Technology and Social Agency Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology [Hardcover]

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.List of Figures.

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

1. Of Black Boxes and Matters Material: The State of Things.

2. Deconstructing the Black Box: Some Philosophical and Historical Reflections on the Logos Tekhne.

3. Prying Open the Black Box: Philosophical Insights on Technology and Being.

4. A Synoptic Approach to Technology: Conceptual Contours of a Practice Framework.

5. Social Agency and Practice: The Heart and Soul of Technology.

6. Engendering the Chaine Operatoire: Methodological Issues.

7. A Future for Technology's Pasts.

Notes.

References.

Index.

Technology and Social Agency is the most provocative and significant book on the relationship between the material world and the human condition to appear in anthropology since Leslie A. White's The Evolution of Culture (1959). Unlike its polemic predecessor, however, Technology and Social Agency avoids instrumental determinism and establishes the challenging alternative of technology as a total social fact centered around individual human beings in meaningful communities of cultural practice. In reaffirming the human and social dimensions of all technological practice and technique, Marcia-Anne Dobres establishes instead the role of material items in all social discourse and social reproduction. As a poetic manifesto for technology and human action Technology and Social Agency will be a flash point of intelligent debate of these issues for the next decade, and perhaps beyond. Professor John Edward Clark, Brigham Young UniversilX