ABSTRACT
The adjective ‘creative’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, only entered conventional English usage in the seventeenth century. Despite the variability in the meanings of the term, there are two other points about the historical emergence of its use that we might note here, for they are important in subsequent characterizations of 'creative' and 'creativity', and have a bearing upon considerations of creativity or temporality. Such debate informs Kirsten Hastrup's discussion of creativity and agency below, though unlike most philosophical debate, Hastrup emphasizes the social nature of creativity and, in turn, the performative nature of the social. The latter, she argues, inevitably casts creativity as a matter of individual agency; whereas anticipation is an inherent feature of all social action we act in anticipation of future events. In so doing she raises important questions about anthropological attempts to identify and celebrate agency and the creative.
