The Power of the Machine Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment

by Hornborg, Alf

• ISBN13: 9780759100664
• ISBN10: 0759100667
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-16
• Publisher: AltaMira Press

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 machin

Author Biography

Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and professor of human ecology at the University of Lund, Sweden.

Table of Contents

List of figures and maps	vii
Preface	ix
Introduction: The Machine As Emperor	1	(8)
Part 1 Technology and Unequal Exchange
Technology and Economics: The Interfusion of the Social and the Material	9	(14)
Cornucopia or Zero-Sum Game: The Epistemology of Sustainability	23	(12)
The Thermodynamics of Imperialism: Toward an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange	35	(14)
Ecosystems, World Systems, and Environmental Justice	49	(16)
Conceptualizing Accumulation from Spondylus Shells to Fossil Fuels	65	(24)
Use Value, Energy, and the Image of Unlimited Good	89	(22)
Language and the Material: Probing Our Categories	111	(20)
Symbolic Technologies: Machines and the Marxian Notion of Fetishism	131	(26)
Part 2 Money, Modernity, and Personhood
Money, Reflexivity, and the Semiotics of Modernity	157	(18)
Ecology As Semiotics: A Contextualist Manifesto	175	(16)
Exchange, Personhood, and Human Ecology	191	(20)
The Abstraction of Discourse and Identity: A Case Study	211	(26)
Afterword: Culture, Modernity, and Power-The Relevance of Anthropology	237	(8)
References	245	(16)
Index	261	(12)
About the Author	273