Generative Anthropology

"Although the term Generative Anthropology dates from the publication of The End of Culture in 1985, GA was born in 1978 when I had the good fortune to be René Girard’s colleague for a semester at Johns Hopkins University. The conception of the originary event, as first expounded in The Origin of Language (1981), was my attempt to combine Girard’s notion of the generation of the human from the intensification of the mimetic with my own notion that the declarative sentence was derived from a more primitive form I called the ostensive (e.g., “Fire!” “Man overboard!”). I thus reformulated Girard’s scene of mimetic crisis, in which the scapegoat was transformed into a peace-bringing divinity, as the scene of the genesis of language, a scene I hypothesized to be unique for our species."