Generative Anthropology News

Anthropoetics XVIII, no. 2, Spring 2013

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1802/index.htm  

Benjamin Barber - Neoclassical Protagonists in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV 

Peter Goldman - Shakespeare's Gentle Apocalypse: The Tempest

Marina Ludwigs - City Walking and Narratives of Destiny

Robert Rois - The Oliphant and Roland’s Sacrificial Death

Benchmarks

Anthropoetics XVIII, no. 1, Fall 2012

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1801/index.htm  

Andrew Bartlett - A Minimal Model for Apocalyptic Thinking 

Ian Dennis - Contemporary Tragic Representation and Response: An Originary Exploration

Adam Katz - The Redemption of Hostages

Matthew Taylor - Not with a Bang but a Whimper: Muen Shakai and Its Implications

Edmond Wright - A linguistic source for the myth of the Summum Bonum, and how it should be played  

Benchmarks

Anthropoetics XVII, 2 Spring 2012

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1702/index.htm

Ian Dennis - The Sexual Market: Three Romantic Moments

Roman Katsman - Cultural Rhetoric, Generative Anthropology, and Narrative Conflict

Melanie Long - Merchantry, Usury, Villainy: Capitalism and the Threat to Community Integrity in The Merchant of Venice

Marina Ludwigs - Adventures in Sainthood: Pascal's Wager in Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's

Edmond Wright - Generative Anthropology and Triangulation Theory

Benchmarks

34th Issue of Anthropoetics, 17: 1

GASC V at High Point, NC - A Communal Experience

The 5th GA summer conference, held at High Point University in North Carolina from May 19 through 21 under the hands-on supervision of Matt Schneider in his new role as Chair of the High Point English Department, was smaller than our two most recent conferences but made up for the reduction in numbers with intellectual coherence and an enhanced sense of community. All the papers stayed on message, including two by undergraduate students of GA veterans (Melanie Long, a student of Peter Goldman at Westminster College, and Ben Barber, who is studying with Richard van Oort at the University of Victoria) and three Skyped talks by Edmond Wright, Tom Bertonneau, and our Australian team of Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll. Eric Gans's plenary talk on "The Jewish Barber, Marx, and Monotheism" has already appeared in two parts as Chronicles of Love and Resentment 405 and 406.

Generative Anthropology Summer Conference 2011 participants Matt Schneider (host), Andrew McKenna, Martin Fashbaugh, Benjamin Barber, Peter Goldman, Adam Katz, Eric Gans, Ian Dennis, Marina Ludwigs, Andrew Bartlett (President of GASC) and Melanie Long. Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.

Posted by Eric Gans, June 1, 2011.

33rd Issue of Anthropoetics, 16: 2, Now Available

Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC) 2011 Proposal Deadline Extended; Logistics Updates

32nd Issue of Anthropoetics, 16:1, the GA Summer Conference issue, Now Available

GA Society Membership Drive Announcement

GASC Website Launch and First Membership Drive

I am pleased to announce the launch of the web site and first membership drive for the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference.

The site is at:

www.gasc.uottawa.ca/

Here you will find information about the Society, its goals and its
personnel. There are links to the GASC founding documents, to the CFP for the upcoming conference, and to other materials of interest.

Here also you will find details about becoming a member of GASC,
including the membership benefits and the dues structure. The site
features a PayPal button to allow you to join and pay your dues online
(although you may also do both by mail).

And there are hedgehogs for every mood or predilection.

Please do join and help build this exciting new organization! Payment
now covers the whole of 2011, and will help us support and prepare next year's GA conference in North Carolina. As that event approaches we will be able to assess our resources and inform you how much of a
discount on conference fees we will be able to offer GASC members. (We are guessing 10% to 20% discount.) Other benefits include voting rights in the Society, eligibility for financial support, and a choice of
"tangibles."

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Ian Dennis

Secretary-Treasurer
idennis@uottawa.ca
613-562-5800-xt1205

Announcing Workshop: Thinking the Human, November 15-16, 2010, Stanford University

.

