Wings for Hummingbirds to Fly With

This chapter employs the famous rabbit-duck illusion to develop a dialectical approach to change. While individuals perceive only rabbit or duck at a given moment, most, if not all, can also see the other. Switching back and forth between the rabbit and the duck creates consciousness about knowledge. This dialectical approach is applied to a symbolic model of creativity. The latter refers to the human capacity to question interpretations of the world and to find new relationships among constituent elements. Metonyms and metaphors are fundamental to human discourse and link knowledge domains in newbutincomplete ways. By hovering between domains, they build meta-awareness. The ancient Maya creator, the god Itzamnaaj, helps to illustrate key aspects of this model of creativity.

Stillman Wanders, Babel Rises

Chapter 6 discusses how innovation changes social structures. Fault lines traverse societies. Their structures are complex, their statuses differentiated, and their power structures unequal. Rather than existing in the abstract, these aspects of social life materialize in concrete actions, things, and people. Diacritical consumption sets members of society apart based on culture-specific values. To work as status-differentiating items, these values should be understood, at least partially, by members of society, especially as they develop meta-awareness through their interaction with social frames. For social change, these individual experiences have to be converted into a public discourse about structures. Inventions then materialize personal visions of society and become novel arguments in the public discourse. As people adopt them, they shift the course of their society.

Flower Mountain Revealed

This chapter questions how innovation can help us to understand social change. Current models of society emphasize structures and agency. Societies have structural properties in the form of virtual schemas and actual resources. Individuals are knowledgeable and self-reflexive about society. They internalize these properties and apply their tacit knowledge in their daily behaviors to recreate society. Habits explain how societies and their structural properties are maintained, yet they make it difficult to account for change. While innovation explains change in industrial Western societies, it remains underutilized for ancient societies, and, even then, it is often restricted to evolutionary approaches that privilege modern technology. Here, innovation is embedded in specific cultural and historical contexts, specifically ancient Maya culture.

Bleibt Alles Anders

Unlike earlier conceptions of society as homogeneous, modern models emphasize its factious nature. Correspondingly, it cannot be reduced to a structure; instead, it contains multiple, coexisting, and even overlapping structures. Chapter 4 visualizes these complex structures as a Garden of Forking Paths in which worlds—some real, others imaginary—coexist. To plan their actions, individuals trace a coherent path between worlds. Their actions adhere to cultural, although not necessarily practical, logic. They deal with worlds differently and apply different modalities. The latter distinguishes innovators from others. The material nature of inventions exhibits interaction and adoption publicly. Therefore, individual decision-making interweaves, Gardens of Forking Paths overlap, and the resulting interferences map the structural changes in society.

Itzamnaaj’s Court

The Western myth of the genius individualizes, and thus distracts, from the social processes that enable innovation. Chapter 3 looks into the social underpinning of creativity. Maya society grew and diversified over the course of the Classic period. Even hinterland villages changed economically as well as sociopolitically and provided individuals with opportunities to advance their interests. These changes can, for instance, be observed when we examine educational techniques: book and situated learning are contrasting approaches. In the former, learning takes place in a hierarchical environment; in the latter, apprentices observe and imitate masters in a work-related setting. Maya learning tends to be embedded in communities of practice. Imitation facilitates the meta-awareness that forms the foundation of creativity.

Names of the Owl

Chapter 7 discusses innovation as the intersection between individuals and society. It follows a culture-specific logic that evolutionary approaches easily overlook. Premodern and non-Western societies encourage tradition, but this should be seen as a culture-specific discourse on social change and order. Structuralist models explain the maintenance of societies by emphasizing habits. Nonetheless, agency includes creativity—that is, the ability to become aware of social structures and to develop new approaches that materialize in inventions. The material aspect of innovations requires reconsidering the relationship between structures and spacetime, or the material context of human existence. Instead of seeing the latter as a passive backdrop, inventions and adoption change it.

A Ruler Just Like Me

Chapter 5 addresses how power and status affect innovation. Earlier approaches considered status as an objective measure of the innovative spirit. These models fail to capture the more complex reality in which all members of society control resources, albeit to differing degrees. Power involves not only the imposition of one’s will on others but also (and possibly even more so) the subtle shaping of the framework in which individuals make their decisions. The powerful are choice architects. Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) six principles are applied to the changing relationships between kings and their people at Late Classic Copan. As members of society negotiate power, they shape the Garden of Forking Paths that describes the space for individual decision-making.