Research in Science and Technology Studies: Material Culture Vol: 10


Product Details
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
9781559380003
Published:
Publisher:
JAI Press Inc.
Dimensions:
228 pages - 156 x 234 x 16mm
Series:
Knowledge and Society
List price £83.99 List price €120.99 List price $146.99

Categories:

Categories:
This volume presents discussions of material culture and society. It offers a perspective that recognizes technology as material culture, that is, as manufactured things spawned by a community and as characteristic of it as its language, behaviour and oral and written knowledge. The chapter "Progress in Separate Spheres" addresses the relationship between the theme of progress and material culture through advertising. Another chapter analyzes the computer and points out that the physical attributes of the machine make it an enigma which cannot be revealed by disassembling its working parts, but must be discovered through the mental comprehension of its processes. Two papers discuss the introduction of technologies to communities from different perspectives. The volume ends with a paper on human automata, an example of an object in which technology and humanity confront each other.

Material culture, Shirley Gorenstein; progress in separate spheres - selling 19th-century technologies, Pamela Walker Laird; "excavating" the present - the computer as gendered material culture, Merete Lie; the electric fridge and other recollections - on things as memory objects, Liv Emma Thorsen; technologies and interpretations - the case of the telephone, John W. Bakke; the culture of instrument - a case from the engineering sciences, Lusin Babla-Gokalp; toward a grammar of artefacts, Russell Mills; separate from the "world" - the use of material culture in Shaker social reproduction, Kenneth D. Croes; reflections in a mechanical mirror - automata as doubles and as tools, Linda M. Strauss.

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