Thinking the Human: Fundamental Questions of Evolutionary Theory in Mimetic Perspective
An International Workshop and Conference
Munger Conference Center, Stanford University
Stanford, November 15-16, 2010

Our symposium aims to discuss René Girard’s hermeneutics of origin and its theoretical and epistemological relationship with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, in order to find a theoretical convergence between Mimetic Theory (MT) and Evolutionary Theory (ET) which may enrich our understanding of how human culture developed, as well as to challenge current theoretical paradigms, while flagging the necessity to fully articulate the place of religious practices in our understanding of the development of human culture and human social evolution.

What is theoretically at stake in discussing human cultural evolution? Which are the “genetic” elements that we should be looking at to define primordial culture? Through which biological/social mechanisms did culture emerge? Which contribution MT could give to the debate and how is it compatible with the current evolutionary paradigm? ("About," Thinking the Human)

Anthropoetics authors Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Eric Gans will be presenting papers and participating in two roundtables.

Announcing Workshop: Thinking in Unity after Postmodernism, 12 and 13 November 2010

Announcing Call for Papers for
2011 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference

New GA Bibliography Available Through LibraryThing

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Generative Anthropology Bibliography via the online cataloguing tool LibraryThing. Users can access the bibliography through the new Generative Anthropology Bibliography page or directly through the Anthropoetics LibraryThing site. The interface is searchable and allows for multiple views of the material. The "bibliography" currently contains close to 300 items including books, articles, blog posts, and videos. All Anthropoetics articles are available, and Chronicles will be added. The bibliography is a work in progress, and users are encouraged to help build the bibliography by submitting relevant items. Including key words with your submission will help us to structure the bibliography to make it more user-friendly. Subscribe to Anthropoetics' LibraryThing RSS feed to receive updates concerning new items. Posted by Stacey Meeker, September 14, 2010.

GA Association Founded
Memberships Soon to Be Made Available

Thursday 24 June resulted in the formation of an association devoted to the development of Generative Anthropology. Its name is The Generative Anthropology Society & Conference; its acronym, GASC.  The eight-member Executive Board of this new association has Andrew Bartlett as President and Ian Dennis as Secretary-Treasurer.  Its five official Members-at-Large are Peter Goldman, Adam Katz, Stacey Meeker, Matthew Schneider, and Richard van Oort.  Eric Gans is Honorary Lifetime Member.   More information will be announced soon (August or early September at the latest) about how you can become a member of GASC, with benefits and privileges attaching thereto.  GASC will also be announcing details about the location and dates for next summer's annual GA Fifth GA Summer Conference will be happening.

Board members pictured at the founding meeting: Front (left to right): Ian Dennis, Robert Hudson, and Andrew Bartlett. Back (left to right): Peter Goldman, Matthew Schneider, Eric Gans, Adam Katz, and Richard Van Oort. Photo by Stacey Meeker. Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.

Posted by Eric Gans for Andrew Bartlett, August 4, 2010.

GASC IV Utah a Success

We are happy to report the resounding success this past June 24-26 of GASC Utah, the fourth annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference, with meetings held at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Brigham Young University in Provo.  Papers were presented by over twenty-five speakers from four nations.  Topics and studies of a remarkable variety were fielded--reflections on punk moshpits, memes, avatars, scapegoats, the Holocaust, romantic joy, mistakenness, and personhood; analyses of texts by Shakespeare, Nerval, Constant, Tocqueville, Balzac, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, and Wilde. Vincent Pecora delivered the stimulating plenary lecture "Secularism, Secularization, and Why the Difference Matters."  Eric Gans's plenary lecture "Haven't We Always Been Modern?" opened pathways between GA and the thought of Bruno Latour.  Trevor Merrill moderated a feisty exchange of views between Pecora and Gans during the final session Saturday evening.  Congratulations to the organizers Peter Goldman (Westminster College) and Robert Hudson (Brigham Young University).  Their smart planning, thorough preparation, and good-natured energy made this fourth GA conference intellectually enriching and enjoyable from beginning to end.
	Above: Generative Anthropology Summer Conference 2010 co-organizers Peter Goldman and Robert Hudson with Eric Gans (center). Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Left: GA stalwart Adam Katz sports the GASC 2010 tee-shirt. Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.

Posted by Eric Gans for Andrew Bartlett, August 4, 2010.

Sad News Regarding Professor Herbert E. Plutschow

Posted by Eric Gans to the GA-list on July 1, 2010:

I was shocked to learn just today of the death of my old friend and colleague Herbert Plutschow, which ironically occurred on the very day of the beginning of the GA Summer Conference in Salt Lake City, where we were looking forward to seeing Herb in Japan in 2012 as he was in the early stages of organizing our sixth GA conference at Josai International University.

