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Notes -
Separate question, but:
What’s going on with that website?
It’s an online journal affiliated with UCLA. There’s an apparent interest in, or at least tolerance for, “other contemporary writers thinking outside of liberal terms.” This particular article was determined to parrot various reactionary talking points. I sampled a few previous issues, most of which were less strident (though it was interesting seeing the phrase “sexual market” in 2012). Each and every article I checked cited one or more works by Eric Gans, the editor.
A brief trawl of Wikipedia suggests that Anthropoetics seems to be the vehicle for “generative anthropology,” the editor’s pet field of postmodernism. The specifics of this theory blur the lines between historical speculation and Christian apologetics. I find it challenging to tell where the rhetorical flourishes end and the actual arguments begin.
Academia truly is a foreign country.
I used to come across Gans (and people quoting him) a fair bit back when I was still regularly arguing with atheists on the internet. He's an odd duck who just goes to show that you can in fact be a conservative in academia so long as you are an atheist and a post modernist, who endorses critical theory, and consistently votes for democrats. Of course for those outside academia the question arises of whether someone who ticks all those boxes is really "conservative" in any meaningful sense.
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