Anthropology
topic
Anthropology as creative input provides the broadest available survey of the diversity of human cultural solutions to universal human problems — how different societies have organized family life, economic exchange, political authority, religious meaning-making, aesthetic production, and conceptual categorization — demonstrating both the remarkable diversity of what humans consider natural or obvious and the structural commonalities that all human cultures share.
Role
Anthropology is the academic discipline that most consistently and most dramatically destabilizes the unexamined assumptions that any particular cultural formation treats as universal human nature — revealing that the arrangements most people in any specific culture experience as natural, obvious, and necessary are, across the full human cultural record, extraordinary minority positions or entirely unprecedented innovations. For creative practitioners, anthropology provides the most comprehensive available evidence that the world could be organized differently from how it currently is.