Generative anthropology is a field of study based on the hypothesis that the origin of human language happened in a singular event. The discipline of Generative Anthropology centers upon this original event which Eric Gans calls The Originary Scene. This scene is a kind of origin story that hypothesizes the specific event where language originated. The Originary Scene is powerful because any human ability: our ability to do science, to be ironic, to love, to think, to dominate, etc can be carefully explained first by reference to this scene of origin.
Because The Originary Scene was the origin of all things human; Generative Anthropology attempts to understand all cultural phenomena in the simplest terms possible: all things human can be traced back to this hypothetical single origin point.
Eric Gans and the origin of generative anthropology
Generative Anthropology originated with Professor Eric Gans of UCLA who developed his ideas in a series of books and articles beginning with The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981), which builds on the ideas of René Girard, notably that of mimetic desire. However, in establishing the theory of Generative Anthropology, Gans departs from and goes beyond Girard's work in many ways. Generative Anthropology is therefore an independent and original way of understanding the human species, its origin, culture, history, and development.
Anthropoetics
Gans founded (and edits) the web-based journal Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology as a scholarly forum for research into human culture and origins based on his theories of Generative Anthropology and the closely related theories of fundamental anthropology developed by René Girard. In his online Chronicles of Love and Resentment Gans applies the principles of Generative Anthropology to a wide variety of fields including popular culture, film, post-modernism, economics, contemporary politics, the Holocaust, philosophy, religion, and paleo-anthropology.
The originary hypothesis of human language
The central hypothesis of generative anthropology is that the origin of language was a singular event. Human language is radically different from animal communication systems. It possesses syntax, allowing for unlimited new combinations and content; it is symbolic, and it possesses a capacity for history. Thus it is hypothesized that the origin of language must have been a singular event, and the principle of parsimony requires that it originated only once.
Language makes possible new forms of social organization radically different from animal "pecking order" hierarchies dominated by an alpha male. Thus, the development of language allowed for a new stage in human evolution – the beginning of culture, including religion, art, desire, and the sacred. As language provides memory and history via a record of its own history, language itself can be defined via a hypothesis of its origin based on our knowledge of human culture. As with any scientific hypothesis, its value is in its ability to account for the known facts of human history and culture.
Mimetic behaviour
Mimetic (imitatory) behaviour connects proto-hominid species with humans. Imitation is an adaptive learning behavior, a form of intelligence favored by natural selection. Imitation, however, as René Girard observes, leads to conflict when two individuals imitate each other in their attempt to appropriate a desired object. The problem is to explain the transition from one form of mimesis, imitation, to another, representation. Although many anthropologists have hypothesized that language evolved to help humans describe their world, this ignores the fact that intra-species violence, not the environment, poses the greatest threat to human existence.[citation needed] Human representation, according to Gans, is not merely a "natural" evolutionary development of animal communication systems, but is a radical departure from it. The signifier implies a symbolic dimension that is not reducible to empirical referents.
The originary event
At the event of the origin of language, there was a proto-human hominid species which had gradually become more mimetic, presumably in response to environmental pressures including climate changes and competition for limited resources. Higher primates have dominance hierarchies which serve to limit and prevent destructive conflict within the social group. However, as individuals within the proto-human group became more mimetic, the dominance system broke down and became inadequate to control the threat of violence posed by conflictual mimesis.[citation needed]
Gans asks us to imagine an "originary event" along the following lines: A group of hominids have surrounded a food object, e.g. the body of a large mammal following a hunt. The attraction of the object, however, exceeds the limits of simple appetite due to the operation of group mimesis, essentially an expression of competition or rivalry. The object becomes more attractive simply because each member of the group finds it attractive: each individual in the group observes the attention that his rivals give the object. Actual appetite is artificially inflated through this mutual reinforcement. The power of appetitive mimesis in conjunction with the threat of violence is such that the central object begins to assume a sacred aura – infinitely desirable and infinitely dangerous.
