Anthropological Perspectives on Technology (review)

Anthropological Perspectives on Technology. Edited by Michael Brian Schiffer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+242. $49.95.

There is a vast sweep of human existence to which anthropological approaches to technology are potentially relevant. Testifying to its consequentiality and yet very limited coherence are the fourteen highly diverse chapters of this volume edited by Michael Brian Schiffer. To be sure, Schiffer himself has a considerably narrower, personal view of its very broad subject matter--one in which technology itself seems almost to emerge at times not as a tool of its human users and creators but as a living, adaptive system of its own. As perhaps most succinctly characterized by another contributor, Lucy Suchman, Schiffer's is "an interest in the social life of things and in the artifactual constitution of persons" (p. 165). Although the volume emerged from a symposium at which discussions were "at times highly charged" (p. xi), discontinuities and differences have undoubtedly been muted in the usual process of editorial "blanding." Regrettable though this may be, it proves no barrier to the volume's impressive coverage. If little emerges that is suggestive of a new consensus, a considerable range of the almost measureless terrain is well represented at widely different levels of specificity and generality.

There are, to be sure, convergences that are compelling for their unexpected quality. Tim Ingold, for example, begins at a theoretical level by convincingly tracing how an emergent separation between ars and techne has neglected a common element of skill--stereotyping the latter as practical ecological adaptation, the "simple, mechanical execution of complex structures," while neglecting the unifying element of skill embodied in "the form-generating potentialities of complex processes" (p. 22). Then Charles Keller, writing as a blacksmith "practicioner," reinforces this insight: "Much of productive activity as it is carried on in the everyday world is repetitive and routine with the appearance of mechanical rigidity. Yet the usually invisible conceptual infrastructure that leads to and supports these routinized performances at the same time contains the material necessary for innovation and variation" (p. 43). And Marcia-Anne Dobres, from nearer the other end of the human career, supplies corroboration from late Pleistocene art. Noting that recent constructivist studies have largely destroyed the distinction between "the efficient modification and pragmatic use of utilitarian objects" and "social artifice, values, and intersubjective relationships," she criticizes the prevailing study of prehistoric art as seeking meaning "in form and end-product to the near-exclusion of concern with how images were made meaningful during the social act of their physical production" (p. 47). Such a concentration on "the efficacious use of end-products rather than on the creative act itself," she rightly insists, can only reinforce an artificial ars-techne distinction.

The points of contact among other contributions are more limited than with these three. Richard Wilk, for example, stakes out an independent dimension by extending technology to consumption as well as production. "In Marx's footsteps," he posits a "radical break between modern consumption based on unlimited wants, and 'primitive' consumption determined by cultural rules and customary standards" (p. 110). The tendency to naturalize wants as needs, and to substitute an emphasis on tastes and impulses, serves for him as a striking index of modernity.

W. David Kingery, a distinguished materials scientist whose untimely death preceded publication of this volume, in a sense shares Schiffer's view that the history of technology centers on the history of artifacts. But he crucially expands the definition of artifact to include "object, device, machine, system" (p. 123), and goes on to argue forcefully for the primacy of design. This "wholly human activity" (p. 137) clearly detaches itself from the stereotypic view of technology as merely pragmatic adaptation. At the core of technological change, for Kingery, are acts of discovery and creation, "the process of conceiving and visualizing an artifact, of forming a plan, of contriving an arrangement of parts in a device, a process or system" (p. 123). While carrying...