The Social Role of Technology in Coastal Alaska

Abstract

Novel technologies linked to women and men through identity-demarcated tasks and knowledge sets can potentially have differential and even long-term effects on each group. This study follows the trajectory of two significant imports into the coastal western Alaskan system, the firearm and the metal cook pot. These imports had different implications for coastal Yup’ik women and men, young and old. Over time the gun became an integral piece of a man’s tool kit and one that had the potential to boost production and thus a man’s access to status-building. However, these same tools had the potential to undermine the apprenticeship system of male authority. Likewise, the metal cook pot replaced the productive oversight and skill set of elder women’s ceramic production but created paths of independence for younger Yup’ik women. These changes in technology destabilized relative balances of gender and age based status, security, and authority and fashioned new gender and age based social and economic opportunities and limitations.