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 35
... position today has significantlyfewer adherents. Historically attested attitudes and behaviors do not neatly divide themselves into capitalist and precapitalist categories. In many cultures and historical epochs, and for social ...
... position was the only technologically practical alternative, or even the most economically advantageous one. They challenge, in short, “the prevailing sense of . . . individual omniscience and self-conscious historical missions,” and ...
... position and weighing their respective advantages in a climate of considerable uncertainty, negotiations over technology transfer frequently tend to be complex, volatile, and protracted. The breeding of hybrid corn, which has been the ...
... position, and also expressed at the outset of this book, is the conviction that “hard” technological determinism does not provide a useful vantage point from which to understand technological change. My own interest in technology may ...
... position associated, for example, with the work of medieval historian Lynn White, Jr. What is clearly called for is neither a blanket acceptance nor denunciation of technological primacy when it is argued in these terms, but rather a ...
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 |