Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology - Hardcover

Dobres, Marcia-Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1577181239 ISBN 13: 9781577181231

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000

Synopsis

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective. The author is explicitly concerned with studying ancient technological practices but the general concept of technology forms the centrepiece of discussion and is defined as an explicitly social, symbolic, and embodied endeavour that simultaneously brings into being both human agents and their material world.

Dobres argues that, for ancient technologies and products to be fully understood, we need to appreciate the historically constituted ways in which social agency, technical knowledge and the gestural acts of artefact production and use were socially meaningful and, thus, politically charged.

About the Author:

Marcia-Anne Dobres received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently teaching at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on Palaeolithic and contemporary hunter-gatherers, technology, social agency, and gender, as well as prehistoric art and symbolism. She has ongoing research projects in France and South Africa. She is senior editor of The Social Dynamics of Technology: Practice, Politics, and World Views (1999) and Agency in Archaeology (ed. with Robb, 2000).

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1577181239
• ISBN 13: 9781577181231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316