Author: André Leroi Gourhan
Publisher: Adelphi
Necklace: Little Adelphi library
Year edition: 1993
Format: Paperback
Pages of the printed version: 176 p.
EAN: 9788845909733
€ 14,00
Leroi-Gourhan's work is comparable in importance, in relation to prehistory studies, to that of Lévi-Strauss in relation to anthropology as a whole. His theories continue to be discussed, and in any case it is inevitable to take them into account. With Leroi-Gourhan it can be said that the study of prehistory has achieved a high rigor in the method and at the same time an impressive wealth of results. A happy and accessible synthesis of all this he presented in 1964 with this short book. Like his masters Mauss and Granet, Leroi-Gourhan knows how to present the result of complex and laborious research in clear and dry formulations. Here, in particular, it is the very meaning of Paleolithic art - this art which is born perfect, at a very high formal level, and at the same time appears completely mysterious to us, since it presupposes precisely "the religions of prehistory" - which is illuminated by a new light, while many of the theories that have been in force for a long time are dropped, and which were often pure psychological projections of scholars, confirmed over time by the projections of other scholars. And Leroi-Gourhan was rightly cruel in clearing the field and specifying what cannot be said. But this went together with other, few things that can be said and were just waiting to be discovered, such as, for example, the combination of signs and animals in wall art or «the equivalence of female signs and wounds». With the humility of the great scholar, Leroi-Gourhan set out to «give a certain life to the message left by the caveman without contaminating it with modern elements».
