AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST Rituals of Creativity: Tradition, Modernity, and the “Acoustic Unconscious” in a U.S. Collegiate Jazz Music Program Eitan Wilf ABSTRACT In this article, I seek to complicate the distinction between imitation and creativity, which has played a dominant role in the modern imaginary and anthropological theory. I focus on a U.S. collegiate jazz music program, in which jazz educators use advanced sound technologies to reestablish immersive interaction with the sounds of past jazz masters against the backdrop of the disappearance of performance venues for jazz. I analyze a key pedagogical practice in the course of which students produce precise replications of the recorded improvisations of past jazz masters and then play them in synchrony with the recordings. Through such synchronous iconization, students inhabit and reenact the creativity epitomized by these recordings. I argue that such a practice, which I call a “ritual of creativity,” suggests a coconstitutive relationship between imitation and creativity, which has intensified under modernity because of the availability of new technologies of digital reproduction. [modernity, creativity, imitation, media technologies, intertextuality] W ith the advent of modernity, the relationship be- tween imitation and creativity has become increas- ingly laden with moral overtones because it reverberates with the question of the relationship between personal au- tonomy and tradition. It thus concerns core Enlightenment ideas such as freedom from tradition as directly linked to the progress of humankind. For instance, at one point in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Emmanuel Kant argues that “the product of a genius (in respect of that in it which is to be ascribed to genius, not to possible learning or schooling) is an example, not for imitation (for then that which is ge- nius in it and constitutes the spirit of the work would be lost), but for emulation by another genius, who is thereby awakened to the feeling of his own originality, to exercise freedom from coercion in his art” (Kant 2008:195–196). Thus, Kant understands the individual’s ability to exercise his or her creative faculties as a practice of freedom, a man- ifestation of enlightened agency, which imitation can only corrupt (see also Schiller 1982). This intellectual legacy has had a definitive impact on the ways in which modernity has been imagined. Creativity has come to index modernity whereas imitation has come to connote tradition (Agrama 2010; Hirschkind 2006:13–19; Mahmood 2001). At the end of the 18th century, the rise of Romantic ideas of radical in- teriority and individual creativity, which rejected imitation as a practice of inauthenticity, further institutionalized these AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 1, pp. 32–44, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. c  2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01395.x binary oppositions in the modern imaginary (Taylor 1989; Trilling 1972). These ideas have had a decisive impact on anthropo- logical studies of cultural creativity. A number of foun- dational scholars located creativity—whether individual or cultural—on the margins of social reality: that is, away from society’s normative center. For example, Franz Boas, writing on the Native American art of the north Pacific Coast, argued that the emergence of pattern books signals the decadence of folk art (Boas 1955:157). Boas thus associ- ated codified imitation with the demise of creative practice. Max Weber instituted a similar distinction between creative (charismatic) and rule-governed (instrumentally rational) social action, arguing at one point that “genuine charismatic education is the radical opposite of specialized professional training as it is espoused by bureaucracy” in that the latter retains hardly any of “the original irrational means of charis- matic education” (Weber 1978:1144). Decades later, Victor Turner (1967) developed the notions of “communitas” and “liminality” to designate a state of “betwixt and between” in which society’s members have the capacity to step outside of and reflect on taken-for-granted social norms. Turner ar- gued that this state, which he extended to leisure and other types of activities that are set apart from routine work, offers the individual a creative space invested in intense emotions and sensations. Similarly, in an edited volume dedicated