Parallel structures: André Leroi-Gourhan,Claude Lévi-Strauss,and the making of French structural anthropology

The formation of a young anthropologist

André Leroi-Gourhan was born in Paris in 1911, and raised by his grandparents. ¹ His grandfather worked in a factory producing supplies for the navy, and was the treasurer of a naturalist society outside of Paris near the Fontainebleu woods, where he often took André for nature walks (Soulier, 2018: 23). The young boy developed an early interest in the natural sciences, but was an unimpressive student, considered by his teachers to be a ‘dunce’. At age 14, when school was no longer mandated by the state, he dropped out and worked odd jobs to help out his grandparents. He made frequent trips to Paris’s famous flea markets, and soon amassed a rich collection of artifacts and antiques, including bones. An early photo of Leroi-Gourhan shows the teenager in a high-collared lab coat standing before shelves lined with human skulls. Cradled under his arm is a skull that Leroi-Gourhan is carefully measuring (Soulier, 2003: 34). Around this time, he enrolled for courses at the École d’Anthropologie, Paris’s leading institution for physical anthropology (Leroi-Gourhan, 1982: 28). One of its areas of focus was the measuring of skulls, or craniometry, a practice developed and professionalized by Paul Broca, France’s most prominent 19th-century anthropologist. For Broca and his disciples, cranial capacity was thought to be linked to brain volume, and therefore to intelligence. Since they also believed in the separate origin of human races – ‘polygenism’ – craniometry was a way of indexing the comparative development and intelligence of different races. Broca was a progressive figure, and thought that polygenism would lead to greater tolerance of other races (Schiller, 1979: 139). The École d’anthropologie was co-created by Broca in 1875, and his work strongly guided its teaching well into the 20th century, when Leroi-Gourhan was a student there. It was deeply formative to Leroi-Gourhan’s intellectual trajectory. Even after his retirement, some 50 years later, he ventured that although craniometry had ‘aged rather than matured, its indispensable role could not be denied. This is why, from time to time, I return to the initial source of my concerns’ (quoted in Soulier, 2003: 34).

Leroi-Gourhan received a diploma from the École in 1929, and from there branched out into new areas of study. He took Russian language and literature courses at the Collège de France, this particular interest having been stoked by his encounters with the ‘white’ Russian émigrés that had settled in his right-bank neighbourhood after the Bolshevik Revolution (Soulier, 2018: 24). He enrolled in Chinese language and culture courses at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, and was particularly enthralled with the lectures of Marcel Granet, a leading French Sinologist and student of Émile Durkheim. Leroi-Gourhan also trained as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Forney, a Parisian municipal library specializing in arts and crafts. There he befriended the Africanist Debora Lifchitz, who introduced him to Marcel Mauss, nephew of Durkheim and the pre-eminent French social scientist of his generation. Granet and Mauss worked primarily in the cultural, as opposed to the ‘physical’, area of the discipline and helped open new frontiers of learning for Leroi-Gourhan, especially in religious sociology, myth, technology, and linguistics. They also encouraged – as orientalists themselves – Leroi-Gourhan’s growing interest in the Eurasian cultures of the global North, sending him to the Musée Guimet (specializing in Asian art) and the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (France’s first anthropological museum, opened in 1878) for further instruction (Soulier, 2003: 34). At the Trocadéro, he volunteered his services to Paul Rivet, a former doctor turned anthropologist of American cultures who had trained in Broca’s methods of physical anthropology. Impressed by the young Leroi-Gourhan’s enthusiasm, Rivet assigned him to work with Anatole Lewitsky, a young linguistic ethnologist exiled from Russia, on developing the museum’s collections of Inuit artifacts. Lewitsky taught him the classification and description of objects, and Leroi-Gourhan was charged with organizing an exhibition of Inuit material that attracted widespread admiration within the field, and also landed him a key role in planning the Arctic department for the Trocadéro’s institutional successor, the Museum of Man, opened in 1937 (Conklin, 2013: 135–6).

The transformation of the Trocadéro into the Museum of Man had been in the making for about a decade, and was part of a broader initiative by Rivet and Mauss to modernize Paris’s ethnological institutions. They sought, first, to create a state-of-the-art museum that would attract a wider audience, and second, to reform educational standards so as to professionalize the discipline (in accordance with international developments in the field). Toward the latter end, they founded the Institut d’ethnologie at the Sorbonne in 1925. This body was subsidized by the Ministry of the Colonies and, in addition to publishing monographs in the field and offering cutting-edge courses, sponsored anthropological missions overseas (Conklin, 2013: 202). Rivet and Mauss coordinated the Institut’s course offerings with workshops at the Museum of Man to establish a new certificate programme in ‘ethnology’: museum work would give students more hands-on experience with the materials and artifacts of ethnology (Rivet’s specialty), while the Institut’s courses would provide a more theoretical overview of the discipline (Mauss’s specialty). Leroi-Gourhan was among the first crop of students to earn this certificate in the early 1930s, and recalled the programme’s founding as ‘a decisive moment for French ethnology’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1983c: 92).

Motivating this institutional reconfiguration was Rivet and Mauss’s plan to merge two different currents of French anthropology: ethnography (or what Anglo-American practitioners usually call ‘cultural anthropology’) and physical anthropology. The result, to be known simply as ‘ethnology’, would aspire to a complete description of human life, which for Rivet and Mauss entailed studying the somatic, linguistic, and cultural characteristics of all races. In this respect, ‘ethnology’ was positioned in reaction to the ‘nineteenth-century tradition of privileging racial science over the study of language and customs’ (Conklin, 2013: 22). Indeed, Rivet began to entertain doubts about the scientific accuracy of craniometric studies during the 1930s. He claimed that of the three categories necessary for understanding human life, the somatic one was the least important. Political circumstances had almost certainly affected his views. A committed socialist, Rivet responded to the rise of fascism by founding the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes in 1934, and by challenging fascistic doctrines of racial superiority and racial purity. Nevertheless, he continued to believe that ‘races’ existed, and that they constituted a legitimate field of inquiry for serious ethnologists (Jamin, 1989: 280). Likewise, he never abandoned the view – nor did Mauss – that ethnology worked hand in hand with the empire to protect native cultures and lift them out of anarchy. ² Some of their most prominent students came to occupy key positions in the empire, notably Jacques Soustelle, a specialist in pre-Columbian civilizations who was named governor general of Algeria in 1955. Soustelle became infamous when, after being dismissed from his post for opposing de Gaulle’s call for Algerian independence, he joined the right-wing terrorist group, the Organisation de l’armée sécrète, and fought for the preservation of French Algeria.

Mauss, for his part, dealt with questions of a more sociological nature in his writing, and did not have extensive training, as did Rivet, in physical anthropology. Still, some of his most important work centred on what he called the ‘techniques of the body’, which studied how different societies imposed specific practices on the individual body (Noland, 2009: 20). Mauss broke down bodily movements into a series of culturally constructed gestures, showing how, for example, different societies swaddled infants or positioned their bodies while sleeping. For Mauss (1950: 372), it was clear that ‘the body is the primary and most natural instrument of human beings’, and, as such, could be seen as a collection of different ‘technical processes’. Mauss’s analysis of the body was primarily cultural: social habits penetrated into the very tissue of one’s body, affecting movements and behaviours one seldom thought of as culturally determined. This way of looking at the body as a cultural instrument was enlightening for the young Leroi-Gourhan. And while he would later attack Mauss for ignoring the way that the body was shaped by the material environment, and would eventually fall out with his mentor, ‘techniques of the body’ marked a definite turn in Leroi-Gourhan’s thinking.

