Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology

Anthropology, broadly conceived, seeks a holistic understanding of human sociocultural life over long time spans. Robert McC. Adams is an anthropologist in this sense. His work has been devoted to unraveling the origins of civilization in southwestern Asia and the Near East, and the concomitant processes of agricultural and urban development, over a period of some six millennia. In Paths of Fire, however, he applies this same totalizing perspective to a different field of inquiry: the growth of technology in the Western world from antiquity to the present day.

After a general introduction, Adams begins with a chapter titled “The Useful Arts in Western Antiquity,” most of which is not actually about the ancient world at all. He takes us from the birth of civilization in Mesopotamia through classical Greece and Rome to the European Middle Ages at such a pace that by halfway through we have already reached Francis Bacon. The rest of the chapter then deals with the relations between the gentlemanly pursuit of natural philosophy and the craftsmanship of artisans and technicians from the seventeenth century to the dawn of the industrial era. The story continues in the third and fourth chapters with a description of the industrial revolution in Britain. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in a climate of intensifying competition, British industry lost its innovative momentum and gradually relinquished its lead to the United States. Chapter 5 documents the emergence of mass production in America. By the sixth chapter, the United States has taken over the mantle of world industrial leadership, and this and the following chapter have an exclusively American focus, concentrating on the roles of government and the military as sponsors of research and development, on the gradual dissolution of the boundary between science and technology, and on the current challenges facing industrial strategists and policymakers in a global competitive arena. The concluding chapter takes up a number of key issues for contemporary science and technology policy, concerning support for research and development, the significance of sustainability, and the estimation of technological risk.

Throughout, Adams reiterates five general points. First, technology cannot be abstracted from the social and economic institutions in which it operates. This rules out any but the “soft” kind of technological determinism, according to which certain innovations may facilitate socioeconomic change. Second, it is wrong to attribute to technology an autonomous dynamic, threatening to usurp the power of its human creators. Since technology is always the servant of human interests, human beings cannot shirk the responsibility for its consequences. Third, technology has never been the mere implementation of scientific knowledge; rather, scientists and technologists have distinctive ways of knowing and thinking and have coexisted in a relationship that, though tense and awkward, has always been two-way. Fourth, far from developing slowly and steadily, technology has advanced through concentrated pulses of innovation, whose frequency has increased over time. Finally, the effects of technology on human life have been overwhelmingly positive, and whatever reservations we might have, for example, about the damage it may do to the global environment, we have no other means by which to overcome adversity.

These points are not novel, and all have been widely debated. But it was not the lack of novelty that left me feeling disappointed by this book. I had rather expected more from a work claiming to be “an anthropologist’s inquiry into Western technology.” Adams sets out three features of an anthropological approach that make it well suited to an inquiry of this kind: it is open to nonquantifiable complexities of interaction, is sensitive to variations of context, and seeks patterns that override conventional geographic and temporal boundaries. I would not dispute these features or deny that they are exemplified in Adams’s work. But there is more to an anthropological perspective than that. At the very least, it is grounded in the realities of everyday experience, intrinsically comparative (so...