What if anthropology were to suspend its claims to be a social science, whether of a geisteswissenschaftliche or a positivist variety? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other-than-humans?

Well, I think something else would come along to do what anthropology used to do and we’d just give it a different name. I don’t see why this has to be an all-or-nothing type of thing; some folks can do this creativity stuff and other academics can take up the mantle of trying to better understand humankind.

Good questions these. And I, for one, am delighted that anthropology has always had room for art and literature as well as science and other forms of scholarship.

But isn’t the obvious answer to these questions that anthropology would disappear as an academic discipline? If Anthropology is Art and Art is Frog, the affected faculty could be given the option of reassignment to either English or Herpetology.