Rivet and Mauss trained an extraordinary generation of French anthropologists, including Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, Germaine Tillion, Jacques Soustelle, George-Henri Rivière, Anatole Lewitsky, Boris Vildé, and of course Leroi-Gourhan. Lewitsky and Vildé were executed by the Nazis, but the rest went on to have distinguished post-war careers in the French academy and the empire. In line with the general shift in the field away from physical anthropology, these thinkers devoted their work to the study of cultural dynamics, most typically to questions relating to myth and language. This held true for Lévi-Strauss too, who was on the fringes of the Mauss–Rivet circle during the 1930s. Unlike Leroi-Gourhan, he came late to anthropology, having first studied philosophy and law before realizing, around 1933, that anthropology could reach a category ‘beyond the rational’, namely the ‘meaningful, which is the highest mode of being of the rational’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 55). He taught himself the basics of the discipline while lecturing in sociology. The rest he picked up from his two fieldwork expeditions to the interior of Brazil in the mid 1930s, and from his extensive reading of American anthropologists, especially the work of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, and Robert Lowie – authors not widely read in France, and probably not by Leroi-Gourhan (Debaene, 2010). Lévi-Strauss was proud of his unorthodox training in the discipline, later boasting, ‘During the whole of my period as a student, I never frequented the Museum of Man or the Institut d’ethnologie, nor did I attend a single ethnography class’ (quoted in Johnson, 2003: 167, n. 22). This was a stretching of the truth. He worked at the Museum of Man in 1939 cataloguing its South American collections, and received from it generous financial support for his fieldwork. His statement also overlooked how deeply he was influenced in his thinking by Mauss, whose notion of the ‘total social fact’ proved instrumental to Lévi-Strauss’s conception of structure, and whose sociological approach in general continued to animate his work, as was made evident in his essay of 1950, ‘Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1950).

Leroi-Gourhan, for his part, was the sole disciple of Mauss and Rivet to have fully adopted their conception of ‘ethnology’, and attempted to link the physical and cultural areas of the discipline. When Leroi-Gourhan’s first book, La civilisation du renne [Reindeer-Age Civilization], appeared in 1936, it showed an unusual talent for multidisciplinary thinking. The book was organized around a central theme, the domestication of reindeer in Eurasia during the Upper Palaeolithic era (around 15,000 years ago). For Leroi-Gourhan, this one technical feat had far-reaching social implications, affecting the way people conceived their relationship with nature, moved from place to place, incorporated technologies into their regimes of work, and represented nature in art. The oscillation between these registers in Civilisation could be disorienting. In one moment, Leroi-Gourhan was reflecting on the ‘realism’ of cave art, in another tracing the evolutionary history of tundra dwellers and classifying them into different racial categories: ‘In Europe, the Eskimoids and the Cro-magnon race; in Eastern Europe up through Siberia, the dolichocephalic peoples, who are related to the Cro-magnon race but mixed with elements not yet well known’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1936b: 81). The work caught the attention of the historian Lucien Febvre. Reviewing it in the pages of Annales, Febvre complimented Leroi-Gourhan’s wide-ranging intellectual ambitions before calling Civilisation a ‘disordered abundance of learning’ – the ‘work of a young man’ in need of ‘more rigor in the way of logic and reasoning’ (Febvre, 1937: 212). Mauss, the book’s dedicatee, wounded Leroi-Gourhan with his assessment: as his instructor, Mauss felt like ‘a chicken that had hatched a duck’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1982: 35).

What for Febvre and Mauss was a limitation, Leroi-Gourhan regarded as a strength: Being undisciplined was a way of opening new frontiers of scholarship, of being cross-disciplinary. Civilisation established the metaphor that would guide all Leroi-Gourhan’s future work, that of ‘coordinating’ different fields of study: ‘This book is an attempt at coordination, whose rushed character will not escape criticism. To explain human gestures my starting point is the weather, rivers, birds’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1936b: 10). ‘Coordination’ became a kind of signature-word for Leroi-Gourhan, whose value lay in bringing together the physical and the cultural (Leroi-Gourhan, 1946, 1952, 1982). The natural world, which included flora, fauna, the physical environment, and the human body itself, could not be ignored in any comprehensive analysis of human nature: hence the importance of starting with ‘weather, rivers, birds’. Myth and language were important, but only pieces of a much larger picture. ‘Coordination’ could offer a more complete and totalizing picture of human society.

In this early stage of Leroi-Gourhan’s career, it was already becoming clear how he might accomplish this analytical unity: by placing technical objects at the centre of his thinking. In a short piece from 1936, he wrote,

Ethnology borrows from a great number of disciplines: linguistics, technology studies, mythology, sociology, aesthetics, all of whose specialists do their research in relative isolation. On the ground, the scholar of technology is unaware of the sociologist’s statistics; the linguist feels free to ignore decorative art. But all are linked; a crossroads brings all of them together – the object. The object materializes a technique, keeps the imprint of a myth, possesses a social role, and an aesthetic sense. (Leroi-Gourhan, 1936c: 27)

In 1936, Leroi-Gourhan married a fellow student within the Mauss–Rivet circle, Arlette Royer. In early 1937, the couple departed for Japan, André having won a two-year scholarship in a pilot exchange programme with the Franco-Japanese Institute of Kyoto (financed by the Japanese government). He knew little of the language, but taught himself enough on the transoceanic voyage to get by. His time in Japan was one of unceasing activity. In addition to teaching French language courses at the Institute of Kyoto, he acted as a buyer of Japanese art for the Musée de l’homme and the Guimet and Cernuschi museums in Paris (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 8; Soulier, 2011). To deepen his understanding of material culture, Leroi-Gourhan met with Japanese artisans, and closely documented their techniques. He also did an impressive amount of ethnographic fieldwork, spending a year with Arlette among the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1937 and 1938. He bragged that no other anthropologist had explored as much of the island as he, not even George Montandon, the leading specialist of the Ainu, and later Vichy’s authority on racial questions (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 46).

The materials from his Japan years were collected and published in 2004. The letters and manuscript pages reveal that Leroi-Gourhan had plans to write at least two works from his research in Japan, one of which, an ethnography of the Ainu, was completed and published posthumously by Arlette; another of which, a monograph on Japanese material culture, was abandoned (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 145–377). More importantly, the documents give the impression of a thinker undergoing an intellectual crisis, one that seems to have been provoked, at least in part, by the heterogeneity of his interests, and a feeling that his work was lacking in unity. For instance, his study of the Ainu was to be written in the style of a traditional ethnography, and required a holistic, sociological approach to Ainu life. At the same time, he continued to be interested in the material productions of ‘primitive’ peoples. This kind of work – as already demonstrated in his writings on Eurasian and Chinese art – involved a particular kind of comparative analysis. Leroi-Gourhan typically collected hundreds of examples of a design or handmade object, and then compared their variations over time and space (Leroi-Gourhan, 1936a, 1943a). Whenever possible, he attempted to periodize the development and transmission of a certain technique.

