“Une véritable syntaxe”. Some Notes on Leroi-Gourhan and Structural Linguistics

In what follows, I will try to offer a brief overview of the relationships between some of Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropological insights on technology and some of the fundamental theoretical claims that form the general framework of structural linguistics. This hermeneutical movement runs an evident risk, which needs to be addressed and overcome: the risk of including Leroi-Gourhan’s works in the wide range of the structuralist corpus. For this reason, in the introduction I clarify what I mean by “structuralism” so that, in the subsequent sections, I can try to show the epistemological relationship between Leroi-Gourhan’s ethnology and the “structuralist turn,” as described in the introduction. To this end, I will point out the possible theoretical influence exerted by structural linguistics, and especially by the structural phonology developed within the Prague linguistic circle, on Leroi-Gourhan’s conceptual toolbox. More specifically, in the paper, I will focus on some passages of La geste et la parole (1964), which I will consider in connection with two more minor and older texts, namely Origine et diffusion de la connaissance scientifique (1953) and L’homme et la nature, an article published in 1936 in the Encyclopédie française.