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  • Comment Homo devint Faber by François Sigaut
  • Ludovic Coupaye (bio)
Comment Homo devint Faber. By François Sigaut. Paris: Biblis. 2013. Pp. 236. €10.

François Sigaut's last book, published after his death (2 November 2012), reflects the author's intellectual trajectory and rigor. Agronomist, historian, and anthropologist, he belonged to the French technologie culturelle (the study of techniques) tradition following Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, André-George Haudricourt, and Pierre Lemonnier. While this tradition is often overlooked by English-speaking academics dealing with material culture, technology, or STS, he was one of the few who consistently published in English (see http://www.francois-sigaut.com/index.php/anglais). Sigaut delivers here a thoughtful exploration of a series of themes present throughout his career.

Composed of three chapters, the genesis of the book is explained in the preface. The first two, originally composed in 1997, aim at taking seriously Mauss's program on "body techniques" (first published in 1935, translated only in 1979), which, as Sigaut rightly notes, was never properly followed. During their revision for this publication, the conclusion offering some general comments on the relation between actions and tools turned into the third chapter which, as Sigaut himself acknowledges, deals with issues often beyond his field of expertise. But because the analysis of tool-use opened questions sufficiently valid, he wisely chose to let the reader "separate the wheat from the chaff" (p. 9).

Academics are often reluctant to take the risk with such humility, preferring clear-cut points to explorations. In Sigaut's case, this experimentation is even more compelling because the book displays his impressive scholarship, covering several fields from philosophy to history, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and prehistory (cf. the five appendices). Breaching three linguistic traditions, he engages with several theoretical trends, without submitting himself to any, while presenting detailed case studies. Though the third chapter requires indeed more forbearance from the reader, the questions raised are definitely worth investigating.

The first chapter deals with the inherent technicity of human beings. While the notion of humans as tool-making animals exists since Benjamin Franklin (p. 13), Sigaut notices that it has never been really taken seriously. Only Ernst Kapp, Augustus Pitt Rivers, Henri Bergson, and Simone Weil [End Page 1076] provide Sigaut with elements to demonstrate that human intelligence is born through and for the manipulation of material things (p. 21), invalidating the distinction between an "intellectual" (logical, conceptual, etc.) and a "practical" intelligence. Empirically demonstrating this, however, requires investigating actual body techniques and gestures, which are too often considered boring and uninteresting, and are consequently overlooked.

The second chapter builds on this critique, and presents an overview of different ways in which hand movements and techniques have been dealt with in the literature. This leads to short but insightful discussions of methodology (distinction between identification and classification, level of analysis, "efficacy"). Through the investigation of two "corpora" of operations—holding the string of a bow and grain harvesting—Sigaut suggests that equipped action is both an ontogenetically and phylogenetically crucial conceptual model for our understanding of humanity. As a result, instrument-based actions, even when actual tools are absent, appear as the defining attribute of all human technical actions (the number of cases of animals using tools being comparatively very low; see pp. 101–2).

In the third chapter, Sigaut explores the relation between this technicity and the forms of sociality. Mobilizing ecology, innovation, apprenticeship, games, and the relation between usage and result, he examines two social dimensions of human technicity. The first is based on the idea that individual technicity is necessarily one that is shared with all other human beings, transmitted through learning, deeply embodied, and creating then a "common sense" (le sens commun, pp. 145–53). The second is the under-examined place of pleasure in technical activities, which leads him to explore their different social manifestations, in particular cooperation (including between sexes) and mutual aid.

Along with a demonstration of rigorous scholarship, there is a critical theory sustaining Sigaut's book. It targets the utilitarian premises upon which modern individualism and neoliberalism have managed to establish their particular form of common sense. He also gives us...

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