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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... relative openness to complexities of interaction that are not readily reducible to simple regularities or precisely measurable quantities. At the possible expense of methodological parsimony, this account will seek to avoid drawing any ...
... relatively seamless web of disciplines. Too frequently it exists in the shadow of the history of science, largely drawing its methodology and theoretical models from that source. Nothing is surprising about this. It surely reflects the ...
... relatively unchanging function. I am skeptical about the utility of an artifact-oriented view of technology, as opposed to a more systems-oriented one, for the study of any period of history. For all of Braudel's enormous authority as a ...
... relatively less affected. They continue to pursue goals that they have had a significanthand in choosing, exercising relatively greater freedom of approach and maintaining higher security of PATHS OF FIRE 17.
An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams. cising relatively greater freedom of approach and maintaining higher security of employment than most of their counterparts in other sectors with comparable training ...
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 |