This issue demonstrates GA’s ability to renew itself; three contributors are first-timers and the fourth was first published in Anthropoetics only last year. The four articles are evenly divided in focus between GA and mimetic theory. In the latter category, Eugene Webb, who wrote on Girard and sacrifice in Anthropoetics 11, 1, contributes an article reflecting his current research on the interface between psychology and religion; and COV&R regular Matthew Taylor applies mimetic theory to the disquieting set of social pathologies that Japan has recently been host to. Greg Nixon, an academic freethinker with a particular interest in human origins, offers a challenge to GA’s originary hypothesis, and Amir Khan, who studied with Richard van Oort and wrote the original version of his article as an undergraduate at UBC, takes on the fundamental positions of cultural studies from a GA perspective.
About Our Contributors
Eugene Webb is Professor emeritus of Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has published books on Samuel Beckett, and on religion and modern literature. Other books include Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (1981) and Philosophers of Consciousness: : Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard (1988). His most recent book was The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France (1993). He is currently working on a book on religious thought and the psychology of worldviews.
Amir Khan is a Master’s student at the University of Windsor, Ontario. He first stumbled upon Originary Thinking as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, where a course called “Shakespeare and the Renaissance” accentuated the central tenets of GA so beautifully that Shakespeare and Generative Anthropology have been his two loves ever since.
Matthew Taylor lives with his family in Japan and is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya. He teaches classes in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training and content courses in media and culture. He has written and presented on EFL pedagogy, literature, chaos and complexity theory, and (in more recent years) René Girard, mimetic theory, and Jane Austen.
Greg Nixon has been an itinerant academic, earning degrees in Philosophy then Education in Canada followed by a doctorate in Curriculum Theory from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1992. Professoring in Teacher Education studies came next at SUNY Oswego, SUNY Geneseo, Prescott College in Arizona, online for National University (San Diego), and now back in Canada at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George where moose often walk on campus. He has published mainly in the areas of consciousness studies, language & memory, and archetypal psychology. He is currently working on a lurid novel. “Websty” here.