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 39
... means employed toward this end at some 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 ...
... means of adaptation,” is a unique property of the 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 ...
... means. How else can we organize ourselves functionally and hierarchically, extend our mastery over the constraints and uncertainties of our environment, and improve our collective ability to set goals and move toward their attainment ...
... means are, after all, just as crucial for coercion and exploitation as for more benevolent purposes. Still, the balance is overwhelmingly positive. The densely interactive, endlessly reshaped mass of artifacts, techniques, designs, and ...
... means for reconfiguring as well as reproducing the social order. Braudel himself, however, was not primarily concerned with its adaptive and transformative significance.For him technology was, like the social order itself, “an enormous ...
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 |