Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western TechnologyPrinceton University Press, 2012 M09 17 - 360 páginas Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term. |
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... activities; and their evolving threshholds of technoscientific capability. More selectively and broadly, its focus at times widens to include the relationship of technology to governmental initiatives and structures; population ...
... activity, its parts more readily taking on the coloration of their different contexts. Virtually all members of society participate in technology to some extent, holding very divergent views of what they know of it and directing their ...
... activities, each with a distinctive, relatively unchanging function. I am skeptical about the utility of an artifact-oriented view of technology, as opposed to a more systems-oriented one, for the study of any period of history. For all ...
... activities of the hand. By tending to decompose technology into dissociated parts, it neglects elements of choice in the selections that must be made continuously within a whole technological repertoire, although these are perhaps the ...
... activities under a growing degree (as especially in contemporary Japan) of state tutelage and overt support.18 Lazonick emphasizes the enabling power of these institutional innovations, tending to see as natural and unproblematical the ...
Contenido
3 | |
36 | |
3 Technology and the New European Society | 69 |
4 England as the Workshop of the World | 104 |
The American System Emerges | 138 |
6 The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership | 173 |
7 The Competitive Global System | 212 |
Technological Change in a Borderless World | 253 |
Notes | 279 |
References Cited | 301 |
Index | 327 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams Vista previa limitada - 2012 |
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology Robert McCormick Adams Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |