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I TECHNOLOGICAL :STYLE AND THE MAI(ING OF CULTURE: Three !(ono Contexts of Production I(RIS L. HARDINr • In this chapter I am interested in introducing issues of difference and variation to the recent literature on the relationship between technological and social forms. By technology I am speaking of "the totality of the means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance and comfort" (Websters Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary), and I am interpreting totality here to mean what Heather Lechtman calls technological style-technical modes of operation, attitudes toward materials, the organization of labor, rituals associated with production, and any other factors that might affect the production of particular things (Lechtman 1977). Over the last ten years there has been a growing interest in analyzing particular technologies in terms of the social aIld cultural forms in which they are embedded. For example, Nigel Barley (1 982), Luc de Heusch (1980), Roy Dilley (1986), and others have cOJnsidered the symbolic and COsIIlological underpinnings of various techniques of production. Others have looked for analogues betvveen technical and social phenomena in formal terms (see Adams 1973 and 1977). Perhaps the most explicit exploration of the complex relationships between technological and social forms can be found in the work of Heather Lechtman (1977) on technological style. The emphasis in all of these studies of technology has been on identifying analogous behaviors in a range of domains. These patterns comprise botll behavioral and conceptual or cognitive styles and reveal infornlation about logic, value and morality, cause and effect relationships , and other aspects of worldview. These and similar studies have paved the way for a view of particular technologies as mirrors of other sociocultural forms or as reflections of other technologies. What is missing from much of this literature, however, is an investigation into the importance of historically or socially situated diversity in techll010gically based habits or skills. When people look at analogues in the production of social and material forms (hey imply that diversities 32 [(ris L. Hardin of style, either among individuals or across domains of production, are nonexistent and thereby suggest homogeneity in concept and action, as well as stasis over time. Luc de Heusch (1980) describes conceptual links between the production and maturation of children and the production of ceramic wares. Variation enters his analysis of southeastern Bantu birth practices only in terms of variations in outcome. In this way, prematurity , twins, and albinism are explained through analogies to problems in firing technology (as in: twins have been overfired and albinos are said to have been struck by lightning), but he leaves out questions of alternative explanations. The picture given here is that principles of technology (as well as culture) are held and practiced uniformly and in perpetuity. While such studies are insightful in many ways, the degree of consistency and coherence described in them is problematic given what is known about inconsistency, variation, and contingency in everyday life. One study which highlights variation is Brinkley Messick's (1987) work on Moroccan weaving. He suggests that the meanings and actions embedded within some forms of women's weaving comprise an alternative discourse that acts as a mode of resistance to male domination. Emily Martin's (1987) work on the technology of reproduction also has implications for questions of variation as well as power and subordination as physicians and their patients work out whose view of physiological processes is dominant. Archaeologists, too, have given much more thought to variation. Olivier Gosselain's (1992) work on technology and style among Bafia potters of Cameroon documents the choices they make among a range of possibilities. Gosselain goes on to suggest that what we really need is an understanding of relationships between technological systems. My goal in this chapter is to explore technological style in three contexts of production among the I

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