International Study Symposium - The Techniques of the Body: 90 Years of Marcel Mauss’s Essay

From October 3rd to 7th, 2024, the University of São Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) hosted the "International Study Symposium - The Techniques of the Body: 90 Years of Marcel Mauss’s Essay."

Coordinated by Guilherme Moura Fagundes, professor at USP's Department of Anthropology (DA) and vice-coordinator of the Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology (LISA), along with Rafael Antunes Almeida from the University for International Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB), the event marked 90 years since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s renowned essay "The Techniques of the Body." It also saw the launch of the Anthropology, Environment, and Biotechnodiversity Collective (CHAMA), a study group at USP's Department of Anthropology led by Professor Guilherme Moura Fagundes.

The symposium featured three prominent specialists on the "technological" dimension of Mauss's work—focusing literally on the study of technique: Perig Pitrou, researcher at CNRS and director of the Maison Française d'Oxford research center; Carlos Sautchuk, coordinator of the Laboratory of Anthropology of Science and Technology at the University of Brasília (LACT/UnB); and Nathan Schlanger from the École Nationale des Chartes (ENC, Paris).

Discussions compared how Mauss's essay has been received and its effects on the consolidation of the anthropology of technology in Brazil and France. This field of study seeks to understand technical phenomena from a symmetrical perspective, overcoming the dichotomy between modern and traditional societies, while addressing interactions between humans and non-humans in life-making activities. These insights are central to addressing our current ecological crisis, where human actions on the planet are often reduced to ideas like "nature's destruction" or "domination of living beings," overshadowing the paleontological continuity between technical and vital phenomena.

The first session of the symposium, hosted in the LISA auditorium, was titled "Life and Movement: Impacts and Perspectives of Body Techniques Between Brazil and France." It opened with remarks from Professor Guilherme Moura Fagundes, was moderated by Rafael Almeida, and included presentations by Carlos Sautchuk and Perig Pitrou. The session aimed to show how Marcel Mauss's essay condenses various inflections of his thought, particularly regarding materiality and the vital dimension in shaping social life, offering a research agenda that resonates with contemporary critiques of the nature-culture divide.

In addition to the opening panel, the symposium featured three lectures by Professor Nathan Schlanger. The first, titled "Techniques of the Body and Technical Bodies—Marcel Mauss on Industry and Craft," was delivered in French with simultaneous translation and moderated by Professor Guilherme Moura Fagundes. It drew on archival materials by Marcel Mauss to provide intellectual and institutional details about the context in which his thoughts on technique emerged. The second lecture, given in English and titled "André Leroi-Gourhan: From Material Civilizations to Technical Behavior," was moderated by Eduardo Neves (MAE/USP) and focused on Schlanger’s recent book about ethnologist and archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986), a student of Mauss and contemporary of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France. The final lecture addressed "Learning in the Paleolithic: Technical Gestures, Operational Chains, and Skill-Building in Prehistory," presented by Joana Cabral (IFCH/Unicamp) with moderation and translation by Chantal Medaets (FE/Unicamp).

The symposium was organized by the Anthropology, Environment, and Biotechnodiversity Collective at USP (CHAMA), the Laboratory of Anthropology of Science and Technology at UnB (LACT), and the French Consulate in São Paulo. In addition to LISA, the event was supported by the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE-USP), the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at USP (PPGAS-USP), and the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at UNICAMP (PPGAS-Unicamp).

To view the event’s full program, visit the LISA website: https://lisa.fflch.usp.br/node/13058. Recordings of the symposium sessions are available on CHAMA’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Chama-USP. To learn more about the essay "The Techniques of the Body," visit USP’s Anthropology Encyclopedia: https://ea.fflch.usp.br/obra/tecnicas-do-corpo.