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 88
... growing interest in these questions coincided with declining opportunities to pursue them in fieldworkin the Near East, and especially in Iraq. Moving away from the detached stance of an observer of relics of behavior that were safely ...
... grown, irregularly but cumulatively and without significantreversal, throughout the entire human career. Furnishing raw materials for change, technological innovations have a role in some respects reminiscent of that of genetic ...
... grow in importance while measurable entities and isolated, well-definedrelationships recede. This tends to support a synthesizing—but correspondingly eclectic—methodo logical stance if we are to aim at better understanding some of the ...
... growing degree (as especially in contemporary Japan) of state tutelage and overt support.18 Lazonick emphasizes the enabling power of these institutional innovations, tending to see as natural and unproblematical the corresponding ...
... growing inventories of personal property. The immense devotion of energy to cathedral-building during the Middle Ages is merely one of many examples demonstrating that this has not always been so. It is no less plausible to assume that ...
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 |