Seitenhistorie

Ingold, T. (2021) ‘Posthuman Prehistory’, Nature & Culture, 16(1), pp. 83–103. doi: 10.3167/nc.2020.160106.

ABSTRACT: This article asks what part prehistory could play in establishing a posthumanist settlement, alternative to the humanism of the Enlightenment. We begin by showing how Enlightenment thinking split the concept of the human in two, into species and condition, establishing a point of origin where the history of civilization rises from its baseline in evolution. Drawing on the thinking of the thirteenth-century mystic, Ramon Llull, we present an alternative vision of human becoming according to which life carries on through a process of continuous birth, wherein even death and burial hold the promise of renewal. In prehistory, this vision is exemplified in the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, in his exploration of the relation between voice and hand, and of graphism as a precursor to writing. We conclude that the idea of graphism holds the key to a prehistory that not so much precedes as subtends the historic.

Johnson, C. (2020). Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology. Paragraph, 43(1), 10–44. https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2020.0318

ABSTRACT: The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Lenay, C. (2018). Leroi-Gourhan: Technical Trends and Human Cognition. In: Loeve, S., Guchet, X., Bensaude Vincent, B. (eds) French Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89518-5_13

Abstract: The work of Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) has had a strong impact on twentieth century French thought. To account for the origin of our human capacities of memory, anticipation and language, Leroi-Gourhan builds on a “Technology” understood as the study of the functional linkage between the organisms and their environment. In continuity with the biological world, without sudden event (by miracle or by chance), it is to explain the gradual separation of social memory by the interplay of technical innovations that will allow free thinking detached from the immediate situation. The fulcrum of this liberation is the tool: both a biological fact and a movable organ, it permits the passage from the biological world to the human world.

Roman D. (2020) Leroi-Gourhan, André. In: Smith C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_715

André Leroi-Gourhan was one of the greatest prehistorians of the twentieth century. He is well known for his significant contributions to archaeological method and theory and to the study of rock art.