Couple of basic questions about Generative Anthropology

Question 1 is important. Gans has addressed it lots of times, and I do at length in my introduction to a book I edited, *The Originally Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Human Inquiry*. But, to get at it in a brief way, the starting point is the fundamental difference between human language and animal communication. Only human language has signs (words, to keep it simple) that are purely "arbitrary," or "conventional." There's no reason for the word "dog" to refer to that particular four-legged furry mammal and, of course, in other languages it doesn't. So, somehow, some human community must have "agreed" to use words in shared ways. But to form such an agreement, you would already need to have language. This is a dilemma, and there's no "natural" way of explaining how it would happen. We draw from this the conclusion that language must have emerged in a singular event, in which a sign was used and repeated (i.e., "understood") by everyone in a memorable way. Clearly, we can't *know* there was such a scene--we don't expect to find some archeological or fossil evidence for it. So, we can only hypothesize. The question then becomes, what is the best hypothesis? Gans puts forward the best one, while, of course, once we have agreed we need a hypothesis, the rules of the game are that to challenge the originary hypothesis you should have a better, which is to say, more minimal, one. What makes it a good hypothesis? One, it accounts for the fact that everyone on the scene would have to be looking at the same thing--the best explanation for this is that they all desire it. Two, it would have to account for them not appropriating the object, but only gesturing toward it. The best explanation for this is fear of, and refraining from, appropriation. The best way of accounting for this is the conversion of the movement to appropriate the object into a gesture showing that you won't--you can imagine a fairly minimal physical shift that would show that, Why the fear of violence? Because of the advanced mimetic capacity of humans--imitation leads to desire for the same object and therefore conflict. The normal pecking order which would have the alpha eating first, then the beta, etc., has been overridden and the sign is what replaces it as a way of maintaining order in the group.

The "proof" of the hypothesis is whether this model then accounts better than other ways of thinking for what we do daily and what humans have done throughout history as sign-users.