Or, as Julia Lupton suggested, negative anthropology
could be an account of culture where you subtract human beings. Think of all the artifacts that are not produced by human civilization, like beehives and seashells and things like that. Those could be the objects of a negative anthropology.
––Aaron Kunin, "Banish the World"
***
Regardless of the theoretical subtraction, does this still import a priori a rather optimistic theory of the human?
Where architecture and mechanism retain value as a shadow of some essential human work of event planning –– or, say, there is still self-flattery in the plastic spirit and autogenous stones of Kircher and Spinoza.
But more interesting: how the negative anthropologist does taxonomy, which may also be a way of studying religion in this modulo universe. Imagine some clever student beginning to rattle that cage––!
"Which is greater, the umbrella or the face?"