Finally, while in Japan, Leroi-Gourhan carried on with his craniometric studies. ‘By chance I was brought an Ainu skull’, he wrote. ‘It’s the only skull I have seen in two years’. For Leroi-Gourhan, a proper ethnology could not omit biological considerations. His notes on the Ainu were full of them: ‘Blondes, redheads among the Ainu? I find this hard to believe. Those that I’ve seen, several hundred, were very homogeneous and of a type that appeared to me to exclude the possibility of blond.…These people, who work in a limited set of trades, have a particular physical type that is obvious enough for me to recognize if there are many of them’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 51, 69–70). Leroi-Gourhan did not entirely share Rivet’s politics. He served in the Resistance for a brief stint – for which he was twice decorated – but joined neither Rivet’s anti-fascist committee, nor the famous Resistance group that formed at the Museum of Man in 1940. If anything, he lent his sympathies to the monarchist Right in the 1920s and 1930s before abandoning them for aesthetic preoccupations:

To give you a sense of my opinions, I leaned to the right until the day I preferred the Chinese bronzes to the leaden canes [used as a weapon in street fights by the extreme right-wing youth group, the Camelots du roi, notably in the 6 February riot of 1934]. It was not in the hope of seeing tournaments or French-style breeches being restored, but by a surge of romantic sympathy for Henri IV’s poule-au-pot and the account books of Louis XI. (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 56)

A new structural paradigm

These discrepant projects, all requiring different analytical procedures, were pulling Leroi-Gourhan in different directions, and seemed to induce a state of intellectual paralysis. The international political climate was worsening too: in September 1938, after the Munich settlement, Arlette returned to France, carrying half the objects André had purchased for the museums. His letters took on a sombre, restless cast. Professional frustrations seemed to bother him more than usual, and he began to see the faults in his mentors. Granet was a kindly person, whose ‘obsession with constructing’, however, ‘takes precedence over caution’. He owed much to Mauss, but felt that they ‘no longer spoke the same language’. Indeed, he now said openly what was apparent to discerning readers of Civilisation, that

there is in Durkheim a disposition that does not accord with my documents. The sociology of Mauss and Granet is above all an affair of texts and oral traditions, or rites, myths, and a large part of my sources are beyond their scope. (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 54, 81, 80)

Thus, with his years of apprenticeship ended, Leroi-Gourhan now had to chart his own path and develop this method. On the one hand, he abhorred the idea of narrow specialization, mocking so many experts of ‘the fourteenth-century Malagasy owl’ as ‘true monstrosities’. On the other hand, the cross-disciplinary generalism of someone like Mauss was desirable, but no longer possible in an age of growing professionalization. To make matters worse, in March 1939, Leroi-Gourhan was forced to cut his Japan research short, and returned to France through the port of Marseille in May. With the outbreak of war in Europe, he was conscripted into the navy as an interpreter. After a few disastrous missions in the Mediterranean, he was demobilized and rejoined his family, who fled to the Bas-Pyrenées. With time on his hands, and equipped with his university lecture notes, Leroi-Gourhan reconsidered the meaning of his work.

He found new inspiration in philosophy, metaphysics in particular. Anthropology and philosophy had historically shared a great deal in common, he discovered, but the Durkheimian tradition, wedded to scientific rationalism, had driven them apart. Philosophy offered what anthropology alone could not, a unified perspective on the world: ‘In order to understand a given civilization, one must adopt the old program of philosophical work, which attempts to apprehend the totality of the material world’. He now felt that his work had been unconsciously moving toward the ‘reconciliation of anthropology and philosophy’. The key inspiration was Henri Bergson, whose philosophical method Leroi-Gourhan attempted to summarize: the idea was

to take a simple fact, not at random, but guided by a view that seeks as a goal to make itself total; to determine it rigorously; to follow it in its numerous variations and consequences; and to then return it into the general flow. I believe firmly that this is the only current way to obtain general facts. (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 95–6)

Bergson thus provided Leroi-Gourhan with a richer vocabulary for understanding changes in the natural world and their impact on human development. Leroi-Gourhan explained that this was not some Platonic story about perfect forms or archetypes. He gave the example of a plow that changed form as it came into contact with different materials: ‘The evolution of the plow is not an idea that is general, permanent, or omnipresent in time; it is more like a fan…whose movement is born from the contact of the possible with the real, a choice which is not made spontaneously, but from the paths of least resistance in that particular milieu’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 2004: 102). Borrowing a term from Bergson, Leroi-Gourhan called this propensity of matter to be formless and change shape when acted upon in a certain way ‘tendency’. The local circumstances in which matter encountered new facts and obstacles he referred to as ‘milieu’. He wrote of their relationship, ‘There is an absolute human tendency, which with every obstacle – social, climatic, or dietary – discovers a method for securing or approximating equilibrium. This is the question of milieu’ (ibid.: 102). Together, these two concepts armed Leroi-Gourhan with a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between matter and intelligence, and laid the basis for his renewed intellectual programme. Thus, Bergson’s influence on Leroi-Gourhan appears to have been profound, enabling him to find an inner unity within his divergent pursuits, but also to place evolutionary dynamism at the centre of his thinking – the part that never meshed with the ‘Durkheimian tradition’ that had become so influential.

At last, in the middle of World War II, Leroi-Gourhan published Évolution et techniques, an ambitious work that tied together the loose ends of the Japanese manuscripts, and marked out new structuralist territory. The inventory of artifacts that was to have provided the backbone of his unpublished work on Japan was here expanded and repurposed: it now served as the foundation for a broader conception of human culture, oriented by his recent adoption of Bergson’s philosophy. The first volume, L’homme et la matière (Leroi-Gourhan, 1943b), offered an anthropological grammar of technology – mostly of primitive tools and weapons, grouped according to the basic physical force implied in their use. Contra Mauss, he looked at both the materials themselves and the bodily movements required to work on them. The Bergsonian idea of ‘tendency’ became integral to his analysis, as he documented how the wheel, for instance, had a ‘tendency’ to produce the potter’s wheel, the lathe, and the cart (ibid.: 27, 39, 239). The point was to dispel a common misconception that individuals were responsible for technical innovation. On the contrary, it often appeared as though technology was the prime mover in nature, presenting certain alternatives and variations to the group, which it was then free to accept or reject. He frequently implied that matter was alive (‘matière vivante’), a self-moving substance (ibid.: 451). Indeed, there was a profound way in which matter shaped the evolution of the human body: Our advanced ‘prehensile’ features – that is, our hands – were, for Leroi-Gourhan, a highly sophisticated tool that had developed through repeated use (striking, seizing, holding, gripping, and so on). What we typically refer to as tools – hammers and the like – ‘liberated’ our bodies from these responsibilities, freeing them up to do other things (ibid.: 43–4).

