Copy and Creation: Potters, Graphic Designers, Textile Artists

Abstract

This chapter provides an application of the theoretical concerns I have developed in chapter two. We have seen that culture change, in fact the development of any culture, inevitably involves the appropriation or borrowing from other cultural systems. Yet there seems to remain a paradox: the entire terminology of appropriative strategies, such as “copy,” “recreation,” “imitation,” “fake,” and “appropriation” itself, make reference to the presumed authenticity of an original. The original embodies somehow the essence, the irreducible singularity of the specific artefact, work of art, or more generally, cultural form or expression. Within Western thought this concept is applied not only to the Western tradition, but also to non-Western cultures. Ultimately, such an understanding of creativity, as being singular and unique, is rooted in the Western conception of the individual, that is, as a bounded, autonomous person. The critique of this concept from within anthropology was built both on work on specific ethnographic areas, such as Melanesia and Amazonia, and recent parallel work in Western societies.¹