Alain Testart (30 December 1945 in Paris – 2 September 2013) was a French social anthropologist, emeritus research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and member of the Laboratory for Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. He specialized in primitives societies (like those of the Australian Aborigines and the hunter-gatherers in general) and comparative anthropology. His research themes included: slavery, marriage arrangements, funeral practices, gift and exchange, typology of societies, the political, the evolution of the societies, and questions of interpretation in prehistoric archaeology.
With his works Alain Testart argued for the autonomy of anthropology as a social science and, against the anti-evolutionism that has dominated social anthropology over the past century, for a sociologically founded evolutionism.An exhaustive discussion of the question of evolutionism in social anthropology can be found in Alain Testarts article on the issue that appeared in the Revue Française de Sociologie Nr. 33, April–June 1992, pp. 155-187. Read also the last paragraph of this article. With force of arguments he contested naturalist approaches of the evolution of the societies that draw their explanatory models from evolution in biology.See for instance the article “Are the biological models useful for conceptualizing the evolution of the societies?” in Préhistoires méditerranéennes 2011/2. Based on a critical review of the foundations of ethnology, in particular of the work of Lewis H. Morgan,A re-edition of Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) was published in 1985 with a preface by Alain Testart that can be obtained via the official website. Alain Testart has attempted to renew an almost forgotten tradition in ethnological research, basing himself on the data acquired by a century of research in ethnography and prehistoric archaeology.
In his synthetic work Prior to history. The evolution of societies, from Lascaux to Carnac (2012) he has explained his scientific approach in a systematic way, and has designed a surprising panorama on the prehistory of the societies, including those of the Indo-European ensemble. With this book Alain Testart obtained a late recognition from a broad audience for his work as a sociological researcher.Following an enthusiastic welcome in the newspaper Le Monde of 23 November 2012, a discussion of this book in the review Sciences Humaines (update of 23 December 2013) shows a continuing interest in the evolution of the societies. After his death a circle of friends and former colleagues has taken up the edition of unpublished works.End of January 2014 the essay The Amazon and the Kitchenmaid: Anthropology of the sexual division of labor was published by Gallimard in Paris.
The following article shortly presents the social-anthropological oeuvre of Alain Testart at the hand of three of his research themes: the anthropology of hunter-gatherers; concepts of comparative sociology, and the evolution of the societies. In the footnotes web links point towards abstracts, papers, articles in scientific reviews, book critiques by others, colloquia and resources for further reference. An extract of his copious bibliography has also been included.
An engineer in the social sciences After graduating as an engineer from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris,Higher National (engineering) School of Mine. and after brief employment in an enterprise, Alain Testart began to study ethnology. In 1975 he received his doctorate with his thesis On the dualistic classifications in Australia: Essay on the evolution of social organization 1978 : Des classifications dualistes en Australie : Essai sur l'évolution de l'organisation sociale. Paris et Lille : Maison des Sciences de l'Homme & Lille III, 222 p. French Summary: http://www.alaintestart.com/class_dual_austra.htm under the direction of Jacques Barrau. In 1982 he began working at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and became, subsequently, a member of the team “Social appropriation of Nature” at the National Museum of Natural History, and of the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology at the Paris X – Nanterre University, where he carried out a number of educational assignments. Alain Testart was a member of the Laboratory for Social Anthropology at the Collège de France and an emeritus research directory at the CNRS.
Anthropology of the Hunter-Gatherers The first works of Alain Testart treat the social organization of the Australian Aborigines and of the hunter-gatherers, peoples who did not engage in any form of agriculture or animal herding at the time of colonization (Australian Aboriginals, San, arctic and subarctic American Indians, Pygmies, etc.).
The opposition Gathering / Storage
His book The Hunter-Gatherers, or the Origins of Social Inequalities (1982) 1982 : Les chasseurs-cueilleurs ou l'origine des inégalités, Paris : Société d'Ethnographie (Université Paris X-Nanterre) rapidly became a classic among prehistorians. It revisits the classical opposition between hunter–gatherers and agriculturalists (or horticulturalists). This opposition was accepted as valid in both ethnology and prehistoric archeology, as was the notion of the Neolithic Revolution earlier advanced by V. Gordon Childe: a radical transformation of social and economic structures that was said to mark the transition from an economy of gathering and hunting to one based on the domestication of plants and crops. In his book, Alain Testart points out that more than half of the hunter–gatherer societies known to ethnology, in fact, share the same characteristics as agricultural societies: a sedentary society which indicates village life; an increased demographic density (higher than neighboring agriculturalists); significant hierarchies, including slavery and the differentiation in social strata such as nobles and commoners. These are typically the American Indians of the Pacific coast, of California and the peoples of Southeastern Siberia. These peoples, who only exploit wild (undomesticated) food resources like salmon, acorns etc., collect them in large quantities during the season of abundance and store them in order to provide for sufficient foodstuffs during the remainder of the year. These hunter–gatherers live on their stored food just as the agriculturalists live on the reserves of grain they keep in their barns or silos.
