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5 - Technology, economy and society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
Summary
This chapter explores the relations between technology, economy and social structure. It considers the implications for human society of the different ways in which people make a living and the different forms and extent of their control over the material environment.
It should begin with the broad distinction between primitive, peasant and industrial societies. In earlier chapters it has been taken for granted that some such distinction exists, without very close inquiry, especially in chapter 2. We saw how social anthropology began in the late nineteenth century as the study of ‘primitive peoples’ and how more recent reconsideration has led to this being amended to ‘small-scale societies’.
People dislike the word primitive, especially when they suspect it is being applied to themselves, and it is natural and often right that they should. It has been much misused in the past. Nineteenth-century Europeans, especially perhaps Victorian Englishmen, were rather prone to think of themselves and their societies as the highest products of an evolutionary process in which lower or more primitive forms had been left behind. Nowadays the world situation has changed. Europeans, including the English, can no longer cherish illusions of grandeur and people of the societies they once called ‘primitive’ now question and resent the term, so, like ‘race’ and ‘class’, it has become almost a dirty word, not to be used in polite society.
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- An Introduction to Sociology , pp. 111 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985