Epilogue: Creative Persona and the Problem of Authenticity
Edward M. Bruner · Cornell University Press eBooks · 2018
The theme of this volume, that the creative persona has the power of transformation and transcendence and can change a culture, is both obvious and subtle.We know that there have always been charismatic prophets, political leaders, and intellectual giants who move peoples and nations, and who change the scholarly directions of an historical era.One thinks of Newton and Einstein, Alexander the Great and Napoleon, Jesus and Mohammed, Joyce and Proust.Such exceptional individuals even have a place in superorganic theories of culture.But in the theory held, for the most part, by the contributors to this volume, even little people in the routine and the everyday construct their lives as they live their lives.Changes initiated by persons of power or by elite groups do have a higher probability of being more widely accepted by the larger society, but change occurs among all social classes and segments.Transformation and transcendence are especially marked in cultural performances, in what Victor Turner has called putting experience into circulation, for it is in performance that a society is most articulate and powerful in giving expression to its key cultural symbols, paradigms, and narratives.Look at it this way:If we believe that culture is heavy, ponderous and static, If it's a slowly changing beast, [321]