A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1960s
By André Leroi-Gourhan
Edited by Nathan Schlanger
Translated by Nils F. Schott
A selection of Leroi-Gourhan’s most important texts—many translated into English for the first time.
André Leroi-Gourhan is undoubtedly one of the most acclaimed figures of twentieth-century anthropology and archaeology. In France, his intellectual importance rivals that of the Claude Lévi-Strauss, yet Leroi-Gourhan’s major contributions are almost entirely unknown in the Anglophone world. This collection seeks to change that. This selection highlights some of his chief influences, such as elaborating a theory of technology, which argues that material culture focuses on the object in use and how use is a dynamic feature that has specific consequences for human evolution and human society. With serious ramifications for our understanding of material culture, putting Leroi-Gourhan’s thinking about technology into English will have an immediate and transformative impact on material culture studies.
Published in collaboration with Bard Graduate Center – Cultural Histories of the Material World.
Extracts from the Introduction by Nathan Schlanger
“There are indeed several substantial differences at play between Anglo-American ‘material culture studies’ and the French technologie culturelle or anthropologie des techniques, largely inspired by Leroi-Gourhan. A different emphasis on consumption on the one side and production on the other is accompanied, in the latter case, by a greater willingness to pay attention to the more material or deterministic aspects of technical realities and processes, and a corresponding commitment to their painstaking empirical study.”
“Several original aspects of Leroi-Gourhan’s technological propositions have hardly aged at all and have actually increased their potential for generating new research questions and perspectives today—be it regarding the material efficiency of technical actions, the ethnographic and sociological appraisal of the chaîne opératoire, or indeed the development of cognitive archaeology.”
“From striding toes to upright posture to freed hands and expanding crania, Leroi-Gourhan’s conception of the incremental evolution of technicity clearly linked and intertwined anatomical and behavioral causes and effects. To a large extent, this feedback conception reflected his wide-ranging interests in machines and indeed in cybernetic mechanisms of control and communication. His predilection for “new technologies” is long attested, including documentary cinema, large data sets in the humanities, and indeed computers as both tools and metaphors for human thought.”
André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) was a French archaeologist, paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, and anthropologist.
Nathan Schlanger is professor of archaeology at the Ecole nationale des chartes, Paris.
Nils F. Schott is a lecturer in the Euro-American Program of the Collège universitaire de Sciences Po, Reims.
© 2023
ISBN: 9781941792148 [cloth]
ISBN: 9781914363276 [PDF]
350 pages | 6.25 x 9.25
$65
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Preface xi
Part I. Reading Technology—Introducing Leroi-Gourhan
Nathan Schlanger
One: Presenting Leroi-Gourhan—Presenting the Anthology
Two: The Making of Technology
Three: Drawing the Gestures, Digging the Text—Leroi-Gourhan and Prehistoric Archaeology
Four: The Reception and Relevance of Leroi-Gourhan’s Technology
Part II. Selected Texts, 1936–1962
André Leroi-Gourhan
One: Ethnology and Museography, 1936
Two: Man and Nature (Elementary Forms of Human Activity), 1936
Three: Man and Matter, 1943 (Revised 1971; Selection)
Four: Milieu and Techniques, 1945 (Selection)
Five: Note on the Relations between Technology and Sociology, 1949
Six: Material Civilization and Spiritual Life, 1950
Seven: Homo faber . . . Homo sapiens, 1952
Eight: Techniques and Society among Animals and Humans, 1957
Nine: Technical Behavior among Animals and Humans, 1957
Ten: The Technological Illusion, 1960
Eleven: Ethnology and the Making of a New Humanism, 1962
Bibliography
Index
Permissions
The translation in the open-access PDF of this book, attached above, is made available by Hau Books through a Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 4.0 International (Attribution Required / Non-Commercial Use / No Derivatives). Additional rights clearance is necessary for third-party content within.