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
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... hand in the “Big Mill” in South Chicago, the old (now demolished) South Works of the U.S. Steel Corporation, was, as I reflect on it, not lengthy, but permanently defining.That was in some respects still a time of innocence. One could ...
... hands-on acquaintanceship with novel, imported artifacts. Nor is this the end of the limitations to be overcome. Exogenous changes in social receptivity or economic demand have consistently been more determinative of the directions ...
... hand.6 At the same time, adding perspectives drawn from the credo of participant observation to the battery of present approaches offers more than an abiding effort to obtain a wider view. It turns attention in many new directions—among ...
... hand, are social constructs, and these have an astonishingly pervasive uniformity across cultures and civilizations.8 In this respect, the inadequacy of existing records is an important obstacle that is difficultto overcome. Patents are ...
... hand. By tending to decompose technology into dissociated parts, it neglects elements of choice in the selections that must be made continuously within a whole technological repertoire, although these are perhaps the principal source of ...
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 |