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
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... periods? Alternatively, what impact did rapid technological progress have on the societies in which it occurred? Has the role of technology in history been primarily that of a dependent or independent variable—dr iven or driver? Only by ...
... period of time, there is some hope of learning how to distinguish less arbitrarily between breaks and continuities in processes of technological change. The subject of this study began with a modest inclusion of the theme of technology ...
... periods in their history, for that matter—differ in their readiness to devote resources and creative energies to taking world technological leadership? Only a few generalized answers to questions like these will emerge from this study ...
... periods in which a technology-oriented logic governs,”1 no convincing case can be made that technology has ever ... period. Until quite recently, it has primarily been viewed from the more consciously documented perspective of the ...
... period of history. For all of Braudel's enormous authority as a contextualizing historian, it has overtones of long-discarded scholastic assumptions about the existence of a wall of separation between affairs of PATHS OF FIRE 11.
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 |