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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... hopeless to storm, by a frontal attack, the great citadels of causality underlying highly complex groups of facts.”3 But the difficulty is, of course, that flanking movements seldom encounter easy going and instead PREFACE xiv.
An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams. course, that flanking movements seldom encounter ... courses of a more general character that I taught at the University of Chicago and as a visiting professor at ...
... course of technological change is continuously subject to many heterogeneous, often confli cting influences. Characterized as “path-dependent” for this reason, it is cumulative and yet. Paths. of. Fire: The. Idea. of. Technological. Change.
... course for years to come. Far more commonly, however, innovative contributions have fallen within a broad, temporally unfolding front of complementary efforts involving many collaborators or competitors. Thus, innovations are better ...
... course, residual values as well as more dynamic religious callings. Separately or in combination, we must be sensitive to the parts that all such contextual factors played in creating milieux that help us to understand technological ...
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 |