Mimesis thus gives rise to a pragmatic paradox: the double imperative to take the desired object for personal gain, and to refrain from taking it to avoid conflict. In other words, imitating the rival means not imitating the rival, because imitation leads to conflict, the attempt to destroy rather than imitate (Gans, Signs of Paradox 18). Generative Anthropology theorizes that when this mimetic instinct becomes so powerful that it seems to possess a sacred force endangering the survival of the group, the resultant intra-species pressure favours the emergence of the sign.
No member of the group is able to take the sacred object, and at least one member of the group intends this aborted gesture as a sign designating the central object. This meaning is successfully communicated to the group, who follow suit by reading their aborted gestures as signs also. The sign focuses attention on the sacred power of the central object, which is conceived as the source of its own power. The object which compels attention yet prohibits consumption can only be represented. The basic advantage of the sign over the object is that "The sign is an economical substitute for its inaccessible referent. Things are scarce and consequently objects of potential contention; signs are abundant because they can be reproduced at will" (Gans, Originary Thinking 9). The desire for the object is mediated by the sign, which paradoxically both creates desire, by attributing significance to the object, yet also defers desire, by designating the object as sacred or taboo. The mimetic impulse is sublimated, expressed in a different form, as the act of representation. Individual self-consciousness is also born at this moment, in the recognition of alienation from the sacred center. The primary value/function of the sign in this scenario is ethical, as the deferral of violence, but the sign is also referential. What the sign refers to, strictly speaking, is not the physical object, but rather the mediated object of desire as realized in the imagination of each individual.
The emergence of the sign is only a temporary deferral of violence. It is immediately followed by the sparagmos, the discharge of the mimetic tension created by the sign in the violent dismemberment and consumption of the worldly incarnation of the sign, the central appetitive object. The violence of the sparagmos is mediated by the sign and thus directed towards the central object rather than the other members of the group. By including the sparagmos in the originary hypothesis, Gans intends to incorporate Girard's insights into scapegoating and the sacrificial (see Signs of Paradox 131–151).
The "scene of representation" is fundamentally social or interpersonal. The act of representation always implies the presence of another or others. The use of a sign evokes the communal scene of representation, structured by a sacred center and a human periphery. The significance of the sign seems to emerge from the sacred center (in its resistance to appropriation), but the pragmatic significance of the sign is realized in the peace brokered amongst the humans on the periphery.
All signs point to the sacred, that which is significant to the community. The sacred cannot be signified directly, since it is essentially an imaginary or ideal construction of mimetic desire. The significance is realized in the human relationships as mediated by the sign. When an individual refers to an object or idea, the reference is fundamentally to the significance of that object or idea for the human community. Language attempts to reproduce the non-violent presence of the community to itself, even though it may attempt to do so sacrificially, by designating a scapegoat victim.
Generative Anthropology is so called because human culture is understood as a "genetic" development of the originary event. The scene of representation is a true cultural universal, but it must be analyzed in terms of its dialectical development. The conditions for the generation of significance are subject to historical evolution, so that the formal articulation of the sign always includes a dialogical relationship to past forms.
Generative Anthropology Society and Conference
The Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC) is a scholarly association formed for the purpose of facilitating intellectual exchange amongst those interested in fundamental reflection on the human, originary thinking, and Generative Anthropology, including support for regular conferences. GASC was formally organized on June 24, 2010 at Westminster College, Salt Lake City during the 4th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference.
Since 2007, Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC) has held an annual summer conference on Generative Anthropology.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Scapegoating is the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment. Scapegoating may be conducted by individuals against individuals, individuals against groups, groups against individuals, and groups against groups.
Mimesis is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including imitatio, imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.
A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages. In some scenarios this can be emotionally distressing, creating a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other, such that the person responding will automatically be perceived as in the wrong, no matter how they respond. This double bind prevents the person from either resolving the underlying dilemma or opting out of the situation.
René Noël Théophile Girard was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.
