Technology-Pfaffenberger

Social Anthropology of Technology Bryan Pfaffenberger lol

overview: Ryan Jenkins

At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists had defined three main spheres of anthropological research: material culture, social organization, physical anthropology. For technological and material culture to come back as a prominent field of study it must overcome almost a century of neglect. Until now, material-culture studies were an emblem of what was wrong with the global view of anthropology ( "extreme and conjectural forms of diffusionist and evolutionist explanations, armchair anthropology, "field work" undertaken by amateurs on collecting holidays, and the simplistic interpretation of artifacts shorn of their social and cultural context"(491)). This is made obvious in the famous works of malinowski, where he had debunked the armchair anthropologists interpretations of the importance of certain material objects to indigenous people of the Trobian Islands. Malinowski also stated that studying "technology alone" is "scientifically sterile" (491). There have been many attempts to bring material-technological studies back to anthropology but little has come of it. Currently, those who study it are located in history and interdisciplinary studies such as STS or anthropologists working in museums or general studies divisions of engineering and technical schools.

Despite its occlusion from the core of anthropology, important questions live in this field, such as…

"what is technology? Is technology a human universal? what is the relationship between technological development and cultural evolution? Are these common themes in the appropriate of artifacts that bridge capitalist and precapitalist societies? How do people employ artifacts to accomplish social purposes in the course of everyday life? what kind of cultural meaning is embodied in technological artifacts? How does culture influence technological innovation - and how does technological innovation influence culture?" (492)

Pfaffenberger aims to validate that social anthropology has already defined a lot about human and technological activity, and to "convey the sociotechnical system concept to an anthropological audience, and to show how it resolves key controversies within anthropology"(493).

STS has had such rapid advances because of its ability to take science at face value, and begin to explore the validity of its thought process and nature of its development. Pfaffenberger looks to do the same by defining what the "mythic standard view of technology" (493) really is so that we can begin to question its implications and effects.

Standard View Of Technology, Quoted in whole as it is obviously important for our criticism:

//"Necessity is the mother of invention. As Man has been faced with severe survival challenges, certain extraordinary individuals have seen, often in a brilliant flash of inspiration, how to address the challenge of Need by applying the forces, potentialities, and affordances ofNature to the fabrication of tools and material artifacts. The power of Nature is there, waiting to be harnessed, to the extent that the inventor can clear away the cobwebs of culture to see the world// //from a purely utilitarian standpoint. In this we see Man's thirst for Progress. Form follows function. To be sure, Man decorates his tools and artifacts, but artifacts are adopted to the extent that their form shows a clear and rational relationship to the artifacts' intended function-that is, its ability to satisfy the need that was the raison d'etre of the artifact's creation. Thus, a society's material culture becomes a physical record of its characteristic survival adap­ tation; material culture is the primary means by which society effects its repro­ duction. The meaning of human artifacts is a surface matter of style, of surface// //burnish or minor symbolization. By viewing the material record of Man's technological achievements, one can// //directly perceive the challenges Man faced in the past, and how he met these challenges. This record shows a unilinear progression over time, because tech­ nology is cumulative. Each new level of penetration into Nature's secrets builds on the previous one, producing ever more powerful inventions. The digging stick had to precede the plough. Those inventions that significantly increase Man's reach bring about revolutionary changes in social organization and subsistence. Accordingly, the ages of Man can be expressed in terms of technological stages, such as the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and so on. Our age is the Information Age, brought on by the invention of the computer. Overall, the movement is from very simple tools to very complex machines. It was also a movement from primitive sensorimotor skills (techniques)// //to// //highly elaborate systems of objective, linguistically encoded knowledge about Nature and its potential (technology).// //Now, we live in a material world. The result of the explosion of technological knowledge has been a massive expansion of Man's reach, but with lamentable and unavoidable social, environmental, and cultural consequences: We live in a fabricated environment, mediated by machines. Technology was more authentic when we used tools, because we could control them. Machines, in contrast, control us. Thus one can identify a Great Divide or Rupture when Man lost his authenticity as a cultural creature, his Faustian depth as a being living in a world of cultural meaning, and gave himself over to a world ruled by instrumentalism and superficiality. This Rupture was the Industrial Revolution, which launched the Age of the Machine. As the primacy offunction over aesthetics rips through culture, we increasingly live in a homogenous world offunctionally driven design coherence. Our culture has become an inauthentic one in which reified images of technology predominate. We can define ourselves only by purchasing plastic,// //ersatz artifacts made far away. To retain some measure of authenticity the young must be brought into direct contact with the great works of art and literature."//

Pfaffenberger finds this to be a "pillar of modernism, a cultural, literary, and artistic period noted for its extreme ambivalences towards technology". Modernism represents a person struggle to grasp at a grounded sense of being while at tension with the modern developments of society and technology, an attempt at unalienating oneself from their surroundings. Technology is viewed by the modernist as both the "reator and destroy, an agent both of future promise and of cultures destruction"(495).

