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.
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.
