Eric Gans

Eric Lawrence Gans (born August 21, 1941) is an American philosophical anthropologist and literary theorist. Gans established a human science called generative anthropology (GA), which is based on the hypothesis that representation, language—insofar as it is the most fundamental form of representation —and the human species—insofar as it is defined against other animal species by its unique possession of language—could only have originated in an event, and which explains culture—insofar as it constitutes systems of representations —as the "generative" development of this event.

Gans claims that GA serves as a better foundation for the human sciences than the alternatives of (a) the natural sciences and (b) religion as it: (a) actually explains the origin of language unlike the natural sciences, which, by "explaining" it in terms of human language gradually emerging from non-human animal sign systems—ultimately in an attempt to ignore the uniqueness of human language—do not actually explain it at all; and (b) nevertheless remains consistent with the natural sciences unlike religion, which, despite actually explaining the origin of language, makes recourse to the supernatural in its explanations.

Gans edits Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, an academic journal devoted to GA. He also publishes the Chronicles of Love and Resentment, a weblog dedicated to his reflections on a range of topics including popular culture, film, contemporary politics, philosophy and religion.

Gans has taught and published on 19th century literature, literary theory and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.

Life Eric Lawrence Gans was born on 21 August 1941 in Parkchester, the Bronx to a middle-class Jewish family.

In 1957 Gans graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. In the same year he attended Columbia College. During his first year he majored in mathematics before switching to French at the end of his second. with Girard's notion of the scapegoat mechanism in La violence et le sacré (1972). Upon returning from Johns Hopkins he started writing The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981).

In 1981, the same year that The Origin of Language was published, Gans resat as chairman of UCLA's French Department. In the subsequent years he elaborated and refined his hypothesis in a series of works starting with The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (1985). In 1987 he started teaching seminars on GA. Later, in 2010, alumni of these seminars would found the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC), of which Gans is an honorary member. In 1990 UCLA's French Department held its first GA colloquium, which featured Marvin Harris as keynote speaker. In 1994, as a result of the activity of GA seminar alumni, the MLA held a session on GA at its annual meeting. In 1995 Gans co-founded Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, a scholarly journal devoted to GA. During the 90s he sponsored a series of talks at the UCLA Society for the Study of Religion, which was chaired by David C. Rapoport. In 2007 he was honored with distinguished professor status. In 2014 he resigned from his professorship after being found in violation of UCLA's sexual misconduct policy. Since 2015 he has assumed distinguished professor emeritus status.

Generative anthropology