Herb is to date the only UCLA professor to show a real interest in GA. He attended sessions of the early GA seminars and published five articles in Anthropoetics, the first as early as our second issue in 1995-96. His second article, on the Japanese Tea Ceremony, which appeared in 1999, has had by far the most hits of any Anthropoetics article. Herb was a long-time member of our Editorial Board, and his death leaves an important gap in the area of East Asian culture.

I had lunch with Herb on his visit to UCLA about a year ago and he showed no sign of ill health. I am really sorry that the newer adepts of GA won’t get the chance to meet him.

I enclose a few photos; the departmental notice appears below.

The tragic news of the sudden passing of Herbert E. Plutschow on June 24 in Chiba, Japan, at the age of 70, profoundly saddens the UCLA community. An emeritus professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Herbert Plutschow spent 32 years at UCLA, teaching Japanese literature, cultural history, folklore, classical Japanese, and kanbun. A world authority in Japanese travel diaries—a field that he developed before it was known in Japan, Plutschow was an extremely popular teacher and a well-known master of the Urasenke tradition of tea ceremony. A native of Switzerland, he was educated at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales in Paris (B.A.), Waseda University (M.A.), and Columbia University (Ph.D.). Plutschow authored over 20 books, many of which also appeared in Japanese. After retiring from UCLA in 2005, he joined Josai International University as Dean of the Faculty of International Humanities. The memorial service took place on June 29 at St. Ignatius Church in Kojimachi, Tokyo. Eulogies were offered by the president of Josai International University, Professor Noriko Mizuta, and by Plutschow’s beloved teacher, Professor Donald Keene. Herbert lives in the heart and knowledge of those who were privileged to have met him.

Herbert Plutschow and other guests at Eric Gans' 60th birthday celebration. Copyright 2001 by Stacey Meeker. All rights reserved. Herbert Plutschow at post-GA seminar gathering in Santa Monica, 1999. Copyright 1999 by Stacey Meeker. All rights reserved.

Herbert Plutschow and Eric Gans celebrate Eric Gans' 60th birthday. Copyright 2001 by Stacey Meeker. All rights reserved.

Professor Plutschow's Anthropoetics bibliography:

An Anthropological Perspective on the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Anthropoetics 5, no.1 (Spring/Summer 1999) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0501/tea.htm

Tragic Victims in Japanese Religion, Politics, and the Art, Anthropoetics 6, no. 2 (Fall 2000/ Winter 2001) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/japan.htm

Xunzi and the Ancient Chinese Philosophical Debate on Human Nature, Anthropoetics 8, no. 1 (Spring / Summer 2002) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0801/xunzi.htm

Archaic Chinese Sacrificial Practices in the Light of Generative Anthropology, Anthropoetics 1, no. 2 (December 1995) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0102/china.htm

Ancient Human Sacrifice on China's Periphery, Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1401/1401plutschow.htm

Posted by Stacey Meeker on behalf of Eric Gans, August 27, 2010.

Latest Issue: Anthropoetics XV, 2 Spring 2010

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1502/index.htm

Jean-Loup Amselle
To Count or Not to Count: The Debate on Ethnic and Diversity Statistics in France Today

Peter Goldman
The Meaning of Meaning in Kafka's The Castle  

Kyle Karthauser
Popular Culture after Postmodernism: Family Guy, Borat, The Office, and the Awkwardness of Being Earnest

Adam Katz
From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein

Marina Ludwigs
Three Gaps of Representation / Three Meanings of Transcendence

Andrew McKenna
Art and Incarnation: Oscillating Views  

Emma Peacocke
“A novel word in my vocabulary”: Laughter and the Evolution of the Byronic Model into Don Juan

Simon Watson
Review Essay: Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Atheist Fundamentalism

Book by Ian Dennis

Congratulations to Ian Dennis, whose new book Lord Byron and the History of Desire has been published by the University of Delaware Press (2009). Quoting from the publisher's website: "This book interprets a number of Lord Byron's major literary works--Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1813, 1816, 1818), the Eastern Tales (1812-16), "Prometheus" (1816), "The Prisoner of Chillon" (1816), Manfred (1817), Cain (1821), Heaven and Earth (1823) and Don Juan (1819-24)--from a perspective informed by the Generative Anthropology of Eric Gans and the mimetic theory of René Girard. It reads these works for their developing awareness of the market world in which the poet lived--the changing nexus of socially mediated desires--but also for their modeling of attitudes and rhetorics useful for life in such a world, with particular attention to Byronic irony and its purposes.

