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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... materials. But from that time forward, having informed the Institution's Board of Regents of my intention to retire ... material could be tested in class lectures, and it concluded early in 1996 during my term as a fellow at the ...
... materials for change, technological innovations have a role in some respects reminiscent of that of genetic ... material objects. There is indeed a place for an essentialist approach of this sort, especially when, as in this book, it is ...
... material and nonmaterial, new and traditional elements. The loosely linked systems into which most of these elements are grouped can neither function nor be understood except as parts of an embracing social organism. In other words ...
... Materials research is likely to make a significantcontribution as well, as a companion discipline alongside geoarchaeology, zoo-archaeology, and archaeological botany. Present experimental approaches will no doubt begin to play a part ...
... material objective.”13 Complementarities and feedbacks lending coherence and impact to larger, interacting, and multifunctional technological systems, or to technology at large as it existed within a particular cultural or historical ...
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 |