Ultimately, however, Leroi-Gourhan was not telling a mechanistic or teleological story, but a dialectical one in which matter and mind co-evolved in confrontation. While technology had certain inbuilt ‘tendencies’, its revolutions were mediated by intelligence. Human culture pushed back against matter and gave it new purpose. The second volume of Évolution, Milieu et techniques (Leroi-Gourhan, 1945a), explained how this human intelligence was constituted, and how it interacted with the physical environment (‘milieu’). Leroi-Gourhan distinguished between a culture’s ‘external’ and ‘internal milieu’, the former referring to the group’s physical surroundings (climatic, zoological, botanical); the latter, its store of mental traditions (beliefs, practices, and laws). External milieu was nature acting on the group, posing questions vital to its survival. Internal milieu was the selection of the best possible solutions to these questions, within the horizons fixed by both nature and the group’s patterns of associating. Groups succeeded by adopting technology for their own ends, using it to ‘attack matter’ (ibid.: 357, 392–3). He described the process as follows: Technology ‘can be represented as a compound of elements that are enriched by the preceding invention and exist as a basis for the next invention. Its most salient property is continuity, the possibility of mobilizing, instantaneously in all technical bodies’ (ibid.: 423; original emphasis). The logic of internal milieu was, it seems, to foster the solidarity and cohesion of the group. It did so by absorbing these different ‘techniques’ – much broader than how we usually conceive ‘technology’ – into its repertoire of cultural practices. These were passed down from generation to generation, improving the group’s capacity to subdue nature all the while. Ideally, the conflict between matter and intellect would be ongoing, enabling the group to endlessly renew its cultural resources. Otherwise, the internal milieu – too insulated from nature – might cease to evolve (ibid.: 452).

Philosophically, Évolution was an impressive demonstration of the old view of ‘man’ as a ‘tool-making being’. For Leroi-Gourhan, this was not merely a pragmatic orientation that came naturally to intelligent beings, but a logic inscribed in the development of the human body, itself a tool for contending with the natural environment. Homo faber was thus determined along evolutionary lines, rooted in a primordial conflict between mind and matter. In fact, so continuous was this tool-making propensity with the zoological history of the human being that it presented a philosophical problem for Leroi-Gourhan. If, as he acknowledged, non-hominid apes could fabricate tools, how were humans to be distinguished from non-humans? What made their intelligence different from animal intelligence? Or, to use his own terminology, where did ‘internal milieu’ come from?

While Leroi-Gourhan never formulated a decisive response to these questions, his work from the 1940s began to reconceptualize the role of technology in human culture. ‘Technique’ for Leroi-Gourhan was more than a culture’s tools and inventions. It was the ensemble of procedures ‘by which a culture makes, produces and consumes the elements indispensable to physical life’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1943b: 13). He called these processes ‘the technical structure of human societies’, and they were deeply embedded in all aspects of social life – economic as well as cultural. In relocating technology from the ‘superstructure’ to the ‘base’, Leroi-Gourhan posed his strongest challenge yet to the cultural anthropology of his contemporaries: Rivet and Mauss’s first generation of students (Griaule, Leiris, Tillion, Soustelle, among others), as well as Lévi-Strauss himself (whose first book appeared in 1949). Against their view that culture marked a rupture with nature, Leroi-Gourhan could more effectively argue for their continuity: Culture, shaped by the guiding hand of technology, never lost touch with its external milieu, and in fact constantly evolved with nature. More broadly, Leroi-Gourhan was well positioned to dispute the Cartesian view of technology, in which technical invention consisted of the application of knowledge (Canguilhem, 2008). Évolution altered this picture, suggesting that the brain followed the hand in human evolution; that the mechanical was inscribed in the organic. The foundational elements of Leroi-Gourhan’s work – ‘technique’, ‘evolution’, ‘tendency’, and ‘milieu’ – gave a way to a structuralism that was both materialist and evolutionary, privileging the encounter between matter and human technical ingenuity.

On the heels of Évolution et techniques, Leroi-Gourhan published a massive ethnographic study, Archéologie du pacifique-nord, which served as his doctoral dissertation, and appeared in Rivet and Mauss’s ‘Travaux et mémoires’ series in 1946. This work too was assembled from his Japan material, and written during the war. As an ‘archaeological’ study of the North Pacific cultures of the Americas and East Asia, it bore little resemblance to Évolution’s abstract meditations on technology. Nevertheless, it opened complementary perspectives on his structural breakthrough. It did so by, first, marginalizing the role of human migration in the transmission of human culture: ‘we will be led to consider human displacements as of less importance than the movements of cultural goods. To put it in other words, human beings have not moved as far or as fast as their products’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1946: 7). Leroi-Gourhan thus saw the North Pacific as a zone of circulation and cross-cultural exchange in which the movement of artifacts, rather than people, drove cultural development. According to Leroi-Gourhan’s structuralist materialism, objects were conduits of culture, since in them was crystallized a highly complex social-technical intelligence. The techniques by which those artifacts were produced ‘bring what is most important to human life: the means of improving one’s hold over one’s milieu’ (ibid.: 5). Ethnologists could thus arrive at fundamental truths about human beings by looking at what they made, not what they believed, or how they behaved. In this regard, Archéologie reinforced the conclusions of Évolution by proposing a model of comparative, cross-cultural analysis that did not rely on, and in fact devalued, personal contact between cultures.

Second, Archéologie established Leroi-Gourhan’s method of reading culture: One began with a concrete object – ‘vestiges materielles’ – and then placed it in a larger series, where its meaning could be more accurately determined by the ethnologist. In this respect, culture functioned like a language: ‘at bottom, it would have to be admitted that there already exists a phonetics or syntax of objects, that one can analyze an axe as a member of a sentence’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1946: 9). If we think of structuralism in strictly Lévi-Straussian terms, that is, as the structural study of myths and kinship relations, we are likely to miss the structuralist affinities in Leroi-Gourhan’s work. He proved that one could still arrive at fundamental laws, tendencies, and structures underpinning human activity by looking at strange material objects; and that structuralism could accommodate a paradigm in which evolution – the inescapability of change over time and transformation – was a privileged dynamic.

Parallel structures

Let us now try to understand, based on these early texts, how Leroi-Gourhan’s work fit into the history of structuralism as we typically understand it, and how he pushed its boundaries. Structuralism was less a ‘philosophy’ than a method. Its guiding assumption, at least in its Lévi-Straussian version, was that differences between elements in a set were what founded categories and classes, instead of the elements themselves. Meaning was established differentially, and thus, ‘the error of traditional anthropology, like that of traditional linguistics, was to consider the terms, and not the relation between the terms’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963c: 46). The innovation was akin to the linguist’s shift in attention from the individual speaker to the grammatical rules that structured his or her statements. Society, for Lévi-Strauss, was a gigantic structure composed of interlocking systems (of kinship, exchange, religious rites, and so on). To understand the meaning of a given social custom, one needed to have a grasp of the totality of the system. No non-specialist could be expected to have this omniscience. Even the well-trained anthropologist was ‘always in danger of confusing the natives’ theories about their social organization…with the actual functioning of society’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963b: 130). It helped that the anthropologist was a specialist, but also that he or she was an outsider, who could look upon native customs with a fresher gaze.

