History of Generative Anthropology

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Origins

The philosophers who inspired Eric Gans to conceive of Generative Anthropology can primarily be accredited to french philosophers René Girard and Jacque Derrida. Having been colleagues for a semester with René Girard in 1978, Eric Gans conceived of the originary hypothesis when adapting René Girard mimetic scapegoat hypothesis with his own theses on the declarative sentence being arrived from a more primitive ostensive. When those ideas were combined with Jacque Derrida's notion of deferral and différance, Generative Anthropology was born.

Early days

The notion of the originary event was first publicized in Eric Gans' 1981 book The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation, where he would posit that the human and human culture was generated from an event so mortally violent that it threatened to consume our nascent human ancestors in existentially threatning in-group violence.

Generative Anthropology was first named so in his 1985 book The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology, which would develop on the ideas of his first book.