Eric Gans's weekly column on culture, desire, and the originary hypothesis — published every week from 1996 to 2019. An essential running commentary on contemporary thought through the lens of Generative Anthropology.
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Back in 1997, on the occasion of the untimely death of Princess Diana, I explained the role of celebrities as what Girard calls “external mediators” who assuage our resentment of real or potential...
Originary thinking is scenic; to think of human origin is to propose a hypothetical originary scene. Throughout human history, this has been done through sacred texts. In the period from Hobbes to...
I feel almost ashamed to take on a target as easy as “intelligent design” (ID) theory, but it offers so excellent a demonstration of the power of the originary hypothesis that the mere mention of the...
Rather than a template for the “good society,” originary thinking provides a touchstone for ethical progress: act so as to diminish the overall resentment in the world, in particular by increasing...
We customarily recognize a transhistorical polarity between realistic and symbolic or “idealistic” modes of representation, according to the respective primacy of the referent or the sign. At the...
Some years ago I proposed that the originary hypothesis, which in the narrow sense concerns the origin of language, could become the basis of a rigorous anthropological methodology. If we accept the...
I am intrigued by Adam Katz’s suggestion that the best approach to earlier thinkers’ approximations to the originary hypothesis is to determine what prevents them from formulating it in its simplest...
Both high and popular culture are spin-offs of ritual; but whereas high secular culture is limited to a specific set of historical circumstances, popular culture is found in all societies: folk-tales...
In response to Chronicle 317 , Gabriel Andrade has pointed out that Boas’ skeptical empiricism was not only a reaction to racialism but above all a rejection of the originary speculations of early...
Chris Fleming of the University of Western Sydney, author of René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004) and co-author of three articles in Anthropoetics (most recently,...
If we would understand the sacred, we must first detach it from the institutional contexts within which it is usually embedded: on the one hand, from religion, which exists to preserve and reinforce...
[As defined in Chronicle 310 , white guilt refers not to skin color but to unmarkedness; it is the guilt of the unmarked toward the marked.] It would be a mistake to characterize white guilt as...
The preceding Chronicles on white guilt raise fundamental anthropological questions that should be dealt with before proceeding with the examination of specific victimary discourses, a subject of...
The Second World War was almost certainly the last total war humanity will be able to tolerate. The necessity for restraining maximal violence henceforth links the world in a global community; all...
Some readers interpreted my analysis in Chronicle 316 as implying that I had changed my mind concerning the relative importance of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. It might be better to say that we should...
When we discover that subjects such as white guiltFor those who may not have been following this series, the white in white guilt is defined not by skin color but by unmarkedness : white guilt...