For Lévi-Strauss, social institutions derived from capacities of the human mind: ‘for a better understanding of these organizations’, he stated in his first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ‘we must take into consideration certain fundamental structures of the human mind’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1969a: 84). He understood these unconscious structures in a specific way: as a repository of innate rules and logical possibilities that came to be expressed through different social institutions. These rules were finite in number, and existed in manifold combinations throughout the world. Typically, they revealed themselves in binary oppositions: high and low, male and female, raw and cooked, and so on. Through patient comparison and classification, Lévi-Strauss believed that anthropology might reach a complete understanding of these rules, and provide a kind of master key for deciphering social institutions:

By making an inventory of all recorded customs…one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements, in which all actual or hypothetical customs would be grouped in families, so that one could see at a glance which customs a particular society had in fact adopted. (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 178)

In supposing that social institutions expressed the unconscious contents of the human ‘mind’, Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology adopted a de facto holist conception of society. Rites, customs, and myths could not be understood without reference to the whole; or, to put it differently, the nature of these institutions was inherently social. From here, it was a short step to affirming structuralism’s well-known decentring of the human subject. If customs and myths were of a social character, then the researcher could ‘disregard’, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, ‘the thinking subject completely, [and] proceed as if the thinking process were taking place in the myths, in their reflection upon themselves and their interrelation’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1969b: 12).

There was also a functionalist component to Lévi-Strauss’s theory. The meaning of a given rite or myth was attached to the fulfilment of a need, namely to ‘communicate’ some feature of the mind. This was different from previous anthropological functionalisms, which typically linked the development of social institutions in ‘primitive’ cultures to scarcity or some basic sense of ‘neediness’. Lévi-Strauss, by contrast, wanted to disassociate ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’, and show that indigenous peoples grappled with high-order intellectual problems. Indeed, the same impulses structuring the ‘savage mind’ were at work in all human societies. Uniting them was a common ‘demand for order’, a tendency to answer the anarchy of nature by organizing around rules (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 10). This higher metaphysical ‘need’ placed all cultures on the same footing, and thereby undermined any notion that industrial societies were superior to – because larger than – ‘primitive’ ones. Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur was just as sophisticated as the most advanced Western scientist, except he worked in a forest, not a laboratory. In this sense, there was no document of barbarism that was not at the same time a document of civilization.

Finally, this functionalism was complemented by a tendency to envision society in ‘cybernetic’ terms, that is, as a self-regulating system or programme. If, as Lévi-Strauss believed, human beings organized themselves against ‘entropy’ – society’s existential threat – then it was reasonable to suppose that some mechanism helped the group preserve a sense of balance. Accordingly, he divided societies into ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Cold societies were those in which social institutions were organized on a cyclical basis. They thus tended to be ‘stationary’ societies, highly resistant to dramatic change. As Lévi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind, ‘the object of “cold” societies is to make it the case that the order of temporal succession should have as little influence as possible’. Their equilibrium, he clarified, was achieved in a ‘quasi-automatic fashion’. ‘Hot’ societies, by contrast, had no such internal control mechanism, and rather ‘internaliz[ed] the historical process and ma[de] it the moving power of their development. They thus ran “hot” and had a capacity for limitless growth’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 234). However, as he explained in Race and History, there was no guarantee that ‘hot’ societies would in fact expand: it was largely a matter of chance. Like a gambler who staked his money on several dice, ‘what he wins on one, he is always liable to lose on another, and it is only occasionally that history is “cumulative”, that is to say, that the scores add up to a lucky combination’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1952: 22).

Considering the differences in the kinds of objects they studied, Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss’s conceptions of structuralism were remarkably similar. Both presented a ‘combinatory’ understanding of human society, in which a finite number of universal possibilities converged with a set of local, unpredictable circumstances to form the character of that particular group. Societies were modular – different permutations of the same rearrangeable parts. For this reason, Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss established structural anthropology as a wide-ranging comparative discipline: one came to an understanding of universal rules by studying their real-world variations. Accordingly, their work involved Olympian syntheses of data: For Lévi-Strauss, it was myths; for Leroi-Gourhan (2004: 49), material artifacts, which he had been collecting for decades. Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan once referred to himself as a ‘machine’ for comparing and classifying objects.

Their conceptions of society were similarly holist, and tended to marginalize the role of the individual. For Leroi-Gourhan, it was the group, drawing on its repository of (unconscious) cultural resources, or ‘internal milieu’, that was responsible for a culture’s dynamism. In the same way that Lévi-Strauss (1966: 247) ‘dissolved man’ in mythic structures, the ‘individual’ became a surface manifestation in Leroi-Gourhan’s work. He wrote, ‘The word “ethnology” deserves perhaps some preference because it takes stock of ethnic reality, of humans grouped in societies. The individual human fact is indeed elusive for ethnology’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1983c: 91).

Both thinkers tended to be suspicious of ‘diffusionist’ models of development: ‘There is no “Asiatic” center of high civilization’, wrote Leroi-Gourhan (Leroi-Gourhan, 1945a: 332). More important for him were geographic and climatic factors, which determined the specific milieu of cultural development. One need only look at the world’s most advanced industrial societies, like the US, Northern Europe, or Japan: All lay along the same lines of latitude. But even this was no guarantee of cumulative growth, since there were many non-cumulative societies existing in the same geographic conditions. Thus, for Leroi-Gourhan, as for Lévi-Strauss, growth was a matter of good fortune – the random convergence of favourable variations. They drew the same conclusions from this observation: If advancement was based on luck, there could be no inherent moral worth to any culture or civilization. Politically, this eroded the basis for denigrating ‘primitive’ cultures as ‘lesser’. Indeed, wrote Leroi-Gourhan (1943b: 16), ‘Australians, Eskimos, Ainus, Siberians, and Polynesians are not more primitive than us’. This point of view also returned a degree of autonomy to indigenous cultures that was typically denied to them. For both thinkers, the idea of a structure implied a theory of indigenous development, and a rejection of a diffusionist one.

Moreover, their structuralisms were similarly functionalist and cybernetic. In Lévi-Strauss’s case, myths varied from culture to culture, but their role was always the same: to communicate social rules to the group. Likewise, for Leroi-Gourhan, each society’s unique ‘techno-economic’ infrastructure transmitted the information necessary for the group’s survival in its milieu. That it did so as efficiently as possible gave his theorization a cybernetic cast. Technical energies ‘are not expended at random’, he wrote, ‘but their movement is directed and amplified by controls or relays, economized by the drive toward equilibrium’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1943b: 19; original emphasis). As with Lévi-Strauss’s cold societies, a kind self-regulating mechanism worked to ensure the stability and equilibrium of the group. ³

Finally, structuralism, as practiced by Lévi-Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan, proposed a certain method of reading. Namely, it treated its chosen ‘texts’ – myths for the former, tools for the latter – as signifiers within a larger system of signification. Lévi-Strauss was directly inspired by linguistic theory, and often referred to social practices as a kind of language. A given myth or rite acquired meaning only when inserted into this larger system. Leroi-Gourhan did not share Lévi-Strauss’s admiration for linguistics, but nevertheless adopted a linguistic framework for understanding material objects. In his archaeological work, for instance, Leroi-Gourhan tended to treat the earth as a bed of signifiers. Excavation typically involved a vertical cut in the soil, and hence a temporal organization of material (in other words, the deeper, the older). Leroi-Gourhan, however, proposed a horizontal cut, which would allow the researcher to analyse topographical relations between objects in one period. The result was a structuralist reading of material fragments:

If one looks at the prehistoric document not as a calendar, but as a text, the essential activity of the researcher is no longer in the interpretation of objects recuperated in their proper stratigraphic order, but in the reading of the document’s surface, as uncovered by the excavation. (Leroi-Gourhan, 1974: 98) ⁴

Leroi-Gourhan applied the same logic to the analysis of Palaeolithic cave paintings. Previous interpreters tended to see them as representations of pre-agricultural life. For a structuralist like Leroi-Gourhan, however, the paintings were not intentional works of art in the way that, say, a Picasso painting was. They were signs, and made sense only within a set. By dating the images and grouping them according to theme, one might, according to Leroi-Gourhan, arrive at ‘a grammar or syntax applicable to the whole’. Indeed, material objects ‘spoke’ in the same way the human mind did for Lévi-Strauss, and they were like a language in the sense that they could be broken down into composite elements and fitted together with rules. Using this technique, Leroi-Gourhan was able to advance a new hypothesis about the meaning of cave art: the paintings were not artistic objects, but a pictorial language invented by early nomadic peoples (Conkey, 1991; Leroi-Gourhan, 1967: 108; Preziosi, 1989).

