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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... become global in their reach as much of the world's population finds itself caught up in overlapping webs of ... becoming a knowledge-based society under these powerful, convergent influences. Great as are some of the apparent incentives ...
... become a key to corporate survival, but with potentially devastating local effects. All in all, ongoing technological change presents us with a highly complex, contradictory set of challenges. Systemically linked in ways that are often ...
... become no less satisfying ends in themselves. By seeking to invoke broad consistencies in the direction and processes of technological change that span fiveor six millennia, I admittedly run the risk of comparing entities and their ...
... become the property of the husband. It is thus not surprising that women are credited with only about 1 percent of patents that were awarded during the nineteenth century. Since then it has risen, at firstvery slowly but now at an ...
... become virtually a synonym for all of the instrumental means for reconfiguring as well as reproducing the social order. Braudel himself, however, was not primarily concerned with its adaptive and transformative significance.For him ...
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 |