From Paris to Los Angeles: Culture in Generative and Cognitive Perspectives WH-KON-E-FPLA

This course explores contemporary theories of culture through the intellectual trajectory that leads from France to California: from René Girard's mimetic theory, rooted in French literary and philosophical traditions, to Eric Gans's Generative Anthropology developed at UCLA. The course situates both approaches within broader developments in cognitive anthropology and cognitive theories of culture, drawing especially on the pioneering work of Ward Goodenough and the subsequent contributions of cognitive anthropologists and cognitive scientists of culture such as Roy D’Andrade, Naomi Quinn, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, Edwin Hutchins, Michael Tomasello, Harvey Whitehouse, Scott Atran, and Maurice Bloch.

Special attention will be given to contemporary research on cultural models, distributed cognition, shared intentionality, cultural transmission, ritual cognition, and the cognitive foundations of symbolic representation.
Students will examine culture as a system of meaning, representation, imitation, cognition, and symbolic mediation. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and Gans’s theory of the originary scene will be analyzed not only as anthropological explanations of the emergence of culture but also as productive frameworks for dialogue with contemporary cognitive approaches to human symbolicity, social learning, collective intentionality, and cultural evolution.

The course combines literary studies, anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, cognitive anthropology, and cognitive science, offering an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the emergence of culture, the evolution of symbolic thought, and the cognitive foundations of human sociality. By connecting French humanistic traditions with Californian developments in Generative Anthropology and contemporary cognitive theories of culture, the course provides students with a comprehensive perspective on how humans create, transmit, and transform cultural meaning.