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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... perhaps the firston which I tried to take a more comprehensive view of the field,was as part of the Tenth Anniversary Lecture Series of the Department of Anthropology of the Johns Hopkins University in 1986, with support from the ...
... perhaps provided by the preponderant role that universities, with their devotion to basic research, have over the last century or so come to play in intellectual life. But the consequence is, in any case, that for a deeper, less ...
... perhaps the principal source of flexibility and adaptive change.14 The element of consistent and conscious reproducibility cannot be overlooked, of course, but the objectives for which this is done must be broad and plural rather than ...
... Perhaps they should be thought of as the cumulative product of a long aggregation of small improvements in practice, supplemented by random, accidental discoveries. No routines are, after all, absolutely rigid at the hands of all ...
... Perhaps it should be conceded that to speak comprehensively of a modern American industrial system would conflate so many differently oriented and even contradictory elements as to be meaningless. Possibilities for comprehensive ...
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 |