The Anthropology of Technology: The Formation of a Field

Anthropos and techne are inseparable when it comes to the study of humans and their societies. From its very origins as a discipline, anthropology has recorded and researched human-technology interfaces in efforts to account for and understand forms of social organisation and practice as well as systems of belief and meaning throughout the world. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the gradual formation of ‘anthropology of technology’ as a field of enquiry, from early evolutionary studies of technology via critiques of it by those who championed diffusionist understandings, to Maussian approaches to techniques as material actions, technology as skilled practice, and more contemporary understandings of technologies in terms of socio-technical systems and infrastructures. It is exactly such a multiplicity of approaches that has contributed to the thriving anthropologies of technology that make up this field of enquiry, allowing for analytical and methodological scaling on the part of the ethnographer, who can choose to focus on embodied skills, on practices/material actions, or on larger socio-technical systems which, together, make up technologies.