RENÉ GIRARD’S FUNDAMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND THEORY OF CULTURE

Abstract

This 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, first of all, establishes Girard’s
specific intellectual profile, and then goes on to discuss his key terms: mimesis, mimetism, mimetic mechanism, mimetic process, mimetic rivalry, mimetic violence, mimetic crisis, mimetic sacrifice, ritual sacrifice, scapegoat, etc., and, in the end, off ers some criticism of Girard’s anthropology. The 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 find and interpret the fi rst and original sources from which human culture developed.