Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University
Warsaw, Poland
For many years, GA has been inspiring scholars to do research in their specialties from its perspective. It has become a unifying factor for various fields of humanities, regardless of differences in methodology or different scientific assumptions. Gans calls Generative Anthropology a new way of thinking, which is a very telling expression. He points to the fact that GA provides an exceptional platform for the confrontation of the basic concepts of language and culture with contemporary simplifications that lose sight of the core of human existence.
A new way of thinking requires bold penetration of the generative areas of human thought, where “the underlying function of human culture is the avoidance of conflict through the deferral of resentment” (Gans, Originary Thinking). GA as a new way of thinking, focused on language and culture, can be applied in interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary studies. This perspective allows a comprehensive understanding of scientific queries across subjects, disciplines, and even social praxis as having the deferral of violence as their universal objective.
This was the overall picture of the 12th annual GASC conference, held at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland in 2018. It is worth mentioning that for the second time a European country was chosen as the venue for the conference.The conference in Warsaw, like all the previous GASC conferences, gathered scholars from around the world for whom GA’s minimal scene of origin constituted a “generative point of analysis,” interpretation, demonstration, and discussion of the whole gamut of intellectual and ethical values.
GA does not set any limits to the means people invent in order to defer violence, but rather points to what transcends all disciplines and unites them in acceptance of its assumptions. The ensemble of conference papers and debates, representing literary, religious, sociological, philosophical, as well as anthropological studies, whether in macro- or micro-contexts, make up, to quote Gans’s Originary Thinking, a body of “ethically responsible thought, today as at the origin of humanity….”