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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... human agency's discretion. Responsibility lies instead with the readiness of human institutions to submit to forces of short-term expediency that heavily diminish any accounting for outcomes. Moreover, when the bleak future arrives ...
... an anthropologist, an apparent interloper from a discipline prevailingly uninvolved with issues of modern technology. However broad the hunting license of a fieldof inquiry that proclaims nothing human is alien to it, how can PREFACE xii.
An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams. that proclaims nothing human is alien to it, how can an anthropologist's insights add to work that is already well advanced along other research frontiers? Consistent ...
... human species. If certain technological developments account for some of our troubles, many others are also the foundation on which human civilization originated and has (if discontinuously) moved forward in giant steps across millennia ...
... human products, most new technologies were invented and applied to serve immediate ends. Continuously shaped by human design and use, their introduction also modifiedprior contexts of design and use. Yet the process of innovating and ...
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 |