The Civilization of the Reindeer.
Beautiful Letters| N° d'inventaire | 21995 |
| Format | 16 x 22.5 |
| Détails | 184 p., 26 B/W illustrations, 32 B/W plates, paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Paris, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782350881751 |
André Leroi-Gourhan's first book, published in 1936, deserved a second edition. La Civilisation du renne, dedicated to Marcel Mauss, is certainly a youthful book, as Lucien Febvre points out, but it is also a promising book, a milestone book, because the extreme ambition of the author, then aged 25, pushed him to multiply the incursions into a considerable number of disciplines (geography, ethnology, technology, prehistory, orientalism) which he intended to coordinate in order to study, despite the temporal distance and the shifting of climatic environments, three periods of the same reindeer culture in an Arctic environment (tundra-taiga): in Pleistocene Europe, among the present-day Eskimos, among the peoples who domesticated the animal. The book is impressive for its "mass of facts and ideas to ponder, and singularly broad perspectives on the most distant past of humanity (Febvre again). It foreshadows the author's master books on technology, as well as his illustrated book on the Prehistory of Western Art (1965) or even his masterpiece which reached a wide, cultivated public beyond specialists, Le Geste et la parole, in which the author questions the future of man by drawing on his past on a paleontological scale.
André Leroi-Gourhan's first book, published in 1936, deserved a second edition. La Civilisation du renne, dedicated to Marcel Mauss, is certainly a youthful book, as Lucien Febvre points out, but it is also a promising book, a milestone book, because the extreme ambition of the author, then aged 25, pushed him to multiply the incursions into a considerable number of disciplines (geography, ethnology, technology, prehistory, orientalism) which he intended to coordinate in order to study, despite the temporal distance and the shifting of climatic environments, three periods of the same reindeer culture in an Arctic environment (tundra-taiga): in Pleistocene Europe, among the present-day Eskimos, among the peoples who domesticated the animal. The book is impressive for its "mass of facts and ideas to ponder, and singularly broad perspectives on the most distant past of humanity (Febvre again). It foreshadows the author's master books on technology, as well as his illustrated book on the Prehistory of Western Art (1965) or even his masterpiece which reached a wide, cultivated public beyond specialists, Le Geste et la parole, in which the author questions the future of man by drawing on his past on a paleontological scale.