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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... historic epoch that have ultimately proved to be of decisive importance. In most of these latter instances, the greatest breaks in continuity occurred at the outset of closely related clusters or series. Such breakthroughs then tended ...
... historical analysis. After all, as is observed in a valuable recent overview of the issue: In spite of the existence of an engineering profession, technology is not an organized institution; it has no members or stated policies, nor ...
... historic records that have been routinely constrained by the observational and conventional filtersof those who were charged with recording them. To take the ... Historical Acceleration of Technology Fernand Braudel has written CHAPTER 1 10.
... historical context, receive little attention. What is given greatest salience may be little more than a hodgepodge of individually reifiedand routinized activities, each with a distinctive, relatively unchanging function. I am skeptical ...
... historical epochs, and for social aggregates as well as for individuals, the overwhelming empirical impression is one of immense variety.23 Significantclusterings of market-oriented practices can be traced far back in history as well as ...
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 |