This element of free creativity in material culture explains why people and groups adopt technical behaviours which seem to have absurd material results (even though they are correct and coherent in terms of the social logic of which they are a part) or why they develop techniques that fail to achieve their material goal. Needless to say, those technologies which perfectly accomplish their physical goals are also shaped by a background of wider social relations.
This leads to a dilemma, or at least to a paradox. On the one hand, as soon as one considers a particular society in a particular time and place, it appears that many techniques are far from ‘rational’, ‘efficient’, or the ‘best possible’. On the other hand, if one considers the long-term *evolution of technical systems, progress is patent, if one calls humanity’s increased control over wide domains of the natural and material world, or the increased productivity of labour (Mumford 1934), ‘progress’. By the same token, most unadapted or odd technical procedures drop out of sight, even though people lived with these techniques, which deeply influenced their everyday life, as well as the meaning they read into the world, for years (and sometimes for centuries). Moreover, in spite of humanity’s freedom in the production of technology, we have examples of ceramics, weaving, wood-working tools, agricultural practices, hunting and fishing devices, etc. from all over the world which often show amazing similarities. This results from what †Leroi-Gourhan (1943) called ‘tendance’ (tendency), that is the propensity that human groups have to perform the same technical actions and to develop very similar means of performing these actions. A recurrent -and unanswered—question in the anthropology of technology is to understand how this ‘tendance’ interferes with the incredible diversity of the ways cultures co-produce techniques and meaning. Are the social relations and meanings linked to technology the decisive element in its social production, or are they such a marginal aspect of innovation that at any moment technology has only a few possible lines of evolution open?
Societies seize, adopt or develop only some technical features (principles of action, artefacts, gestures), and dismiss others, because technical actions as well as changes in technology are in part determined by, and simultaneously the basis for, social representations or relations that go far beyond mere action on matter (Lemonnier 1993). It is as though societies choose from a whole range of possible technological avenues that their environment, their own traditions and contacts with foreigners open to their means of action on the material world. The nature and range of such technical choice has recently become the subject of research which attempts to determine how and to what extent societies play with the apparently overriding laws that govern their action on the material world. Among other results, it has been shown that technological choices may well bear on items or elements of material culture which necessarily produce real physical effects, as well as those involved in some form of communication. Conversely, non-technical representations of technology are found to participate in systems of meaning by virtue of their physical (and not only their stylistic) characteristics. For instance, the strength of a New Guinean eel-trap or a garden fence may be part of the mythical representation of eels or express the strength of affinal collaboration. It it also crucial that a given feature of a technological system (a particular stone axe, a particular hunting technique, etc.) may have meaning with respect to several sets of social relations at the same time; in politics, status, or ethnic identity, for example.
A consideration of technological choices also sheds light on the issue of change and continuity in material culture, whether this involves the invention of a new element aimed at acting on matter, or its borrowing from some external source (van der Leeuw and Torrence 1989). In both cases the social context of change, and notably the ‘meaning’ attributed to various elements in the technological system, are crucial factors. And both processes involve, among other things, a recombination of already existing elements. Yet, technical invention differs fundamentally from technical borrowing. Borrowing involves adapting or dismissing a technical feature that already exists as such (say a tool, or a relation between a material action and a material effect), whereas invention is, by definition, a process of discovery and creation of ideas and things which were previously unknown. Fortunately, no society lives in total isolation, so that the possibility of borrowing technical features has probably always existed, which enables scholars to escape the puzzling problem of invention in non-industrial societies.
It is noteworthy that the same expertise in the study of social representations, which is basic to the social anthropology of *classification or *cognition, can be applied to technological knowledge, particularly in order to investigate the local representations of elementary principles of action on the material world: what is cutting, pressing, squeezing, punching, drilling, etc.? How do people imagine or describe the accumulation of energy, the dilutive property of water, the use of a lever, etc. Moreover, what can be investigated in anthropological case-studies is of immediate interest to *archaeologists and scholars working in the ‘new’ sociology of *science and technology, with which ties have been recently re-established. The study of technology is also a bridge between anthropology and other people’s lives because it documents, in a very practical way, the feasibility of inserting and adapting bits of Western technology into non-Western material cultures, a recurrent issue in the anthropology of *development.
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