Documentary resources

The André-Georges Haudricourt Center (Humanities and Social Sciences)

Who was A-G Haudricourt?

A-G. Haudricourt

(1911-1996), Honorary Director of Research at the CNRS, which he joined in 1939 (in the laboratory of applied botany of the National Museum of Natural History), was an eminent linguist and ethnologist, too little known by the general public.
Pupil and friend of M. Mauss, contemporary of C. Levi-Strauss and A. Leroi-Gourhan, he is one of the most fertile and curious scientists of our time, one of the most atypical too. His itinerary is not common: raised in an isolated farm in Picardy, he obtained a diploma of Agricultural Engineer in 1931, made a first mission in the USSR in 1934, starting point of a world tour which will lead him in particular to New Caledonia and Southeast Asia. He was also librarian at the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi in 1948-49.
A-G. Haudricourt played a fundamental role in the development of the anthropology of techniques, ethnoscience and ethnolinguistics. This lover of flora, languages and technical objects has left a body of work that is difficult to classify because of the immense variety of subjects it covers, from the origin and history of the carriage or of cultivated plants, the phonology of Austronesian languages, the relationships between the treatment of plants and the treatment of others, to the ecology of lice or the shape of buttons. From this profusion, one will retain in particular the masterly L’Homme et la Charrue à travers le monde, with J.B. Delamarre (1955, republished by La Manufacture, 1986); L’Homme et les plantes cultivées, with L. Hédin (1943, republished by Métaillé, 1987); La notation des langues. Phonétique et phonologie, with J.M.C. Tomas (Institut Géographique National, 1972); Problème de phonologie diachronique (Selaf, 1967); La Phonologie panchronique, with C. Hagège (PUF, 1978) and Technologie science humaine. Recherches d’histoire et d’ethnologie des techniques (MSH, 1987).
Scholar of an inexhaustible erudition, militant until his death, notorious for his biting irony, his anticonformism and the hallucinating mess of works in which he lived, A-G. Haudricourt, as much by his personality as by his work, left an indelible mark on a whole generation of ethnologists. It is therefore easy to understand why the units gathered in Building 23 have placed themselves under the banner of this extraordinary scientist.

• DONAUD1607 . Fonds Jean-Claude Rivierre. Langues de Nouvelle-Calédonie, langues kanak.
• DONAUD1901 . Fonds Véronique de Colombel (CNRS-LACITO). Linguistique africaine. Langue ouldémé du Nord-Cameroun (1976-1994)
• DONAUD0403 . Fonds Simha Arom. Ethnomusicologie
• DONAUD1906 . Fonds Christiane Seydou. Patrimoine littéraire peul du Mali