The Materiality of the Socio-Cultural Life in the Anthropology of A. Leroi-Gourhan

Abstract

André Leroi-Gourhan (1911 - 1986) was a famous French scientist, a specialist in paleontology, archeology, ethnology, history of technique and art history. The article discusses the ideas from his book “Gesture and speech”, revealing the materiality of socio-cultural life as it develops in human evolution, technological and social development. New encyclopedias say that the division of culture on “material” and “immaterial” loses its former certainty. This does not mean that these concepts are now redundant. There is a class of phenomena for which the idea of “materiality” is relevant to the full extent. In the social world, the active role belongs not only to the people. People have been organizing artifacts, but the artifacts do not agree with their role of passive objects. We have reciprocal process here, when material world organizes human beings and vice versa. The things of the world that can change people’s behavior, can be called socio-cultural materiality. The habit to contrast “material” with “immaterial” culture in social knowledge demonstrates the persistence of unilinear understanding of history, indicates a dualistic opposition of body and soul in understanding of human nature and dualism of subject and object in epistemology. Leroi-Gourhan’s book proposes foundations allowing to avoid the opposition between “material” and “immaterial” in this sphere. From a paleontological point of view, it is important to reveal a common origin of gestures and speech rather than juxtapose them. For A. Leroi-Gourhan the meaning of the gestures lies in the function they perform, regardless of the meanings which have the parties in communication, regardless of the need for a symbolic code and the addressee who “reads” the gestures as signs. There is no reason to oppose “language of words” and “language of gestures”. Leroi-Gourhan had an impact on the development of the “material turn” in the social sciences, the followers of this movement reject the concepts of “material” and “immaterial” having the status of substantial categories; they argue that there is no opposition to socio-cultural materiality at all.