Abstract
The dominant postmodern intellectual movement of deconstruction was premised on the notion that the rationality of anthropology and the social sciences was spurious, grounded in unexamined metaphysical postulates that had to be “deconstructed.” But René Girard taught us that although we should reject the metaphysical perspective that cannot comprehend the historical essence of the human because it has no place for a scene of origin, we must not renounce the task of explaining the human in rational terms. Girard’s fundamental idea that religion itself is our originary anthropology is central to generative anthropology, even if Girard himself declined to elaborate a theory of the logos, which the fourth Gospel puts “in the beginning,” as an anthropological phenomenon, that is, as the product of a human scene. For generative anthropology, the origin of the human is simultaneously the origin of formal and institutional representation, language and religion, and the central task of anthropology is to understand the consequences of this originary unity.
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Further Reading
Bartlett, Andrew. Mad Scientist, Impossible Human: An Essay in Generative Anthropology. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2014.
Eshelman, Raoul. Performatism, or, the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2009.
Gans, Eric. The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. University of California Press, 1981.
———. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. University of California Press, 1985.
———. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990. Second edition, Davies Group, 2015.
———. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford University Press, 1993.
———. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford University Press, 1997.
———. The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford UP, 2007.
———. A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2011.
———. The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology. Imitatio/Amazon Digital Services, 2012.
Katz, Adam. The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2007.
Van Oort, Richard. The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2009.
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Gans, E. (2017). Generative Anthropology. In: Alison, J., Palaver, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3_59
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3_59
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