ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connection between creative thinking and transitional places. It examines the ways in which a sense of “off place and odd moment” encourages a type and quality of creative thinking in people. The chapter explores the off places and odd moments in which creative thought seems to regularly emerge for advertising professionals and anthropologists. It looks at emplacement in transitional places as embodying a resource that advertising creatives and anthropologists avail for gaining new perspectives on their work. Studies on creativity regularly associate creative thought with qualities of indeterminacy. Anthropologists use the between in their own personal experience of fieldwork to bridge other realities of the places they study with their own inner impressions, connecting others to selves, far off lives to close daily experiences. The practice of listening for contradictions, bridging disjointed concepts, and being attuned to paradoxes in consumers’ stories takes getting used to, even for experienced anthropologists.
