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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.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction: The Machine as Emperor Part 3 Part 1: Technology and Unequal Exchange Chapter 4 Chapter 1: Technology and Economics: The Interfusion of the Social and the Material Chapter 5 Chapter 2: Cornucopia or Zero-Sum Game: The Epistemology of Sustainability Chapter 6 Chapter 3: The Thermodynamics of Imperialism: Towards an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange Chapter 7 Chapter 4: Ecosystems, World Systems, and Environmental Justice Chapter 8 Chapter 5: Conceptualizing Accumulation from Spondylus Shells to Fossil Fuels Chapter 9 Chapter 6: Use Value, Energy, and the Image of Unlimited Good Chapter 10 Chapter 7: Language and the Material: Probing our Categories Chapter 11 Chapter 8: Symbolic Technologies: Machines and the Marxian Notion of Fetishism Part 12 Part 2: Money, Modernity and Personhood Chapter 13 Chapter 9: Money, Reflexivity, and the Semiotics of Modernity Chapter 14 Chapter 10: Ecology as Semiotics: A Contextualist Manifesto Chapter 15 Chapter 11: Exchange, Personhood, and Human Ecology Chapter 16 Chapter 12: The Abstraction of Discourse and Identity: A Case Study Chapter 17 Afterword: Culture, Modernity, and Power: The Relevance of Anthropology Chapter 18 References Chapter 19 Index
About the author
Alf Hornborg is professor and chair of the Human Ecology Division at Lund University, Sweden
Summary
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.
