Technology (Anthropology)

Techniques and representations

Technology can be defined as the particular domain of human activity immediately aimed at action on matter. Since Mauss (1979 [1935]) demonstrated long ago that the most ‘natural’ of our technical actions — like walking, carrying a load or giving birth — vary from culture to culture, it has become clear that every technique is a social production learnt through tradition. Techniques (or material culture) are embedded with all kinds of social relations, practices and representations, but they are also of concern to anthropology in themselves, and not solely for their effect on the material life of society or for the social relations surrounding their application.

Techniques always have a systemic aspect (Gille 1978). First, any particular technique involves five kinds of element — matter, energy, artefacts, gestures and a specific knowledge (or set of representations) — and these elements interact. If one is changed, then others will change. Second, if one considers all the technologies in a given society, it can easily be shown that many are interrelated. In particular, several different techniques may share some common technical knowledge; that is, representations concerning action on matter. For instance the way people build planes is related to the way cars are made, and the technical knowledge involved in the hafting of a stone axe is related to that involved in the making of a trap or in the tying of some wooden part of a house. A last general characteristic is that every artefact or technical behaviour always has two dimensions or functions, which are intimately related: a physical one, and one which communicates some kind of information and plays a symbolic role in social life (Lemonnier 1992).


The description and study of technology goes back to the very beginning of anthropological research. The ‘anthropological expeditions’ of the turn of the century looked closely at material culture and the description and study of technology was long a classical domain of the discipline (Forde 1939). But, besides the mere collection of artefacts and museum work, for years most studies on the link between technology and other social behaviour have dealt either with the effects of technological systems on culture and society, or with a search for what human groups communicate when they make and use artefacts. Unfortunately, researchers interested in the effects of techniques often consider the techniques themselves as merely a set of constraints, i.e. as a black box into which no inquiry is needed. This was notably the case in ecological and Marxist anthropology. As for those concerned with the cultural aspects of material culture, they tended to limit their study to the ‘style’ of artefacts, thereby curiously reducing the social content of techniques to details of shape or decoration aimed at conveying a ‘message’, but with little or no physical function. But, in a break with most archaeological and ethnological tradition, scholars no longer study the material effects of technical systems or the meanings which societies impute in them. Instead, they focus on the uninterrupted process by which material culture is made part of culture; that is the way in which material culture simultaneously results from, and participates in, particular sociocultural characteristics (Lechtman and Merrill 1975; Latour and Lemonnier 1994).

In this respect, social representations of action on the material world appear as the most important link between technology, culture and society, because any technique, be it a mere gesture or a simple artefact, is always a physical manifestation of mental "schemata of how things work, how they are to be made, and how they are to be used. Some representations of technology are related to basic, universal, and necessary principles of action or to physical laws involved in action on matter. People may, for example, have representations of the principles of gravity, the accumulation of energy and the precarious equilibrium that underlie the functioning of a deadfall trap, or of the kinetic laws behind the functioning of the crown and pinions in a car’s transmission. Other such representations are mental algorithms, or a kind of mental plan of the sequence of operations involved in a given task. But members of a culture or a society also have ‘ideas’ about every element of a technical process: raw materials, sources of energy, tools, actors, where and when things should take place, etc. A different society may have different ideas, and the reason for this is often to be found in the symbolic values each society attributes to these elements rather than in physical necessity.

Social representations of technology are therefore embedded in a broader, symbolic system: people and societies put meaning into the very creation, production, and development of techniques as well as make meaning out of existing technical elements (Hodder 1989; Miller 1994). As a result, technologies display an irreducible element of free creativity, despite material constraints, just like other social phenomena (myths, rules of marriage, religious concepts) which are also human products mediated by social representations. The sheer diversity of the components of technical systems involved in such a creative process is puzzling. Conversely, a particular technical trait may relate to various domains of social organization and culture at the same time. For instance, the fence that protects a New Guinea garden from the pigs is certainly a physical means to separate pigs from sweet potatoes. But it is also a particular way to divide and distribute human activities between several domains: pigs could be enclosed instead of gardens, but people would then have to feed them more intensively, and they would have to work more in their gardens. Furthermore, a garden fence is at once the visible mark that distinguishes a ‘private’ individual domain from clan or lineage land, and also something which has been built through the cooperative work of a dozen people, especially "affines.

Technological choices

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, woodworking 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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