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. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 61
... already well advanced along other research frontiers? Consistent with a general shift of anthropological attention toward as- pects of contemporary civilization, I suggest that our insights may be useful in three principal respects ...
... already been mentioned. No doubt it reflects a steeply increasing range of applications of new technologies resulting from many new paths of convergence with basic scientificresearch. What has been put in place is nothing less than a ...
... already noted, there are increasing difficulties if we allow the fieldof meaning of contemporary technology to be identified primarily with Braudel's slowly moving, deepest substratum. Characteristic of the technologies that now have ...
... already noted, innovations differ greatly in importance. It is only natural that clusterings of subsidiary improvements and applications quickly follow the more fruitful and fundamental breakthroughs as their potential is recognized and ...
... already noted, some clustering of innovations is to be expected even in the absence of entrepreneurship. Irregularities of rate, interspersing relatively long quiescent periods with shorter impulses of rapid change and growing ...
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 |