Zagadka znikającej granicy
The Puzzle of the Vanishing Boundary

Summary/Abstract: In a reference to the leitmotif of the 7th Anthropological Meeting held in Zakopane in December 2017 the author of the presented text embarks upon yet another attempted reflection on the “location” of the boundary between creative (literary, artistic) work and scientific-research activity. In doing so he attempts to evoke arguments justifying his theoretical and methodological ”uncertainty” connected with the absence of the possibility of a clear delineation of a boundary between the above-mentioned domains of creative human activity. Art. Science. Creativity. Anthropology. Each of these words has become swamped with an almost infinite number of publications. Each appears in more or less serious as well as completely ordinary and commonplace registers, stirring the minds of the public, scholars, artists, men of letters, and theoreticians of assorted domains of the humanities. The purpose of using those concepts in such a juxtaposition is to confront and compare them, and to examine them more closely as conceits whose ranges are increasingly fluidly overlapping and crossing in an unexpected and often extremely inspiring way. Is contemporary science/anthropology (or at least some of its symptoms), or can it be, a new form of artistic activity? Is art inspired more than ever in its past by science (e.g. ethnography, anthropology, the humanities)? Does it exploit science already fully consciously and consistently as a tool for quests and expression? Or, on the contrary, does art today find in science its best/better ally? Must science and ”fiction” be mutually exclusive? Finally, when and why should those domains be distinctly differentiated?

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