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 35
... emerge in any other way. To what degree is technology, like science, a branch of knowledge in its own right? Some authorities believe that a disciplinary pedigree became attached to technology only quite recently, and at least partly as ...
... emerged with greater consistency and clarity—an d with unquestionably greater economy as well, overlooking some personal regret over the necessary disappearance of many of my numerous excursions into anecdotal detail. He has my warmest ...
... emerge from this study. No doubt that is at least partly explained by the most salient of its conclusions—that the course of technological change is continuously subject to many heterogeneous, often confli cting influences ...
... emergence of protoindustrial and industrial technology. This is the part of the considerably larger technological fieldon which this book will concentrate—the one culminating in industrial scale, methods, organization, and ultimately ...
... emergence of modern Western society. More and more heavily involving the self-directed, consciously innovative pursuit of new opportunities and enterprises, this transformation was for him the decisive force accounting for technology's ...
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 |