Mimetic Theory, Social Order, and the Question of Identity

This session brings together two papers that examine how social and cultural boundaries are constructed, maintained, and challenged. The first paper explores mimetic theory in a prison context, focusing on dynamics of purity, exclusion, and the challenge of extending compassion to the most marginalized. The second paper reconsiders the Vattimo–Girard debate through the lens of Henza culture, highlighting how more fluid forms of identity (“loose ontology”) open new possibilities for rethinking gender, metaphysics, and the role of difference in social life.

This essay reframes the debate between Vattimo and Girard—between ‘weak thought’ and anthropological facts—through Okinawa’s Henza culture where identities are established through a ‘loose’ ontology. This ontology presents a mythical-metaphysical reality that structures male-female complimentarity, though also allowing individuals to cross genders for cultural reasons. This essay contrasts ‘loose’ ontology with the ‘strong’ ontologies of western culture/religion where individual identities are ‘fixed’. For his part, Girard defines cultural intelligibility through acts of exclusion (scapegoating), though when the ‘other’ is not a fixed entity—even if an anthropological fact—new possibilities appear for metaphysics in relation to identity. Susan Sered’s reading of Henza culture enables a reimagining of the nominalist-realist dispute replayed in the Vattimo-Girard debate, and provides a solution akin to Martin Jay’s‘ magical nominalism’. We need neither get rid of metaphysics nor fully identify with it—something Girard had foreseen with profound theological consequences.