Thus, Leroi-Gourhan’s technique of organizing and interpreting material objects often ran parallel to Lévi-Strauss’s. Yet there was a sense in which their structuralist theories did not entirely align. When it came to the origins of human culture, Lévi-Straussian structuralism presented a more idealist and static story. Social and cultural practices were the expression of an unchanging entity: ‘I am referring to the uninvited guest which has been seated at this Conference beside us and which is the Lévi-Strauss, human mind’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963d: 71; original emphasis). Lévi-Strauss’s fondness for ‘inventories’ was consistent with this idea: one needed merely to take stock of what was already there. With Évolution et techniques, Leroi-Gourhan offered a materialist and dynamic account of human culture. The latter was constituted through the interaction of matter and mind. Nature produced materials; humans worked upon them, and in doing so, saw their modes of thinking and associating evolve. Thus, if Lévi-Strauss pursued inventories, Leroi-Gourhan searched for ‘tendencies’ – the propensity for matter and mind to collide and evolve in a ‘creative’ way. This notion of dynamic structuration gave Leroi-Gourhan the ability to deal with a wider range of objects than Lévi-Strauss – materials, technology, the body, non-human animals, among others.

The conventional narrative of French structuralism has distinguished between an early version, represented by Lévi-Strauss and the search for timeless, formal structures; and a later, more heterogeneous one in which time was taken into consideration. My contention here is that reading Leroi-Gourhan alongside Lévi-Strauss leads to the collapse of this periodization, since both tendencies were clearly present from the beginning (Dosse, 1998; Léon, 2013). Leroi-Gourhan’s articulation of a dynamic structural anthropology in Évolution (1943) preceded Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship by six years.

Brain and hand

Now that we have compared Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss’s respective conceptions of social structure, let us return briefly to the chronological development of their ideas. In the early 1950s, Leroi-Gourhan returned to the sources of his intellectual training. He wrote a second PhD at the Sorbonne, this one in the field of palaeontology, and his thesis, ‘Les Tracés d’équilibre mécanique du crâne des vertérbrés terrestres’ (The traces of mechanical equilibrium on the skulls of terrestrial vertebrates), explored an idea that was merely implicit in Évolution et techniques: that the human body evolved as a natural technology prior to the development of human technology; in other words, that the skeleton was itself a kind of machine (Leroi-Gourhan, 1983b). ⁵ Like his teachers at the École d’anthropologie, his focus was on the evolution of the human skull and its correlations with intelligence. At the same moment, Leroi-Gourhan was wrestling with another question that had long preoccupied him: where to draw the line between the animal and the human? This entailed for Leroi-Gourhan locating not only what distinguished human from animal, but also what remained of the zoological in the human. These two problematics would form the spine of his next major work, the one for which Leroi-Gourhan is principally known: Le geste et la parole (Gesture and Speech).

The two volumes of Le geste appeared in 1964, the same year as Lévi-Strauss’s Le cru et le cuit, the first of his four Mythologiques. The divergence these projects signalled could not have been starker. If the early Lévi-Strauss had devoted much attention to social rites and customs, and even taken an interest, however fitful, in the zoological and physical branches of the disciplines, the Mythologiques closed these doors: it was only the cultural content of myths that exercised him now. Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, on the other hand, fulfilled his long-awaited dream of ‘coordination’. It proposed not only to rewrite the evolutionary history of the human being from the beginning of time to the present, but also to explain the origins of human social institutions, and offer predictions on the future course of humanity (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993). ⁶ Building on ‘Crâne des vértebrés terrestres’, Leroi-Gourhan argued that the key to human evolution lay in the complementarity of hand and face, or what he called the division of the anterior field into facial and manual poles (ibid.: 31). With the development of erect posture came a suite of ‘liberations’: the hands, no longer tied to locomotion, could now be used to handle and manipulate objects; the facial pole, freed from its gripping function, allowed the mouth to develop, but also the brain, which fanned out in the cranial box, leading to the increased complexity of the motor areas (Audouze, 2002: 290). It was essential to see, for Leroi-Gourhan, that body and brain developed in concert, that cortical advancement was rooted in the dialectical relationship between matter and mind. Thus, the natural environment conditioned not only the habits and customs of human beings – Évolution et techniques stopped here – but also their brains, and hence their intelligence.

One outcome of this neurological sophistication was the emergence of speech in the facial pole, and the possibility of writing in the manual pole. Leroi-Gourhan had much to say in Gesture and Speech on the subject of writing, a phenomenon he carefully distinguished from graphism. Writing was a linear organization of script, coinciding with societies that had reached the agricultural stage of development. Graphism – durable traces left on materials (like rocks or cave walls) – was at least as old as speech. From about 30,000 BCE, graphic marks, principally wavy lines resembling animals, began to appear. The markings could be seen more as a kind of language than an attempt to reproduce reality: ‘the earliest known paintings do not represent a hunt, a dying animal, or a touching family scene, they are graphic building blocks without any descriptive binder, the support medium of an irretrievably lost oral context’. For Leroi-Gourhan, graphism coincided with an age of symbolic thought in the human world: it ‘restores to language the dimension of the inexpressible – the possibility of multiplying the dimensions of a fact in instantly accessible visual symbols’. The ability to understand this kind of thinking – emotional, creative, mythological – was no longer available to human beings.

Full justice cannot be done in this essay to a work of Gesture and Speech’s scope. Its core argument about brain evolution helped solve a lingering problem in Leroi-Gourhan’s work, namely that human intelligence was unexplained and seemed sui generis. He could now argue that intelligence developed as the body interacted with its physical environment. Their relationship was one of dynamic structuration. Gesture and Speech also achieved the synthesis of physical and cultural anthropology that he had been experimenting with since his apprenticeship under Mauss and Rivet. Improbably, Leroi-Gourhan found a way to make his enduring passion for skull measuring into a fruitful intellectual hypothesis: Instead of determining ethnic or racial composition, it was now used to trace the evolution of the brain in the cranial box. It thus became the culmination his polymathic exploration of human culture.

