The Power of the Machine
Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment
By (author) Alf Hornborg
Publication date:
16 October 2001Length of book:
288 pagesPublisher
AltaMira PressISBN-13: 9780759100664
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. His analysis provides an alternative understanding of economic growth and technological development. Hornborg's work is essential for researchers in anthropology, human ecology, economics, political economy, world-systems theory, environmental justice, and science and technology studies. Find out more about the author at the Lund University, Sweden web site.
There is more to culture than meets the eye, that product of cultural processing designed to overlook that 'more'; that 'more' being the allegedly natural and objective foundations of our life in common with all its iniquities and inanities. This is the message of Hornborg's astonishing book, bound to spur the social-scientific community to take another hard look on their own seemingly self-evident concepts and hidden from view assumptions. The book crowns years of study and thought which went deeper than even the most earnest and acute self-scrutiny of anthropologists and economists went thus far. Very seldom is describing the publication of a book as revolutionary event as apt. Hornborg's oeuvre stands a chance to revolutionise not only the paradigm of the theory of modern society, but the way we divide human actions from their precultural conditions and so called 'unanticipated consequences.'