Eric Gans Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In 2015, Gans was found guilty of violating the UC Policy on Sexual Harassment and the Faculty Code of Conduct. In 2011–2012, Gans began sending unwanted and unsolicited emails to his female graduate student, professing his love for her. Gans acknowledged the feelings were one-sided: “There is no doubt an asymmetry in our affection”. According to the results of the Title IX investigation launched in response to the student’s complaints, Gans continued his advancements after his student repeatedly tried to get him to cease.

The Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC) is a scholarly association formed for the purpose of facilitating intellectual exchange amongst those interested in fundamental reflection on the human, originary thinking, and generative anthropology, including support for regular conferences. GASC was formally organized on June 24, 2010, at Westminster College, Salt Lake City, during the 4th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference.

Since 2007, Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC) has held an annual summer conference on generative anthropology. The 14th summer conference, which was to be held at Bar-Ilan University, was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gans invented a new science of human culture and origins he calls generative anthropology, based on the idea that the origin of language was a singular event and that the history of human culture is a genetic or “generative” development of that event. In a series of books and articles beginning with The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981), Gans has developed his ideas about human culture, language, and origins. In 1995, Gans founded (and continues to edit) the web-based journal Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology as a scholarly forum for research into human culture and origins based on generative anthropology and the closely related fundamental anthropology of René Girard. Since 1995, Gans has web-published his “Chronicles of Love and Resentment”, consisting of reflections on everything from popular culture, film, post-modernism, economics, contemporary politics, the Holocaust, philosophy, religion, and paleoanthropology. In 2010, the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference was created for sponsoring annual conferences dedicated to generative anthropology.

Generative anthropology grew out of Gans’s association with Girard at Johns Hopkins University. Gans was Girard’s first doctoral student, receiving his PhD in 1966. But it was only on the publication of Violence and the Sacred in 1972 that Gans became interested in Girard’s idea of mimetic desire and the connection between violence and the sacred in Girard’s work. The concept of mimetic desire forms one of the cornerstones of generative anthropology. Girard argues that human desire is essentially cultural or social in nature, and thus distinct from mere appetite, which is biological. For Girard, desire is triangular in structure, an imitation of the desire of another. Desire, therefore, leads to conflict, when two individuals attempt to possess the same object. In a group, this mimetic conflict typically escalates into a mimetic crisis which threatens the very existence of the group. For Girard, this conflict is resolved by the scapegoat mechanism, in which the destructive energies of the group are purged through the violence directed towards an arbitrarily selected victim. Girard sees the scapegoating mechanism as the origin of human culture and language.

Eric Lawrence Gans (born August 21, 1941) is an American literary scholar, philosopher of language, and cultural anthropologist. Since 1969, he has taught, and published on, 19th century literature, critical theory, and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.

Eric Lawrence Gans was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 21, 1941. He went to Columbia University at the age of 16 and received a B.A. in French (summa cum laude) in 1960. Going on to graduate work in Romance languages at Johns Hopkins University, he received his M.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D (with distinction) in 1966. After two years as an assistant professor at Indiana University, he moved to the Department of French at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1969, where he became full professor in 1976. In 1978, he served at Johns Hopkins University as a visiting professor. From 2007 until 2014 he was honored as a distinguished professor at UCLA until he resigned after being found in violation of the UCLA sexual misconduct policy. Since 2015, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCLA but is forbidden to teach or advise students.