropologist ponders the better angels of our nature--the ones armed with paintbrushes, notebooks, cameras, and plowshares.According to Fuentes (Chair, Anthropology/Univ. of Notre Dame), an essential component of human nature is our ability to work the trove of materials made available to us by virtue of our "symbolic inheritance." Our creativity is thereby an essential component of what makes us human; so, too, is our ability to work together in creative ways for creative ends, for what the author calls a "cocktail of creativity and collaboration." The condensed tail of evolution, in that scheme, has a vulnerable gaggle of newly terrestrial simians figuring out how to fend off hunger, predation, illness, and other threats existential and otherwise while filling our lives with meaning and hope, allowing our kind "to reshape their world, thereby reshaping themselves." It's a pleasing vision and one decidedly more optimistic than the naked-ape-with-guns portraits of a past generation of anthropologists. Still, it's one that requires only a few case studies to wrap up, and regrettably, part of the author's creativity turns on saying the same thing in numerous ways, with multiple variations on that trope that working together is a good thing and one that distinguishes us from other animals, which "do some ratcheting and scaffolding, but...lack the human combination of discovery, innovation, cooperation, and information transfer." The diverse studies in creativity are good ones, though, encompassing everything from conflict resolution to learning how to use fire to cook--not just red meat, but fish and vegetables as well. Fuentes frowns on a few predictable things, like racism and war, but also on the paleo diet. Though the science can get a little lite, this offers an informative, readable introduction to recent scholarship on the anthropology of creativity.

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February 15, 2017

Creativity is an essential reason why Homo sapiens have progressed to the point we have: dominating an entire planet and eagerly searching the universe, argues anthropologist Fuentes (Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You). The author examines the cultural leavings of early hominins and determines that they succeeded in large part because of their ability to collaborate with one another; whether this was our distant ancestors who hunted and gathered as collective units or when sedentary subsistence was established in the near Middle East by modern humans roughly 10,000 years ago. This assertion is well argued but runs against many of the tenets of Darwinian evolution, which stresses that all life on Earth progresses through the Tennyson maxim of "nature red in tooth and claw." Strife and competition have made us what we are? Not so, according to Fuentes. His thesis is an intriguing and insightful one. VERDICT Fuentes seeks a general audience, covering topics already familiar to experts. This work could serve well as a secondary text in an introductory anthropology course.--Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2017
Behind the Pieta, Fuentes sees a line of human creativity stretching back from Michelangelo three million years to the pre-human hominins who first began using stone tools to shape the world to satisfy their desires. Condensing a great deal of anthropological research, Fuentes shows how imaginative resourcefulness enabled a vulnerable species lacking fangs and claws to survive in a world of fierce predators. In time, the creativity that allowed Homo sapiens to survive opened possibilities that set the species apart from all of the planet's other occupantsin physical mode of life and travel, in social organization, in communication, in capacity to investigate nature, and even in transcendent self-understanding. Unfortunately, the evolutionary record of the creative singularity of the human race also includes bloody ingenuity in the violence of war. But whether facing the current threat of armed conflict or pondering contemporary controversies surrounding gender and religion, Fuentes draws one imperative lesson from humankind's deep past: we survive as a species only so long as we continue to creatively innovate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)