Book by Richard Van Oort

Congratulations to Richard Van Oort, whose new book The End of Literature:  Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics has been released (2009) by The Davies Group Publishers.  A description from their website:  the book "seeks to answer the question: What knowledge does the humanist possess that can compete with the explanatory power of evolutionary theory?  Drawing on Eric Gans's groundbreaking idea of language as the deferral of violence, Van Oort situates this 'originary hypothesis' in the context of recent studies in primatology, developmental psychology,, evolutionary anthropology, and cognitive science. The point of this comparison is not to reduce the humanities to the sciences, but to delimit a minimal point of departure for humanistic inquiry.  Having established this starting point, Van Oort compares the premises of the originary hypothesis to the unavowed starting points of recent cultural and literary criticism. He shows that the theory is not incompatible with the best insights of either Clifford Geertz or Stephen Greenblatt.  The hypothesis is further fleshed out in original readings of Shakespeare, tragedy, and romanticism."

Gans Lectures in Australia and Israel

In November and December 2008, Eric Gans delivered lectures and held seminars in Australia (University of Sydney, University of Western Sydney) and at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. Thanks to Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming (Australia) and Roman Katsman (Israel) for organizing these visits.

Raoul Eshelman Book Published

Raoul Eshelman, a frequent contributor to Anthropoetics, has just published Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group). It is now available on Amazon.com for $27.

GA Book Published

The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, edited by Adam Katz, is now available through the Davies Group Publishers.

Table of Contents:

Adam Katz
Introduction:  The Consequences of the Originary Hypothesis

Eric Gans
Originary Thinking in the New Millennium

Raoul Eshelman
Originary Aesthetics and the End of Postmodernism

Christopher Morrissey
Immaterial Intellect and the Originary Scene 

Adam Katz
The Question of Originary Method:  The Generative Thought Experiment 

Eric Gans
The Anthropology of Bronx Romanticism 

Richard van Oort
Hamlet's Theater of Resentment 

Peter Goldman
Shakespeare's Iconoclasm:  Public vs. Private Scenes in Measure for Measure 

Thomas Bertonneau
From Epicurus to Marx:  The Horizon of Materialist Anthropology in Light of the Minimal Scene 

Matthew Schneider
Romanticism and the Evolution of Popular Culture 

Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll
What is the Human?  Generative Anthropology and the Humanities

Andrew Bartlett
Accusations of "Playing God" and the Anthropological Idea of God

Gans Book Published

Eric Gans's latest book, The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day, is available though Stanford University Press. From the Stanford University Press website:

The Scenic Imagination argues that the uniquely human phenomenon of representation, as manifested in language, art, and ritual, is a scenic event focused on a central object designated by a sign. The originary hypothesis posits the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human as such an event. In traditional societies, the scenic imagination through which this scene of origin is conceived manifests itself in sacred creation narratives. Modern thought is defined by the independent use of the scenic imagination to create anthropological models of the origin of human institutions, beginning with the social contract scene in Hobbes’s Leviathan that puts an end to the reciprocal violence of the state of nature. Eric Gans follows the work of the scenic imagination in selected writings of twenty thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Boas, and Freud and concludes his book with a critical examination of contemporary writing on the origins of religion and language. In the process, he demonstrates that the originary hypothesis offers the most cohesive explanation of the origin and function of these fundamental institutions.

GA in Croatia

Anthropoetics is pleased to announce HUGA (Hrvatska Udruga za Generativnu Antropologiju), the Croatian Association for Generative Anthropology). HUGA was founded on July 30, 2006 in Zagreb, Croatia. Its mission is to explore and develop GA and mimetic theory. HUGA's board members include Antun Pavešković (president), Tatjana Pavešković (vice-president), Silva Mežnarić, and Joško Božanić.

Stacey Meeker / ap@humnet.ucla.edu
Last updated: 08/29/2010 16:07:44