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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... presents us with a highly complex, contradictory set of challenges. Systemically linked in ways that are often counterintuitive, these challenges include irregular, nonlinear paths of advance that defy prediction. Enveloping and ...
... present day. Much of my earlier work was devoted to the unfolding sequence of urban life in southwestern Asia, from late prehistory to the threshold of the modern era. In shifting to a fresh and unfamiliar subject, I admittedly have had ...
... present likelihood of business failure. Human beings are the active agents of technological change, but innovations are its units. They obviously vary greatly in their change-promoting, destabilizing potential, from minor, quickly ...
... present training, little equips most anthropologists for the meticulous source criticism and textual analysis that is everyday grist for the mills among historians, or for the theoretical rigor and quantitative sophistication that is ...
... present, need to consider the creative, purposive, systemic features not only of technology in general but of most individual technologies as they are put into practice. Above all, it is important to recognize the multiplicity of ...
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 |