Generative anthropology is a field of study based on the hypothesis that the origin of human language happened in a singular event. The discipline of Generative Anthropology centers upon this original event which Eric Gans calls The Originary Scene. This scene is a kind of origin story that hypothesizes the specific event where language originated. The Originary Scene is powerful because any human ability: our ability to do science, to be ironic, to love, to think, to dominate, etc can be carefully explained first by reference to this scene of origin.
Because The Originary Scene was the origin of all things human; Generative Anthropology attempts to understand all cultural phenomena in the simplest terms possible: all things human can be traced back to this hypothetical single origin point.
Origin
Generative anthropology originated with Professor Eric Gans of UCLA who developed his ideas in a series of books and articles beginning with The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981), which builds on the ideas of René Girard, notably that of mimetic desire. In establishing the theory of Generative Anthropology, Gans departs from and goes beyond Girard's work in many ways. Generative Anthropology is therefore an independent and original way of understanding the human species, its origin, culture, history, and development.
Anthropoetics
Gans founded (and edits) the web-based journal Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology as a scholarly forum for research into human culture and origins based on his theories of Generative Anthropology and the closely related theories of fundamental anthropology developed by René Girard. In his online Chronicles of Love and Resentment Gans applies the principles of Generative Anthropology to a wide variety of fields including popular culture, film, post-modernism, economics, contemporary politics, the Holocaust, philosophy, religion, and paleo-anthropology.
Originary hypothesis of human language
The central hypothesis of generative anthropology is that the origin of language was a singular event. Human language is radically different from animal communication systems. It possesses syntax, allowing for unlimited new combinations and content; it is symbolic, and it possesses a capacity for history. Thus it is hypothesized that the origin of language must have been a singular event, and the principle of parsimony requires that it originated only once.
Language makes possible new forms of social organization radically different from animal "pecking order" hierarchies dominated by an alpha male. Thus, the development of language allowed for a new stage in human evolution – the beginning of culture, including religion, art, desire, and the sacred. As language provides memory and history via a record of its own history, language itself can be defined via a hypothesis of its origin based on our knowledge of human culture. As with any scientific hypothesis, its value is in its ability to account for the known facts of human history and culture.
Mimetic behaviour
Mimetic (imitatory) behaviour connects proto-hominid species with humans. Imitation is an adaptive learning behavior, a form of intelligence favored by natural selection. Imitation, as René Girard observes, leads to conflict when two individuals imitate each other in their attempt to appropriate a desired object. The problem is to explain the transition from one form of mimesis, imitation, to another, representation. Although many anthropologists have hypothesized that language evolved to help humans describe their world, this ignores the fact that intra-species violence, not the environment, poses the greatest threat to human existence. Human representation, according to Gans, is not merely a "natural" evolutionary development of animal communication systems, but is a radical departure from it. The signifier implies a symbolic dimension that is not reducible to empirical referents.
Originary event
At the event of the origin of language, there was a proto-human hominid species which had gradually become more mimetic, presumably in response to environmental pressures including climate changes and competition for limited resources. Higher primates have dominance hierarchies which serve to limit and prevent destructive conflict within the social group. As individuals within the proto-human group became more mimetic, the dominance system broke down and became inadequate to control the threat of violence posed by conflictual mimesis.