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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... economic settings of these clusterings? Which contextual features help to explain why transformative bursts of innovation occurred when and how they did and not in other, more quiescent, intervening periods? Alternatively, what impact ...
... economic, or some other, determinism, and that privilege things and events over relationships and processes.4 As it is considered here, in short, technology is an enormous, vaguely bounded array of material and nonmaterial, new and ...
... economic or social advantage. Diffusion of new innovations largely depended on precept, example, and word of mouth, or on hands-on acquaintanceship with novel, imported artifacts. Nor is this the end of the limitations to be overcome ...
... economic history from economics. Although other perspectives have begun to command a substantial place in recent years, traditions of participant observation among ethnographers, and of sitefocused excavations among archaeologists ...
... economic variables,” their formulation of the balance between innovation and entrepreneurship tips toward the former in seeing the “ 'cumulative and selfpropelling advance of technology' [as] a sort of primus inter pares within the menu ...
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 |