Necessity is the mother of invention:

It basically is what it says, that invention follows based on the necessity of a culture or group of people. it is a "need-driven technological evolution". Binford argued in 1965 that every material artifact had 2 aspects, the primary, which was the the objects function, and the secondary, which was the social meaning and symbolism of the object. Dunnel clarifies even better by saying that a functional object is one which "directly enhances the Darwinian fitness of the populations in which they occur"(496). the standard view seems to be a very "no duh" system, but the resoluteness of this belief falters a bit under objective analyzation. Basalla proved this point with respect to the use and invention of the wheel. //"// //First used for ceremonial purposes in the Near East, the wheel took on military applications before finally finding transport applications. In Mesoamerica, the wheel was never adopted for trans­ port functions, given the constraints of terrain and the lack of draught animals. Even in the Near East, where the wheel was first invented, it was gradually given up in favor of camels. Basalla comments, "A bias for the wheel led Western scholars to underrate the utility of pack animals and overestimate the contribution made by wheeled vehicles in the years before the camel replaced the wheel" (4: 1 1). Against all Modernist bias, Basalla's vicw echoes the findings of recent social anthropologists who have argued that it is impossible to identify a class of "authentic" artifacts that directly and rationally address "real" needs (2, 22:7 2; 8 7). Culture, not nature, defines necessity. One could reassert that a "hard" or "tough-minded" approach requires the recognition, after all, that people must eat, and so on, but it is abundantly evident that a huge variety of techniques and artifacts can be chosen to accomplish any given utilitarian objective (9 1).//

This backs up the notion that, the believed and function of an artifact or object does not truly provide a clear understanding of what a population needs, "and what is more, one cannot unambiguously infer from them precisely which challenges a human population has faced" (496). This supports a strong break from the standard view in suggesting the idea that a material culture does not play a definitive role in how a group may adapt to its environment. Labor has proven to be perhaps the most importune element, and a new view is to think that it is not the mere technology of the object, but that object in partnership with social organization of labor, "that constitutes a human populations adaptation to its environment". Much like the wheel and the camel, it was the people who facilitated the development of their own personal surroundings, not the wheel. So, how do we define technology? "Spier, for instance, defines technology as the means by which "man seeks to modify or control his natural environment."(497). Pfaffenberger rather defines it into two parts, technique, and sociotechnical system. Spiers definition is clearly erroneous because it assumes domination of nature as mans goal, as well as neglects that technology are secondary to social coordination of labor in shaping adaptability.

**Technique:** //the system of material resources, tools, operational sequences and skills, verbal and nonverbal knowledge, and// //specific// //modes of work coordination that come into play in the fabrication of material artifacts (497)//

**Sociotechnical System:** //the distinctive technological activ­ity that stems from the linkage of techniques and material culture to the social coordination of labor (497)//

the sociotechnical system branches off the work of thomas Hughes who worked on modern electrical power systems. Hughes states that "those who seek to develop new technologies must concern themselves not only with techniques and artifacts; they must also engineer the social, economic, legal, scientific, and political context of the technology . A successful technological innovation occurs only when all the elements of the system, the social as well as the technological, have been modified so that they work together effectively"(498). An example is given in the form of Edison. In order for his invention to take off Edison had the economic advantage ( cheaper than natural gas) which got him political attention, which gave him the ability to achieve technical goals (technical), and then found a proper filament ( scientific).

another example is the mixed-rigged vessels of the portuguese. Much like the muddle we have talked about with most of the sciences, THis invention was not just possible because of the development of the boat, it was the developments on tide mapping, compass and astrolabe development, amongst many other things. The phrase "resistant to dissociation" is used to describe this relationship.

Pfaffenberger goes on to describe the principle of symmetry, which basically mirrors structuralisms idea of "what else could it have been". This idea states that while someone way develop a specific technology to achieve a specific goal, it is nothing more than a successful attempt at achieving that goal. It is not THE BEST or THE WAY to do it. It is simply the result of the muddle in that instance to create a solution that may work.

- Any sociotechnical system thus inherently show the context from the culture that developed it, since those that created it obviously were imprinted by their own culture and its limitations/needs. this in turn makes the system "sociogenic: Society is the result of sociotechnical-system building"(500). So in effect, we enter in a loop of the technology being developed within the boundaries and effective cultural norms of the society, and then in turn by its creation further defining the culture.