New humanisms

We have now tracked the parallel development of structural anthropology through the writings of Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss. It remains for us in this final section to show how their work came to similar conclusions about the moral and political responsibility of ethnology in the larger world (and here I mean ‘political’ in the ancient Greek sense, of how society is organized, and not day-to-day ‘politics’ as it normally understood). This part of the article will argue that while Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss developed what they took to be rigorous, scientific frameworks for the study of human life, neither thinker was satisfied to see their work as value-neutral with respect to contemporary moral and political issues. They imagined, in keeping with the teachings of Mauss and Rivet, that ethnology could contribute knowledge and clarity to a world of conflict. Their writing was, from early on, suffused with moral judgements, as we have seen in the first section of this essay, and it continued to be so into their later work. How were these judgements framed?

Both thinkers claimed, once again in separation from one another, that ethnology could found a ‘new humanism’. The locution is unexpected, and thus all the more striking, given their diminished view of the role of the individual in society, which has often led to them being called ‘anti-humanists’. In a text from 1956, Lévi-Strauss identified ‘three humanisms’ in Western thought. The first two – those of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – shared a common and, for Lévi-Strauss, correct assumption that ‘no fraction of humanity could aspire to understand itself without reference to all the other human beings’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1976a: 273–4). ⁷ However, both were limited, not only by geographic scope, but also by the elitist values that guided them: ‘It was believed that such distant civilizations merited our interest only by their most scholarly and refined productions’. The third humanism, informed by the structural revolution, would surpass the others and achieve a universal and democratic reach:

Seeking its inspiration in the midst of the most humble and despised societies, it [ethnology] proclaims that nothing human can be strange to man, and thus founds a democratic humanism in opposition to those preceding it and…calls for the reconciliation of man and nature in a generalized humanism. (ibid.)

Members of France’s anthropological community greeted these ideas enthusiastically. For Roger Bastide, a specialist of Brazil at the Sorbonne, the new humanism reflected structural anthropology’s ‘rediscovery of human nature’, and likewise shifted attention away from individuals toward what human beings created. In this way, the new humanism

emphasized the richness, the variety, and the immense possibilities among human beings, not only for adaptation to different milieux – desert lands, tropics, lake areas, etc. – but also for innovation, and original creation. It places us in the world of freedom. (Bastide, 1964: 445)

The world-saving language of structural anthropology was in no way an afterthought to its ‘serious’ or ‘legitimate’ scientific work. Rather, it was an integral part of how its thinkers conceptualized the discipline from the very beginning. In 1952, Leroi-Gourhan wrote, ‘The ethnologist’s goal [is] “to understand human beings” in the same way the doctor’s was “to cure human beings”’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1952: 508). He delighted in the idea that ethnology had a distinct advantage over other social sciences, since ‘it is not rare for ethnologists to be called upon…to diagnose urgent governmental maladies’. If the state needed to know ‘what would be required for a colonial population to reach the euphoric stability of well-equilibrated societies’, the ethnologist was on standby, ready to act (Leroi-Gourhan, 1983c: 94). The medicinal language favoured by Leroi-Gourhan raises a larger question: What did human beings have to be cured of exactly? For both thinkers, the answer was ‘modernity’, a seemingly inescapable litany of horrors. In response, the work of Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss offered an anthropology of redemption, a way of coming to terms, intellectually and practically, with what they saw as a global human crisis.

Leroi-Gourhan’s two major texts, Évolution et techniques and Gesture and Speech, were at once innovative works of scholarship and grand narratives tracing the moral decline of humanity. Both texts urged human beings to maintain a sense of balance amid dynamic change. In Évolution, this warning was rendered in abstract terms: if internal milieu lost touch with its external milieu – in other words, if the tension between mind and matter fell away – then the group might cease to evolve. Human beings were fortunate to be caught up in a natural economy of forces that pushed them toward balance. The moral critique was merely implicit here: to have conquered and subdued the forces of nature was unnatural and would disrupt this balance.

Twenty years later, these moralizing arguments became more explicit in Gesture and Speech. Its second volume dealt principally with the concept of ‘exteriorization’, the process in which direct manipulation of or contact with a technology was replaced by machine automation. The motions performed by the body, like pulling, chopping, or stretching, were relegated to machines; thinking too came to be exteriorized, first through writing, and, later, through computers and artificial intelligence. The cumulative effect of these developments was a species-wide regression. Once the natural balance of hand and face was disrupted by the machine, body and mind began to lose their dynamic structuration. Imagination dried up; muscles softened. Structuralism’s talk of evolutionary balance gave way to talk of moral degeneration and the imminent decline of the human race in the final chapters of Gesture and Speech. At best, regression might inspire some collective drive toward ‘rehumanization’. At worst, ‘human development is heading in the direction of mega-ethnicity – a global unit of measurement rather like the “megadeaths” devised to express the destructive power of atomic weapons’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 358). Here the option was extinction.

In broad terms, Lévi-Strauss shared Leroi-Gourhan’s catastrophic conception of human civilization. Tristes Tropiques in particular presented a tragic view of history:

The world began without man and will end without him. The institutions, morals and customs that I shall have spent my life noting down and trying to understand are the transient efflorescence of a creation in relation to which they have no meaning, except perhaps that of allowing mankind to play its part in creation. (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 413)

From different angles of vision, Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss produced narratives of moral decline with strong echoes of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Lévi-Strauss made his debt to the Geneva-born thinker clear in one of the closing chapters of Tristes Tropiques, claiming that every page of the book could have been devoted to him. Rousseau’s paradigm, for Lévi-Strauss, was that of the Neolithic revolution, when human beings at last fended off cold and hunger, and ‘acquired the leisure’ to think (and write). With Rousseau, he agreed that this moment in history, poised between the indolence of the natural state and the ‘irrepressible busyness of our self-esteem’, must have been the happiest of all for humankind. It was progress without (and before) moral collapse, a state in which ‘the human race was intended always to remain’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 391–2; 1976b). The affinity with Rousseau points to an important continuity in French anthropological writing: From the philosophes of the 18th century, through the physical anthropology of Broca in the 19th, to the ethnology of Mauss and Rivet in the 20th, its sensibility has been endowed with moral purpose, and directed toward the improvement of humankind. This was no different for the structural anthropologists.

Leroi-Gourhan’s adaptation of Rousseau was subtler, but unmistakable. As with Rousseau, the degeneration of humankind for Leroi-Gourhan corresponded to the development of metallurgy and agriculture (and writing) – in other words, to the rise of cities. Aggression and greed were common among nomads, but took on a more pernicious form in civil society, where Promethean ambitions soon took over:

For as long as agricultural societies maintain their original structure…industry will continue to act as the powerful but somehow sinister driving force of material development in the service of a society composed of an ever-increasing number of human beings still governed by the laws of their zoological nature. (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 180)

As Rousseauists, Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss did not fully embrace anti-modernist nostalgia. Redemption would come by way of heroic ethnological work, and a new conception of humanism (Stoczkowsi, 2008). Lévi-Strauss wrote triumphantly of anthropology’s advances over neighbouring disciplines: ‘Ragpicker of the humanities from the beginning, anthropology believes that it has now found the master keys to the human mystery among the debris round the doors of the other disciplines’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1953: 71). With its superior grasp of the human condition, and its growing inventory of global customs, structural anthropology could help arrest the worldwide process of cultural convergence, and protect cultural diversity. For Lévi-Strauss (1952: 45), it was axiomatic that ‘the true contribution of a culture consisted not in the list of inventions it has personally produced, but in its difference from others’. Writing for UNESCO, he proposed that international institutions take it upon themselves to find ‘an optimum degree of diversity’. Their task was not to promote a unitary world culture – this was in fact the problem – but to referee the global play of differences among cultures, with a look toward encouraging interaction between those whose collaboration could produce the most brilliant results: ‘We must therefore hearken for the stirrings of new life, foster latent possibilities, and encourage every natural inclination for collaboration which the future history of the world may hold’ (ibid.: 9, 49; original emphasis).

