ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the experiences of creativity for those who produce culture-as-elitetradition. It focuses on three such forms: advertising, fiction and ethnography. While as an abstraction the idea has heuristic utility, its real-world instantiations vary in intensity and quality among particular domains our focus here being on the three domains of advertising, fiction and ethnography. The core product of any advertising agency is creativity that helps sell things, and this commercial end strongly influences the spaces in which such creativity occurs. The people largely responsible for producing this form of creativity are collectively known in the industry as ‘creatives’. The chapter discusses the anthropologists, however, if we are to believe books on how to write ethnography, conceive of our creativity largely in terms of focus and disengagement. Across the domains of advertising, fiction and ethnography, we have encountered both similarities and differences in people's experiences of a creativity.
