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.
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 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.
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.
[citation needed] Human representation, according to Gans, is not merely a "natural" evolutionary development of animal communication systems, but is a radical departure from it.
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.
The attraction of the object exceeds the limits of simple appetite due to the operation of group mimesis, essentially an expression of competition or rivalry.
Generative Anthropology theorizes that when this mimetic instinct becomes so powerful that it seems to possess a sacred force endangering the survival of the group, the resultant intra-species pressure favours the emergence of the sign.
Things are scarce and consequently objects of potential contention; signs are abundant because they can be reproduced at will" (Gans, Originary Thinking 9).
By including the sparagmos in the originary hypothesis, Gans intends to incorporate Girard's insights into scapegoating and the sacrificial (see Signs of Paradox 131–151).
The conditions for the generation of significance are subject to historical evolution, so that the formal articulation of the sign always includes a dialogical relationship to past forms.
GASC was formally organized on June 24, 2010 at Westminster College, Salt Lake City during the 4th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference.