https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315424255/mundane-objects-pierre-lemonnier

Lemonier formulated an empirically demanding programme for a comparative anthropology of technology based on the concepts of material actions, technological systems, and technological choices (1986, 1992, 1993, 2012). 'Technological choices', a concept gleaned from Lévi-Strauss, addresses questions that arise from the observation that many techniques are far from 'rational', 'efficient', or the 'best possible' and that, among several technological possibilities, societies seize, adopt, or develop only some features while dismissing others (Lemonier 1993). Building on the French tradition of Mauss, Haudricourt and Leroi-Gourhan, Bruno Latour y and Pierre Lemonnier (1994) endeavoured to integrate the vatious paradigms of technology at an interdisciplinary symposium in the early 1990s alongside primatologists, archacologists, ethnologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars. While Latour went on to develop actor-network theory (Latour
2005), Lemonier continued Mauss's programme and summarised and refined his work in the field of technologie culturelle in Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication (2012), emphasising that material actions and mundane artefacts are at the very core of human existence. It is through close ethnographic attention to material techniques, Lemonier posits, that anthropologists can understand basic human logics, social relationships, and societies.3