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André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology
A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1960s
Edited by Nathan Schlanger and Translated by Nils F. Schott
$65
The newest publication in BGC’s Cultural Histories of the Material World series, André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology features 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.
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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.”
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André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) was a French archaeologist, paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, and anthropologist.
Nathan Schlanger is professor of archaeology at the École nationale des chartes, Paris.
Nils F. Schott is a lecturer in the Euro-American Program of the Collège universitaire de Sciences Po, Reims.
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