“Culture in the broadest sense of the term includes not just the artistic and scholarly products. It encompasses the institutions and practices, rites and rituals, beliefs and skills, attitudes and values, and world views and localized modes of thinking and acting of all members of society over the whole range of contexts” (Martin, 1996, p.6, Italics in original); creativity then, is arguably the cultural stock (products or output) of the original thought and expression of an entire society. Hennessey and Amabile (2010) lend credence to this ideology by suggesting that creativity is the “development of a novel product, idea, or problem solution that is of value to the individual and/or the larger social group” (p. 572); however, this illustrates the inherent commodification of original thought and design that suggests that only the useful products are indeed creative.

This is problematic, as it is exclusive of aspects of creativity that are not directly marketable, such as expressive arts (Valters Painter, 2007), and creativity as a tool for meaning making and coping from a mental health perspective (Cory, Mallet, Lewis & Abdel-Khalek, 2013). When the products of creativity are thought of in terms of creation, a spiritual connection emerges, where it is suggested that creativity is a manifest of the Divine, or “spiritual power given to us by God” (Buckenham, 2011, p.59). Alternatively, traditional Indigenous wisdom envisions creativity as a means of conceptualizing the interconnection and interrelation of all things (Lane, Bopp, Bopp & Brown, 2012), which lends support to the argument of creativity being a therapeutic process (Cory et al.; Valters Painter, 2007).  Personally, this is the ideology I gravitate toward!

References

Buckenham, K. (2011). Creativity and spirituality: Two threads of the same cloth.  Religion & Theology, 18(1), 56-76.

Corry, D.A.S., Mallett, J., Lewis, C.A., and Abdel-Khalek, A.M. (2013). The creativity-spirituality construct and its role in transformative coping. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 16(10), 979-990.

Hennessey, B. A., and Amabile, T.M. (2010). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 61(1), 569-598.

Lane, P., Bopp, J., Bopp, M., and Brown, L. (2012). The sacred tree: Reflections on Native American spirituality (4th ed.). Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press.

Martin, J. R. (1996). There’s too much to teach: Cultural wealth in an age of scarcity. Educational Researcher, 25(2), 4-16.

Valters Painter, C. (2007).  The relationship between spirituality and artistic expression: Cultivating the capacity for imagining. Spirituality in Higher Education Newsletter, 3(2), 1-6.