Entrepreneurship, colonial monetary economy and the limits of creativity

Innovation has two faces for science and technology studies. First, it describes the invention of a new technique and second, it denotes the process of social adaptation and social role of an innovation is defined. In the study of science and technology, innovation comes first, before adaptation and appropriation, while for social anthropologists, adaptation and appropriation constitute the innovation. This chapter describes the second perspective and relates the history of trading stores in the northern Namibian reserve of Ovamboland. It demonstrates that the social changes linked to the appropriation of trading stores cannot be understood if the processes of creative appropriation alone are considered. This perspective has certainly been important as a corrective to all too- encompassing theories of modernization and globalization. But there are limits to creative adaptation. Finally, the chapter presents a typology of processes of appropriation according to the degree of creative freedom involved in them. Keywords: creative appropriation; innovation; northern Namibia; Ovamboland; social adaptation; trading stores

Appropriation · Colonialism · Creativity · Economic system · Economics · Economy · Epistemology · Globalization · Modernization theory · Political science · Sociology · Typology · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law · Psychology

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