On Innovation
Citation: Bielo, James “On Innovation.” The Jugaad Project, 5 Dec. 2019, thejugaadproject.pub/innovation [date of access]
Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, we invited Prof. Bielo to write a short piece on the concept of innovation. We hope that the ideas below serve a way to further our conversation on the value of ‘Jugaad’ as an analytical concept in religious materiality.
In the late capitalist order, innovation is an obsession. It is prized and celebrated, idolized as good. It also provokes anxiety as an imperative underwritten by logics of efficiency, austerity, brand recognition, and the endless feedback loop of iterative improvement. No success can be complete. This order produces an unceasing fear of eclipse: competing brands, products, companies, and destinations are poised to innovate past you, beyond you, leave you in their creative dust. You must innovate. INNOVATE. N-O-V8! “Just do it.” To be disinterested in innovation flirts with lunacy, to claim anti-innovation borders heresy.
The trouble is that this order does traffic in something good: creativity. No doubt, it forged a monster, turning the beautiful treacherous. One promise of The Jugaad Project is to rescue innovate from N-O-V8. Perhaps the rescue is a reprisal: returning to a sense of creativity that (thankfully) was never fully buried in the anthropological heap. The Hindi jugaad and the French bricolage conjure comparable spirits: creativity is about using whatever is at hand, combining in unexpected ways for unanticipated uses, exceeding intended affordances, bending the rules. Here, innovation is not reducible to market or bureaucratic logics, but embraces a broader and grittier swath of lived experience: frugality, messiness, improvisation, unpredictability, and the emergent nature of problem-solving. The discard-able becomes usable, stage becomes prop, random becomes purpose-full.
Such transformations are temporally diverse. Some are momentary, quick fixes that may not last beyond the circumstance. Others are enduring, traditions in embryo. This recalibrated sense of creativity also has the capacity to impact forms of experiential temporality. Famously, improvisation can express as “flow,” a sense of suspended duration. In other ways, bricolage can confront the everyday flow of time: marking progression, mile posting memory, and intervening in temporal states such as waiting and hurrying.
A panoramic scene from the Ave Maria Grotto (Cullman, Alabama), 2018. Photo by: Claire Vaughn)
Reflecting on jugaad, the example of Brother Joseph comes to mind. Born Michael Zoetl in 1878, he immigrated from southeastern Germany to the United States in 1892. A priest in training, he settled at a newly established Benedictine Abbey in northern Alabama. Denied priesthood because of a debilitating back injury, he entered the monastic novitiate and became Brother Joseph in 1895. After several short stints at other monasteries, he returned to the Abbey in 1908 and lived there, rarely leaving, until his earthly death in 1961.
Around 1918, his life as a self-taught artist began in earnest, working with cement to craft miniature replicas. He began with Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, and ultimately crafted around 125 scenes: from biblical stories (e.g., Noah’s ark) to Catholic pilgrimage destinations (e.g., Lourdes) and sites valued as national landmarks (e.g., the Statue of Liberty). Over four decades, he accumulated these replicas amid a four-acre park, dedicated as the Ave Maria Grotto in 1934.
The Grotto was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 for its status as a folk-art environment. Its reach beyond devotional labor and pilgrimage owes largely to Brother Joseph’s imaginative use of media. He worked with discarded and donated items. Reading across archival sources, a partial inventory includes concrete, marble, beads, chicken wire, seashells, jewelry, bits of glass, beverage and ink bottles, cold cream jars, tiles, dinner plates, toilet tank floats, watches, figurines, bird cages, bicycle reflectors, rocks, and chandelier prisms. Soon after the Grotto’s dedication, reports describe visitors sending Brother Joseph random collections of materials to incorporate in his next creation. A 1941 profile in the Cincinnati Enquirer writes in concert with bricolage: “Many persons who have visited the place, impressed with his skill at adapting various materials to unusual uses, now collect and send to him the materials with which he works.”
In the study of material religion, the story of Brother Joseph neatly expresses much about the spirit of jugaad. He worked with no strategic plan and his preparation was measured not in expertise but in a will to worship with hands and tools. Contra to narratives of the lone genius, there is an undeniable social dimension to Brother Joseph’s vision and work. He produced in dialogue with his monastic brothers and incorporated whatever miscellany people thought worth sending. He left no written theological oeuvre or manifesto, but his practice declares commitment to a ‘waste not’ ethic. No material was too mundane or profane, all the world’s detritus was redeemable.
Jugaad practice recalibrates limitations as possibilities. Affordances, both animate and inanimate, work less as conditioning structures and more as flexible resources to manipulate, tinker with, and re-mix. For Brother Joseph, he used the language of unconventional materiality to challenge what qualified as a place worthy of pilgrimage and a refusal to discretely separate art, labor, religion, ordinariness and extra-ordinariness. In other cases, other scripts are flipped. An instructive example is the life and labor of Elijah Pierce, an African-American self-taught artist from Mississippi.
Pierce had a less omnivorous attitude toward materiality than Brother Joseph, preferring to work in only one media: wood. Active from the 1920s through the early 1980s, Pierce depicted diverse subjects in his woodcarving, including biblical themes such as Noah’s ark and Jesus’s crucifixion. As Sally Promey observes in her reflection on Pierce, his exclusive choice of media meant that his subjects “naturally appear in a range of beiges and browns.” Pierce capitalized on this visual affordance for his representations of skin color, calling out regimes of racial inequality and calling up a theology of racial equality. Here, the resourcefulness that defines jugaad rhymes with the Black poetic tradition of signifyin’. Pierce’s “sermons in wood” clap back at a tradition of religious art that elevates and naturalizes whiteness.
Innovation, figured as jugaad, is an everyday ethic, available to all and for some a virtuosic dedication. It also has the potential to be an engine of cultural change. This species of creativity works against the ossifying effects of inertial culture, social learning that is more “imitative” than inventive. It embodies instead the dynamics of accelerative culture, which makes creative use of tradition, mobilizing the familiar in pursuit of something novel. It enables the imagination and fosters unanticipated ways of being by refusing to let what exists delimit what is possible. Jugaad is no panacea, but it is necessary and it signifies sharply on late capitalism’s obsession with newness for the sake of capital, distinction or, simply, newness.
