The power of the machine : global inequalities of economy, technology, and environment / Alf Hornborg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hornborg, Alf.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Technological innovations.

Technology--Economic aspects.

Technology.

Physical Description:

x, 273 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira Press, [2001]

Summary:

Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machine generates increasingly asymmetrical exchanges and distribution of resources and risks between distant populations and ecosystems, and thus an increasingly polarized world order. The author challenges us to reconceptualize the machine-'industrial technomass'--as a species of power and a problem of culture. He shows how economic anthropology has the tools to deconstruct the concepts of production, money capital, and market exchange, and to analyze capital accumulation as a problem at the very interface of the natural and social sciences. Hornborg's work is essential for researchers in anthropology, human ecology, economics, political economy, world-systems theory, environmental justice, and science and technology studies.

Contents:

Introduction: The Machine As Emperor 1

Part 1 Technology and Unequal Exchange

1 Technology and Economics: The Interfusion of the Social and the Material 9

2 Cornucopia or Zero-Sum Game: The Epistemology of Sustainability 23

3 The Thermodynamics of Imperialism: Toward an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange 35

4 Ecosystems, World Systems, and Environmental Justice 49

5 Conceptualizing Accumulation from Spondylus Shells to Fossil Fuels 65

6 Use Value, Energy, and the Image of Unlimited Good 89

7 Language and the Material: Probing Our Categories 111

8 Symbolic Technologies: Machines and the Marxian Notion of Fetishism 131

Part 2 Money, Modernity, and Personhood

9 Money, Reflexivity, and the Semiotics of Modernity 157

10 Ecology As Semiotics: A Contextualist Manifesto 175

11 Exchange, Personhood, and Human Ecology 191

12 The Abstraction of Discourse and Identity: A Case Study 211

Afterword: Culture, Modernity, and Power

The Relevance of Anthropology 237.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-260) and index.

ISBN:

0759100667

0759100675

OCLC:

46835324