With this book Alain Testart obtained a late recognition from a broad audience for his work as a sociological researcher.
[5] 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.
After graduating as an engineer from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris,[6] 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 [7] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alain Testart summarizes these facts by saying that everywhere the slave was defined by an exclusion from areas considered as most fundamental by society.
Nor does the distinction depend on whether the reciprocity is expected: gift-giving with selfish motives also exists, giving something in the hope of getting back more in return (for example: the baksheesh).
Here too it is the juridical aspect that enables us to distinguish both phenomena: the right to demand compensation characterizes the exchange but is absent with the gift.
[12] In this article he welcomes the often unappreciated originality of the great 19th Century anthropologists, primarily that of Lewis H. Morgan, but simultaneously criticizes their methods.
[13][14] This conviction led him to take a dual perspective on the funeral practices from both an archeological and an ethnological viewpoint, and to introduce a thesis on the origin of the State.
Extended Summary in English of: 2001 L'esclave, la dette et le pouvoir : Études de sociologie comparative.
Pour la Science 396 : 74-80 2013 Reconstructing Social and Cultural Evolution: The Case of Dowry in the Indo-European Area.
374–416) for an extended exploration of Alain Testart's insight that an 'ideology of blood' underlies the sexual division of labour in hunter-societies.
Focusing on African hunter-gatherer societies, this is a detailed analysis of Ekila – a concept of menstrual potency which illustrates and underlines the importance of Alain Testart's notion of an 'ideology of blood'.