André Leroi-Gourhan from material civilisations to technical behaviour
This lecture aims to introduce the major contributions by French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) to the field of technology – that is, the study of techniques in the human and social sciences. In the course of his career path – coming at several junctures in contact with his contemporary Claude Lévi-Strauss – Leroi-Gourhan shifted his interests from a museum-based, object-centred "civilizational" approach, including questions of borrowings, migrations and inventions, to a psychologically informed focus on technical behaviour, drawing notably on animal studies, cybernetics and experimental archaeology to formulate the currently popular notion of "chaîne opératoire".
