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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... 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 large-scale comparison, beginning in the ancient world and ...
... . In the face of obstacles like these, further progress in understanding the development and role of technology clearly requires not only the marshaling of very disparate kinds of direct and indirect evidence but CHAPTER 1 8.
... progress alone. Economist Brian Arthur has plausibly suggested that they will commonly characterize unstable hierarchies of dependence or “food webs” where the “individuals or entities or species or organisms co-exist together in an ...
... progress is best conveyed by conceptualizing it as a continuous flow, and foreswear narratives that dwell on a succession of unique actions and discrete historical “e vents”?51 However, a difficultywith following this suggestion of Paul ...
... progress as the ultimate residual. One identifiesas many of the components of economic growth as one can, and what is left provides at least an upper limit to the contribution of technological change.”68 The larger issue, surely ...
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 |