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
... less satisfying ends in themselves. By seeking to invoke broad consistencies in the direction and processes of technological change that span fiveor six millennia, I admittedly run the risk of comparing entities and their social ...
... less well to a concisely summarized proposition that can be stated at the outset. Very briefly, it is a dynamic, evolving relationship of increasing synergy and mutual interdependency as we approach the modern period. Until quite ...
... less independent acts of origination. Although the record usually turns out on closer inspection to be marred by ambiguities, at least in principle the substance and timing of each of these achievements seems conducive to being more ...
... less random, more situationally responsive or context-dependent, more prone to occur in closely interrelated clusters, and likewise more transformative in the scale and scope of their consequences. No less important, they do not adhere ...
... less derivative understanding, technology demands a distinctive approach of its own. Science, for all of its intense specialization, in principle constitutes a corpus of comprehensive, generalized knowledge with recognized frontiers 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 |