PANEL 02: Creating, Transforming, Transmitting

PANEL 02: Creating, Transforming, Transmitting… – Creative Processes in Myth, Ritual and the Everyday in Lowland South America

SALSA XII Sesquiannual Conference – Vienna, 2019

Organizers:
Ernst Halbmayer, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
Anne Goletz, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany

Chairs: Ernst Halbmayer, Anne Goletz

This panel focuses on creative processes and the semantics fields of formation, reproduction and reconfiguration of life, the world and the living. Which actions and processes are involved in creative processes? Which technics and forms of knowledge are implemented? How are these processes conceptualized and linguistically expressed in myth and everyday life, and ritually enacted? How are these processes transformed and used to deal with the contemporary world? How is the creative potential of Others (spirits, gods, whites) conceptualized and what is the relationship between creation and destruction? Creative processes have been analyzed in terms of rituals with specific focus on the transformative power of music and instruments, in terms of fabrication and constructional understandings of personhood, as well as in terms of metamorphosis and of becoming an Other. This panel asks for the links of creative everyday practices, rituals and myth. Myths explain the transformation of formerly existing conditions, the creation of different forms of life and the transmission of goods through mythical beings in a historical-mythical past. But in how far do these processes permeate into everyday life and manifest themselves in environmental phenomena, landscapes, objects, the body and socio-cultural phenomena or much more contradict everyday practices? Of special interest are papers that theorize creative processes beyond the logics of the material and the immaterial, that scrutinize established theoretical knowledge based on new empirical research or that show from a comparative perspective the differences and continuities of creative processes and practices across Lowland South America and beyond.

Panel Schedule