More than ever in the era of the “posthuman” and ”transhuman,” the Humanities must retain their focus on the unity and uniqueness of the human. The perspective of Generative Anthropology (GA) is that the Humanities can only remain a credible source of knowledge production through the explicit theorization of the fundamental human categories of the scene of representation, language, the sacred, and the esthetic.

We will focus on the ramifications of the following questions:

• How does reflection on cultural texts produce knowledge of the human irreducible to that generated by the social and natural sciences?
• What are the most fruitful ways to articulate these two modes of knowledge?

Established and emerging scholars are warmly invited to join our interdisciplinary conversations at UCLA. Both theoretical / conceptual and textual /applied approaches are welcome. A few suggestions to begin the conversation:

-- reading texts--secular and sacred--as sources of anthropological knowledge: e.g Girard, Eliade, Iser
-- reconceptualizing the human scene as a unifying principle for the study of human institutions
-- rethinking the animal/human boundary through language: e.g. Tomasello, Pinker
-- theorizing the scenic aspects of ritual and market sociality: e.g. Polyani, Gellner, Appadurai, Baudrillard
-- “anthropologizing” theories of representation: e.g. Derrida, Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, Bateson
-- debating the limits between science and scientism and Snow's "two cultures": e.g. Dawkins, Tallis
-- writing History through esthetic history: e.g. Lukács, Auerbach, Goldmann, Deleuze
-- situating gender and standpoint theories: e.g. Harding, Butler, Foucault
-- mapping postcolonial theory and advocacy: e.g. Said, Bhaba, Amselle
-- attending to the social scene: social epistemology, actor-network theory, ethnography: e.g. Fuller, Latour

The Generative Anthropology Society and Conference, with the generous support of UCLA's Department of French and Francophone Studies, will host the sessions and exchanges. Please see our web site at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/GASC/gasc2013/index.htm (bit.ly/gasc2013 ). For more information about GASC and Generative Anthropology, visit http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/, home of Anthropoetics, UCLA's oldest Open Access journal. Proposals for papers of 20 to 25 minutes should be sent by attachment in MS-Word to: Ian Dennis, Department of English, University of Ottawa, at . Deadline: March 1, 2013.

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