Mark Anspach

An American anthropologist and social theorist based in Europe, Mark Anspach has been affiliated for the past twenty years with the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée at the École Polytechnique in Paris. After graduating from Harvard with a B.A. in Social Studies in 1981, he went on to earn a doctoral degree in anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 1988 and a Ph.D. in French at Stanford in 1991. His research has focused on the ritual aspects of exchange, on social and cognitive mechanisms of circular causality, and on the role of "unanimity minus one" in the formation of religious mythology and psychotic delusions. He has contributed articles to a number of books, including (in English) Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World (ed. M. Juergensmeyer, Frank Cass, 1991), Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality (ed. J.-P. Dupuy, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, 1998), and Expanding the Economic Concept of Exchange (ed. C. Gerschlager, Kluwer, 2001). Mark Anspach is the author of a book on vengeance, gift and market exchange, À Charge de Revanche: Figures Élémentaires de la Réciprocité (Seuil, 2002), and the editor of Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire by René Girard (Stanford University Press, 2004).