In one of these scenarios, Lévi-Strauss suggested that Japan and France were ideally suited for ‘collaboration’. On opposite sides of the world, both had developed highly sophisticated cultures, with a refined tradition of critical analysis and an appreciation for craftsmanship. ‘As soon as the French spirit learned something about the Japanese’, wrote Lévi-Strauss, ‘it felt in harmony with their spirit’. Their inner symmetries even led him to speculate about their prehistoric connections:

If Europe, that headland of the Asian continent, and Asia proper, including its easternmost regions, were in active communication in the past, we would better understand how Japan, the extreme tip of Asia to the east, and France, the extreme tip to the west, could illustrate symmetrical states of a series of transformations. (Lévi-Strauss, 2013: 31)

Like Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan agonized over the disappearance of non-Western cultures. For him, the right to one’s culture was absolute and existential, and he cautioned in Évolution et techniques against the ‘physical separation of human beings from their forms of expression’ (Leroi-Gourhan, 1945a: 443). Western-led globalization was happening too quickly for indigenous societies to adjust, and their own distinct cultural personalities were being lost in the process. European colonialism bore some of the responsibility, imposing industrial techniques on societies that could not accommodate them, proletarianizing native workers, and ultimately ‘desacralizing indigenous societies’. The heroic role he envisioned for anthropology was not to sponsor anti-colonial movements or liberate the colonized, but to reform the empire.

In keeping with the views of his mentors, Mauss and Rivet, Leroi-Gourhan believed in the colonial mission of French anthropology. The chair he accepted at the University of Lyon in 1945 was in ‘ethnologie coloniale’, and in his inaugural address, he spoke frankly of anthropology’s commitment to empire:

Whether you are a colonial functionary, priest, doctor, engineer, merchant, or simply an anthropologist, you have a role to play. You have not only to serve science, but to accomplish a task of first-rate importance for the future of colonization; you have to understand and love the native person, and make the French people of the colony do the same; and you have to make it understood to French people that Indochina, Africa, New Caledonia, the Antilles, or Madagascar are France; that at the present hour, they are the most important part of our country, which we cannot live without. (Leroi-Gourhan, 1945b: 35)

In 1952, Leroi-Gourhan expanded on these ideas in a two-volume, thousand-page work co-authored with Jean Poirier, Ethnologie de l’Union française. The text, an encyclopedia of sorts, was a proud display of ethnological learning, with in-depth reports on all of France’s overseas holdings. It showed, for instance, that ethnology could ‘grasp “globally” the totality of indigenous life and describe its evolution’ (Leroi-Gourhan and Poirier, 1953: 959). As for the present state of the empire, the authors argued that the whole project needed to be overhauled and brought in line with the newest ideas of culture and progress. Colonialism had to be well informed, enlightened. ⁹

Leroi-Gourhan and Poirier, therefore, were offering not French colonialism, but the ‘French Union’ – ‘a new type of integration, which substitutes the idea of association for that of colonization’ (Leroi-Gourhan and Poirier, 1953: 979, 994). This supranational federation of France’s overseas holdings would work only if ‘respect for the personality of native cultures were at the heart of the project’. Economic and material gain would no longer be priorities, and the old imperial condescension – along with the temptations of exoticism – would have to be replaced with ‘humanist’ values of respect and dignity. Ethnology would be a key player in this project, helping to ‘reconstruct the history of different peoples, clarify cultural affinities, and study the elements – often very rich – of “autochthonous” civilizations. It could also help indigenous societies become better aware of themselves and the conditions of their progress’. The French presence was a ‘guarantee of liberty and equality’ that would at last bring about an effective symbiosis with the colonies: ‘The days of simple contact had to be relegated to the past’ (ibid.: 907, 996).

Conclusion

Thus, for both Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropology was a moralizing discipline, one capable of delivering judgements on how global problems ought to be resolved. Like every anthropological paradigm that preceded it in France, structural anthropology was caught up in a discourse of progress and improvement. Since Montaigne, studying the ‘other’ in France implied a normative comparison: sometimes the non-European other appeared as a foil – innocent and peaceable – to the decadent European; sometimes as a benighted ‘primitive’ in need of civilizing. Structural anthropology was continuous with this history, and presented a way of configuring the relationship between science and morality that was suited to its unique methodological principles. Just as structural anthropology studied human phenomena on a vast canvass – comparing customs and techniques on a planetary scale, and often reaching back into the remote past – its horizon of normative judgement was similarly global and deep-historical. Spatially, both thinkers were attuned to conflict that occurred not within individual societies or nation states, but between cultures, continents, and civilizations. Accordingly, they looked to supranational bodies like UNESCO and the French Union to mediate cross-cultural discord. In this respect, their work tapped into a larger post-war intellectual current concerned with ‘notions of the world as an inherently social system’ (Andersson and Duhautois, 2016: 106). Temporally, they were preoccupied with slow demographic and environmental change – human history on the scale of the ‘longue durée’. Short-run political events – revolutions, anti-colonial wars, elections – were not on their timescale, and had no place in their writings.

Likewise, structural anthropology bore the marks of its origins in interwar France, emerging under the aegis of Mauss and Rivet amid the anti-racist struggle of the French Left against fascism. Along with an entire cohort of Mauss and Rivet’s students, Leroi-Gourhan and Lévi-Strauss developed an anthropology in which racist claims for the superiority of one race or culture over another could have no foundation. Moreover, as with Mauss and Rivet and their students, this anti-racism was not accompanied by an anti-colonial politics. Once the Third World began to rise against the European empires, these thinkers either sided with the colonizer or remained silent. Rivet signed a petition written by his student Soustelle for the salvation and renewal of French Algeria (Soulier, 2018: 192). Leroi-Gourhan’s homilies for the French Union were unapologetically colonialist, and written at a moment when the Indochinese were fighting a war of national independence against the French. And for all of Lévi-Strauss’s outrage at Western decadence, he offered no support for the independence movements of French and Portuguese colonies. Tellingly, an anti-colonial French anthropology – pioneered by Georges Balandier – developed outside the Mauss–Rivet network. ¹⁰

In conclusion, we should resist the temptation to see structuralism as a value-neutral, ‘scientific’ discourse. This point of view could often seem justified given how younger anthropologists complained of structuralism during the 1960s: ‘Structures don’t take to the streets’, went one popular 1968 slogan (quoted in Dosse, 1998: 122). Such a judgement is misleading, however, since structural anthropology was, as we have seen, a moral science, even if unlikely to satisfy the protestors of 1968. The structural framework, with its world-spanning scope and origins in the politics of interwar France, was not particularly well equipped to deal with the politics of the 1960s, or with sudden or radical change. In order to have broken entirely with racism, structural anthropology would have needed to adopt some form of anti-colonial critique, and this it was structurally unable to do.