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 71
... substantially to the process of innovation by envisioning needed features and stimulating the search for them.2 Hence it is a reifying distortion to isolate inventions and innovations as triggering events that, at least in each major ...
... substantial place in recent years, traditions of participant observation among ethnographers, and of sitefocused excavations among archaeologists, remain the dominant ones. Those traditions tend to take implausibly for granted that the ...
... substantially changing institutional context of firmscompeting in a market. But we need to foreshadow the rise of capitalism, not simply to follow the main lines of its evolution. It was a central feature of Braudel's larger synthesis ...
... substantial improvements in technical equipment or productive efficiencysometimes were devoted to freeing greater time for religious observance, family or community rites of passage, or merely leisure. Population growth has no doubt ...
... substantially responsible for continuing gains in productivity that threaten to make increasing numbers of unskilled and semiskilled workers permanently redundant. Those directing and working within the science-and-technology enterprise ...
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 |