Machines as manifestations of global systems: Steps toward a sociometabolic ontology of technology

Alf Hornborg

doi:10.1177/1463499620959247

Abstract

Anthropologists have generally found it reasonable to understand the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a product of global historical processes including colonialism and the structure of world trade. The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global processes has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori. Andre Gunder Frank proposed that we should reconceptualize technological development as a ‘world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy’. Yet the theoretical implications of understanding industrial technological systems as global and unevenly distributed phenomena have, by and large, not contaminated mainstream conceptions of technologies as politically neutral and fundamentally innocent manifestations of enlightenment, detachable from the societal contexts in which they have emerged. Social theory nevertheless offers perspectives for a radical rethinking of this conventional ontology of modern technology. If the premises of actor–network theory, material culture studies, Marxism and poststructuralist critiques of power and inequalities are combined with the perspectives of ecological economics on global social metabolism, the fossil-fuelled textile factories of 19th-century Britain can be reinterpreted as social instruments for appropriating embodied human labour and natural space from elsewhere in the global system. A renewed ‘anthropology of technology’ might focus on the observation that technology is not simply a matter of putting nature to work, but a strategy of putting other sectors of global society to work.1

Highlights

Many anthropologists would immediately agree that such an observation is historically valid, but my ambition has been to give it a more literal significance than reflected in conventional acknowledgements that the emergence of industrial technology was conditioned by global processes (e.g. Marks, 2002; Wolf, 1982)
The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global relations of exchange has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori (2002) and Sven Beckert (2014)
No matter how willing we are to concede that access to advanced technology represents a global, historical privilege, it will require a fundamental ontological3 shift to conceive of modern technology as such as a global societal phenomenon

Summary

Introduction

A central theoretical challenge for me has been how to articulate and pursue my intuition that our most tangible manifestation of capital accumulation—modern technology—is to be understood as a global phenomenon (Hornborg, 1992, 1998, 2001).2 Many anthropologists would immediately agree that such an observation is historically valid, but my ambition has been to give it a more literal significance than reflected in conventional acknowledgements that the emergence of industrial technology was conditioned by global processes (e.g. Marks, 2002; Wolf, 1982). The point I have been trying to make is that modern technologies that are contingent on price relations on the global market are socioecological phenomena that are as dependent on socially organized, asymmetric resource transfers as on revelations of the physical properties of nature.

Results

Conclusion