Creative Encounters, Appreciating Difference: Perspectives and Strategies

by Sam D. Gill

Across the world from personal relationships to global politics, differences—cultural, religious, racial, gender, age, ability—are at the heart of the most disruptive and disturbing concerns. While it is laudable to nurture an environment promoting the tolerance of difference, Creative Encounters, Appreciating Difference argues for the higher goal of actually appreciating difference as essential to creativity and innovation, even if often experienced as stressful and complex. Even encounters that are apparently harmful and negatively valued (arguments, conflict, war, oppression) usually heighten the potential for creativity, innovation, movement, action, and identity.Drawing on classic encounters that have played a significant role in the founding of the academic study of religion and the social sciences, this book explores in some depth the dynamics of encounter to reveal both its problematic and creative aspects and to develop perspectives and strategies to assure encounters both include the appreciation of difference and also are recognized as creative and innovative. The two examples most extensively considered show that the academic study of the peoples indigenous to North America and to Australia involved creative constructions (concoctions) of primary examples in order to establish and give authority to academic theories and definitions. Rather than damning these examples as “bad scholarship,” this book considers them to be encounters engendering creative constructions that are distinctive to academia, yet their potential for harm must be understood. Most important to the book is a persistent development of perspectives and strategies for understanding and approaching encounters in order to assure the appreciation of difference is accompanied by the potential for creativity and innovation. Specific perspectives and strategies are related to naming, moving, gesture, and play and, particularly relevant to religion, the development of an aesthetic of impossibles.Since these historical examples engage highly relevant present concerns —the distinction of real and fake, truth and lie, map and territory—the threading essays show how these more or less classic examples might contribute to appreciating these contemporary concerns that are generated in the presence of difference.

273 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2018

About the author

Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Native American religions were the focus of his work for twenty-five years. He regularly hung out in cultures in the American Southwest—Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and Zuni—to observe ritual and dancing. Since the early 1990s Sam has been an enthusiastic student of dancing in cultures around the world including travel to observe and study dancing to Bali and Java, Thailand and Nepal, Ghana and Mali, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Sam has taught courses on many topics related to dancing notably a yearlong course “Religion and Dance” that covered over thirty dance traditions and included weekly dance studios taught by artists from the relevant cultures. In the late 1990s Sam founded, with his daughter Jenny, a dance and music school, Bantaba World Dance & Music. For many years he has taught salsa dance in high schools, in his classes at CU, and in the community including a performance group. He has developed an extensive catalog of salsa dance instructional videos. Sam’s insatiable interest in various fields of study—movement, dancing, play, masking, perception and the senses, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, gender issues, fitness, gesture, aging—interweave and shape his current work. Since retiring from teaching in 2017 he has published at least a book a year including an Award Winning book "The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith" and most recently "Religion: A Contemporary Perspective."