Review article
RENÉ GIRARD’S FUNDAMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND THEORY OF CULTURE
Rade Kalanj
; Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Th is paper attempts to give a short overview of the fundamental features of René Girard’s cultural and anthropological concepts. It beings with the idea that not enough is known about his concepts in our academic and cultural circles, little has been written about it and a very small number of Girard’s texts have been translated into Croatian language. Th e paper considers Girard’s anthropological thought as a type of
discourse that can be marked as the fundamental anthropology, however, even within these boundaries, his
approach remains specifi c and he was therefore treated over the last forty or so years, with more or less respect,
as an original, widely read as well as a controversial author. Th e paper, fi rst of all, establishes Girard’s
specifi c intellectual profi le, and then goes on to discuss his key terms: mimesis, mimetism, mimetic mechanism,
mimetic process, mimetic rivalry, mimetic violence, mimetic crisis, mimetic sacrifi ce, ritual sacrifi ce,
scapegoat, etc., and, in the end, off ers some criticism of Girard’s anthropology. Th e paper focuses especially
on Girard’s defi nition of culture, i.e. his fundamental anthropological hypothesis about the sources, origin
and formation of human culture. It attempts to show that Girard, as an advocate of the fundamental anthropology,
tried to fi nd and interpret the fi rst and original sources from which human culture developed.
Keywords
culture; imitation; mimetic mechanism; mimetic violence; Christianity; religion; sacrifice; scapegoat; original event
Hrčak ID:
67442
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2011.
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