Leroi-Gourhan, André (1911-1986)
André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) was a French anthropologist, palaeontologist and prehistorian. Self-taught, he took courses in physical anthropology at the Paris School of Anthropology and learned Russian and Chinese. A student of Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss at the Institut d’ethnologie, he joined the team at the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1932. In 1937, he left for Japan for two years, where he studied the Ainu and the archaeology of the North Pacific. With his insatiable encyclopaedic curiosity, he developed a passion for man’s creative capacities and the anthropology of techniques and cultural technology, prehistoric ethnology, cave art and the evolution of man in society, refusing to separate man as a biological being from man as a social and cultural being. He founded the Centre de documentation et de recherche préhistoriques (1945) and the Centre de formations aux recherches ethnologiques (1946) at the Musée de l’Homme. First professor of colonial ethnology in Lyon in 1944, he became professor of ethnology and prehistory at the Sorbonne in 1956, after Marcel Griaule passed away. He was elected to the prehistory chair at the Collège de France in 1969. He trained generations of ethnologists and prehistorians. His monumental body of work includes L’homme et la matière (1943–1945), Le geste et la parole (1964–1965), Préhistoire de l’art occidental (1965), and Le fil du temps : ethnologie et préhistoire (1983).
Keywords: Prehistory | Archaeology | Palaeontology | Anthropology of Technology | Applied anthropology | Physical anthropology | French colonialism | Museum curator | 20th century | France | Japan | Evolution | Technology | Colonial situation | Cave Art | Collège de France | Marcel Mauss | Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro | Musée de l’Homme
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