Social Anthropology of Technology

At the onset of the 20th century, anthropologists such as Balfour, Marett, and Haddon could readily identify three spheres of strength in anthropological research: material culture, social organization, and physical anthropology (49). The study of technology and material culture, however, was about to be jettisoned, and with stunning finality. By 1914, Wissler (103:447) complained that the study of these subjects "has been quite out of fashion." Researchers were giving their attention to "language, art, ceremonies, and social organiza­ tion" in place of the former almost obsessive concentration on the minute description of techniques and artifacts, and on the tendency to study artifacts without rcgard for their social and cultural context. As I aim to show in this chapter, the anthropological study of technology and material culture is poised, finally, for a comeback, if in a different guise. Its findings may signifi­ cantly alter the way anthropologists analyze everyday life, cultural reproduc­ tion, and human evolution. If this all-but-forgotten field is to play such a role, it must overcome nearly a century of peripheral status. In anthropology's quest for professionalism, material-culture studies came to stand for all that was academically embarrass­ ing: extreme and conjectural forms of diffusionist and evolutionist explana­ tion, armchair anthropology, "field work" undertaken by amateurs on collecting holidays, and the simplistic interpretation of artifacts shorn of their social and cultural context. Malinowski, for instance, condemned the "purely technological enthusiasms" of material culture ethnologists and adopted an "intransigent position" that the study of "technology alone" is "scientifically sterile" (69:460). The study of technology and material culture, a topic that