Merlin Wilfred Donald is a Canadian psychologist, neuroanthropologist, and cognitive neuroscientist, at Case Western Reserve University. He is noted for the position that evolutionary processes need to be considered in determining how the mind deals with symbolic information and language. In particular, he suggests that explicit, algorithmic processes may be inadequate to understanding how the mind works.
Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth is a 1972 book on ancient Greek religion and mythology by the classicist Walter Burkert. It won the Weaver Award for Scholarly Literature, awarded by the Ingersoll Foundation, in 1992.
Post-postmodernism is a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. One other similar recent term is metamodernism.
Eric Lawrence Gans is an American literary scholar, philosopher of language, and cultural anthropologist. Since 1969, he has taught, and published on, 19th century literature, critical theory, and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.
Symbolic culture, or nonmaterial culture, is the ability to learn and transmit behavioral traditions from one generation to the next by the invention of things that exist entirely in the symbolic realm. Symbolic culture is usually conceived as the cultural realm constructed and inhabited uniquely by Homo sapiens and is differentiated from ordinary culture, which many other animals possess. Symbolic culture is studied by archaeologists, social anthropologists and sociologists. From 2018, however, some evidence of a Neanderthal origin of symbolic culture emerged. Symbolic culture contrasts with material culture, which involves physical entities of cultural value and includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects.
Violence and the Sacred is a 1972 book about the sacred by the French critic René Girard, in which the author explores the ritual role of sacrifice. The book received both positive reviews, which praised Girard's theory of the sacred, and more mixed assessments. Some commentators have seen the book as a work that expresses or points toward a Christian religious perspective. However, the book has also been seen as "atheistic" or hostile to religion. Violence and the Sacred became highly influential, in anthropology, literary criticism, and even Christology. It has been compared to the classicist Walter Burkert's Homo Necans (1972). Girard further developed its ideas in a subsequent book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978).
Inalienable possessions are things such as land or objects that are symbolically identified with the groups that own them and so cannot be permanently severed from them. Landed estates in the Middle Ages, for example, had to remain intact and even if sold, they could be reclaimed by blood kin. As a legal classification, inalienable possessions date back to Roman times. According to Barbara Mills, "Inalienable possessions are objects made to be kept, have symbolic and economic power that cannot be transferred, and are often used to authenticate the ritual authority of corporate groups".
Christoph Wulf is a professor of Anthropology and Education at the Free University of Berlin.
Jean-Michel Oughourlian is an Armenian-French neuropsychiatrist and psychologist as well as a writer and philosopher recognized both in France and the United States for his collaboration with René Girard and his work on the mimetic theory of desire. Since the early 1970s he has devoted both his clinical work and his research to applying and developing Girard's theories in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and psychopathology. He is the author of several books, in which he developed clinical points of view around mimetic theory of desire.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a 1978 book by the French critic René Girard; it presents a dialogue between Girard and the psychiatrists Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort.
Roman Katsman is an Israeli researcher of Hebrew and Russian literature, Full Professor of the Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University.
Paolo Diego Bubbio is an Italian philosopher and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is known for his research on post-Kantian philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics and philosophy of religion. He is the editor of the "Contemporary Studies in Idealism" book series for Lexington Books.
In evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary linguistics, the mimetic theory of speech origins is an analysis of the factors leading to the evolution of language in human ancestors, typically during the Homo erectus era.
The mimetic theory of desire is an explanation of human behavior and culture which originated with the French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science René Girard. The name of the theory is derived from the philosophical concept mimesis, which carries a wide range of meanings. In mimetic theory, mimesis refers to human desire, which Girard thought was not linear but the product of a mimetic process in which people imitate models who endow objects with value. Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire. Girard described mimetic desire as the foundation of his theory:
The Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) is an international organization dedicated to “exploring, critiquing, and developing” the mimetic theory proposed by the French historian, literary critic, and anthropological philosopher René Girard. Membership includes scholars of theology, religious studies, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, and other academic fields as well as clergy and other practitioners.
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