They thereby possess what Alain Testart terms a “techno-economical structure” analogous to that of the grain growers. As a consequence their societies are analogous as well. He proposes to substitute the classic opposition of hunter – gatherers and agriculturalists with a more general classification, depending on whether or not their economies rely on the large scale stockpiling of a seasonal, basic food resources. The evolutionary implications of this recasting are very clear. In no case it is possible to retain a unilinear conception. Rather, one finds an evolution which diverges, resulting, in one case, in food-storing hunter-gatherers, who remain unchanged into the 19th century and, in the other case, in agriculturalists, some of whom came to develop into very different forms of society.
The sexual division of labor as ideology In a second work Alain Testart traces some invariance that one could almost term as transhistorical, as they are widely found in very different societies, including those of the first industrial era. One of these is how work is divided between men and women. A brief observation shows for instance that women are generally kept far from all professions related to blood (surgery, the armed professions, hunting, etc.). A consideration of the ethnographic data collected on hunter–gatherers shows that the division of tasks between men and women regarding gathering and hunting obeys a simple law: women are not excluded from hunting but from those forms of hunting that shed blood. With the Inuit, the Siberians and the Australian Aboriginals women can be observed hunting with nets and clubs, but never with bows and arrows or with harpoons. These data refute the idea that the sexual division of labor with hunter–gatherers could be based on nature (women not hunting because of repetitive pregnancies) and had no connection to economical rationality, because what could justify women hunting but not using typical hunting weapons?
In his Essay on the Foundations of the Sexual Division of Labor with the Hunter-Gatherers (1986)Video of the last College conference with Alain Testart at the Cité des sciences , December 1st, 2011. Alain Testart argues that this division must be based on an ideology involving the symbolism of blood. Finally relating these prohibitions or taboos regarding weapons to the very numerous taboos associated with the blood of menstruation, he shows how this ideology acts to prevent the blood shed by women from being confused or mixed up with the blood shed by men in the hunt.
Concepts of Comparative Sociology Alain Testart was often very critical about social anthropology; he reproached it for using concepts that are vague, inexact and much too simple, compared to the concepts used in the sciences of history or in the history of law. He maintains that for a scientific project in a comprehensive sociology it is of fundamental importance to consider small, precolonial stateless societies, that so far have been studied only by this discipline. According to Alain Testart, today's major scientific challenge when studying these societies is to be able to use the same terms and the same problematic as those used by the historical sciences. In this perspective he has reexamined a number of issues in order to define the terms with more precision.
Slavery For instance: slavery, conceived as an extreme form of servile dependency, needs to be carefully distinguished from other forms like serfdom, the Roman colonat, helotism, etc. In Slaves, Debt and Power: Studies in comparative Sociology 2001, L'esclave, la dette et le pouvoir : Études de sociologie comparative. Paris : Errance, 238 p. Alain Testart notices that the slave is not assigned a single typical way of life. This is particularly true for the slave of Antiquity: the slave of the latifundia and the slave who works at his master's side have very little in common; the gladiator and the Prince's favorite, who carries out important functions in the imperial offices, have even less in common. There is no single material and social condition characteristic of slavery. These slaves have in common only their legal status as slaves: to consider only the Greek and Roman examples, the favorite concubine of the master and the worker in the mines of the Laurion cannot have legitimate children. And, according to laws common to both classical Athens and ancient Rome, both the concubine and the miner are subject to torture when they are called to testify in a law court. The slave cannot be conceived of except as a clear legal category.
But the legal conditions of slavery, for instance in Ancient Rome and with the Ashanti, are not at all the same. They even completely change from the beginning to the end of the Roman empire, likewise they differ between the Ashanti kingdom and that of Abomey. This legal dimension needs to be enlarged to encompass a wider sociological characterization.