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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... social consensus be sought to shape advancing technology in the service of the unfolding requirements of the Good Society of the future? Compounding such questions and thereby introducing an additional layer of risks and opportunities ...
... social features that are viewed as systemically linked to technology and relevant to understanding its many paths of growth and change. Second, most anthropologists tend to maintain a consistently integrative, contextual emphasis. In ...
... social, cultural, and economic settings of these clusterings? Which contextual features help to explain why transformative bursts of innovation occurred when and how they did and not in other, more quiescent, intervening periods ...
... social contexts that are too fundamentally different to sustain the effort. But rewarding engagement with colleagues and programs at the Santa Fe Institute in recent years convinces me that models of thought need not be in any sense ...
... social science and public affairs for Princeton University Press. With his help the main lines of the argument of the book have emerged with greater consistency and clarity—an d with unquestionably greater economy as well, overlooking ...
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 |