Abstract
Anthropos and techne are inseparable when it comes to the study of humans and their societies. From its very origins as a discipline, anthropology has recorded and researched human-technology interfaces in efforts to account for and understand forms of social organisation and practice as well as systems of belief and meaning throughout the world. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the gradual formation of ‘anthropology of technology’ as a field of enquiry, from early evolutionary studies of technology via critiques of it by those who championed diffusionist understandings, to Maussian approaches to techniques as material actions, technology as skilled practice, and more contemporary understandings of technologies in terms of socio-technical systems and infrastructures. It is exactly such a multiplicity of approaches that has contributed to the thriving anthropologies of technology that make up this field of enquiry, allowing for analytical and methodological scaling on the part of the ethnographer, who can choose to focus on embodied skills, on practices/material actions, or on larger socio-technical systems which, together, make up technologies.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, Mauss makes a case that ‘technology’ should be formalised into the science of techniques: ‘Technology is to technics what every other science is or would be to its objects, what linguistics is to language, for instance, or ethology to behaviour’ (Sigaut 1994, p. 422).The question of whether we understand technology as the study of techniques (as biology is the study of organisms) or as an operative system built into the machinery of production (as we sometimes talk of the ‘biology’ of the body) has been hugely influential for the divergent ways in which the anthropologies of technology have developed, for example, in Francophone and Anglophone countries, and it also lies behind many misunderstandings (Ingold, personal communication; cf. Canguilhem 2009).
- 2.
Disputes between evolutionism and diffusionism partly continued within anthropology, for example through Julian Steward’s (1955) cultural ecology as the study of human adaptation to the environment and Leslie White’s (1959) neo-evolutionary studies of technology, even though they were gradually marginalised from mainstream socio-cultural anthropology.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Tim Ingold, Pierre Lemonnier, and Daniel Miller for their insightful comments both on the history and on the substance of the anthropology of technology; their suggestions have been invaluable. We would also like to thank Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewers of the Handbook in general and our Introduction specifically for excellent feedback and comments that have considerably improved our chapter. And finally we would like to thank Rachel Douglas-Jones, Klaus Hoeyer, and the team of Handbook co-editors for their careful reading and their comments.
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Bruun, M.H., Wahlberg, A. (2022). The Anthropology of Technology: The Formation of a Field. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_1
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