ABSTRACT
Marcel Mauss defined techniques as "traditional efficacious" acts. I The appropriate technique varies with gender and age. It also varies, according to Andre Leroi-Gourhan, with "the ideal mechanical function" that it is expected to achieve. The latter expectation depends in turn on the ethnic or individual style or aesthetic of the performers and on their conception of the relationship between the materials used in the performance of the technique and the expected result. It similarly depends on the performance itself or ways of making contact between the body or bodily parts and the materials used for the purpose of obtaining the intended result.2 A group's perceptions and conceptions of the body and individual bodily parts thus reflect its own image of the group and proper role in it of the individual.3
