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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... suggest that our insights may be useful in three principal respects. First is a relative openness to complexities of interaction that are not readily reducible to simple regularities or precisely measurable quantities. At the possible ...
... suggests. Evident for at least several centuries, firstin Britain and later and more strongly in the United States, has been a consistent aim to design new technologies that would not only meet existing needs or demands but would create ...
... suggests, we need to take into account an ongoing evolution in the character of technology itself. The relationship of a pre-modern farmer or craftsperson to a tool (or set of tools, for that matter) is likely to have been a highly ...
... 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 interacting population, with some forming substrates or ...
... suggests, is a combination of interrelated innovations that embodies a quantum leap in potential productivity, opens up an unusually wide range of investment and profitop- portunities, and produces major structural crises of adjustment ...
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 |