This issue of Anthropoetics illustrates both the intellectual scope and the international appeal of Generative Anthropology; its four authors are from four different countries other than the USA, and their subjects range from Aristotelian poetics to African victimology. Jean-Loup Amselle’s focus on resentment and the victimary displays an affinity with GA that has been remarked on in the work of this distinguished French anthropologist. Fabio Brotto, a major proponent of GA in Italy, adds to the variety of our literary analyses with a study of a work many have called the major Italian novel of the 20th century. Christopher Morrissey, known to many readers for his activity on the GAlist, derives a wealth of conclusions from an anomaly in Aristotle’s discussion of the Oedipus, and Raymond Swing, in his second article for Anthropoetics, attempts a bold dialectical synthesis of anthropological and natural-scientific thought, from neurology to the anthropology of religion to GA.
About our Contributors
Jean-Loup Amselle is attached to the Centre d’études africaines (Center for African Studies) and directs the doctoral program in anthropology at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales – Faculty of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences). He also edits the Cahiers d’etudes africaines. His main areas of interest are historical and political anthropology, Africa, ethnicity, identity, hybridity, multiculturalism, and African contemporary art. He has done field work in Mali, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. His main publications are: Ed. (with E. M’Bokolo), Au coeur de l’ethnie (Paris, La découverte, 1985); Logiques métisses, Anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris, Payot, 1990, 1999), English translation, Mestizo Logics, Anthropology of Identity in Africa and elsewhere, Stanford, 1998); Vers un multiculturalisme français, L’empire de la coutume, Paris, Aubier, 1996, English translation Affirmative Exclusion, Cultural and the Rule of Custom in France, Cornell University Press, 2003; Branchements, Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, Flammarion, 2001.
Fabio Brotto graduated in philosophy at the University of Padua in 1974 with a dissertation on John Dewey’s gnoseology. He teaches Italian, Latin and Comparative literature at Liceo Ginnasio Antonio Canova in Treviso, Italy. His recent publications are Divenire Nulla (Becoming Nothing), Giacobino, Susegana 2000, and Una prospettiva antropologica per la letteratura (An Anthropological Perspective for Literature), Antonio Canova working papers n.1, Treviso 2002. With his web site www.bibliosofia.net he does his best to make GA and mimetic theory known in Italy.
Christopher S. Morrissey (PGP email: Key ID 0x6DD0285F) teaches Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Mythology at Simon Fraser University, where he also studies mimetic theory and generative anthropology as a Special Arrangements Ph.D. candidate. His area of research is Aristotle, Greek tragedy, and Shakespeare, in which he is preparing a book that integrates Aristotelian thought with the work of René Girard and Eric Gans. Previous studies have focused on Aristotle’s Physics. Other interests include music, cinema and computer hacking. His consulting company, More C Communications Inc., specializes in database projects, and has developed a proprietary program for generating concordances of Greek and Latin texts. He also works with Prof. David C. Mirhady on NOMOI, the Bibliography Database on Ancient Greek Law, which is part of a larger research project on Athens’ Democratic Judges.
Raymond Swing studied music at the conservatory in Aalborg, Denmark and theory and history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, DDR. He taught in Denmark as a schoolteacher for thirty years. Since retiring in 1987, he has devoted his energies to his interdisciplinary interests in philosophy and what he calls Formal and Generative Dialectics, based partly on Marx but also involving physics, biology, economics, history, culture, and the philosophy of science. He is a contributor to the Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften. In the course of summer 2003 some of his essays and articles (English and Danish) will be available athttp://home20.inet.tele.dk/swing.