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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... late prehistory to the threshold of the modern era. In shifting to a fresh and unfamiliar subject, I admittedly have had to rely heavily on secondary works and to skirt many issues of uncertainty or contention that can only be the ...
... late 1970s and early 1980s. This led to more direct approaches in formally prepared lectures. One such occasion, perhaps the firston which I tried to take a more comprehensive view of the field,was as part of the Tenth Anniversary ...
... late 1940s and early 1950s as a mill 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 ...
... late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were too distinct in content, and too widely separated in time, to demonstrate any pattern of direct dependency of the latter on the former. Moreover, most accounts of great scientific ...
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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 |