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INTRODUCTION: Technology as Skilled Practice: approaches from Anthropology, History andPsychologyAuthor(s): Penelope HarveySource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 41, No.1, Technology as Skilled Practice (March 1997), pp. 3-14Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23171728 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS No. 41(1), March 1997

INTRODUCTION: Technology as Skilled Practice: approaches from

Anthropology, History and Psychology

Penelope Harvey

Anthropology, History and Psychology

The social study of technologies, particularly the new information technologies and

bio-technologies have come to constitute a boon area of research activity. However

there are still unexamined and problematic assumptions surrounding the notion of

technology, assumptions which tend to be perpetuated rather than challenged in many recent research initiatives. Central among these is the basic assumption that "tech

nologies" have tremendous power to shape and change human lives. This trans

formative potential has come to inhere in the meaning of the term itself and generates

both the fears that these changes might not be altogether positive and the paradoxical

conviction that such changes could be for the better if properly conceived. Either way

the connection between technology, innovation and social change has pushed the

social study of technology to the forefront of the research agendas of both public and

private institutions.

This volume brings together the work of eight scholars all of whom are engaged in re-thinking the technological, looking for ways to draw out and analyze the social nature of technical activity. The papers emerge from the attempts we have made over

the past two years to bring together perspectives from Anthropology, Psychology and

the History of Science in a seminar cm Technology as Skilled Practice that has been held at the University of Manchester.1 Our interest was to extend the agenda that has

become established within Science and Technology Studies (STS) to embrace an

anthropological interest in how the technological is constituted and recognised, and

thereby to disassociate understandings of particular kinds of technical practice from

culturally specific narratives of progress and social change. These narratives have

tended to reduce the notion of technology to a cognitive or economic measure of

human capacity and a measure which furthermore tends to confirm western assum

ptions about key fields of productive or cognitive activity. The aim of the seminar was to develop alternative ways of identifying and engaging with the technological by focusing on skill and the practice of learning and/or transmission of such skills.

Anthropology, as Ingold argues in this volume, has tended to think of technology and the social as external to one another, such that technology can be determined by

the social, and vice versa. Nevertheless, as Pfaffenberger2 reminded us, anthropo logical concern to resist the particular, modernist disciplinary demarcations of the

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economic, political, social, material, ideological, etc. by thinking across domains (or at least looking at how domains are constituted), implies that the study of technology is nothing new. To the extent that anthropologists have theorized the social, they will

inevitably have theorized the technical, whether they are aware of it or not. The

question then arises as to whether the study of technical practices are in any sense

distinctive and if so how? What does the anthropological study of technical practice offer beyond the mere extension of possible fields of ethnographic engagement? Both

Anthropology and History appeared to offer the possibility of engaging in a sub stantive and critical way with the general theoretical concern of how it is that the technical is distinguished from other kinds of social activity, of how such dem arcation is sustained and reproduced, and of what is done in the name of such

difference. In this volume, both the anthropologists, Strathern and Ingold, look at the dis

association of "technology" and "society" and relate particular western under

standings of the technical to wider social and cultural contexts.

Strathern is interested in "relationships" and "contexts", and in a certain cultural

confidence that once having disassociated the technological from the social, all that is needed to allay the fears of autonomous technical forces beyond human control, is the

reintroduction of the "social relation". She finds this appeal to the panacea of the

"relationship" in both academic production and in the media. The argument that re

lationships are at the heart of our cultural concerns over technology is made with re

ference to media reporting on the use of reproductive technologies and particularly the

case of would be "virgin mothers".

Ingold, by contrast, considers the effect of the distinction between the technical

and the social in modern cultural narratives on evolution and history. He is partic

ularly interested in challenging the way in which the evolution of human linguistic and technical skills is conflated with ideas about the evolution of "intelligence", dependent on notions erf intellection and design at the expense of attention to

embodied capacities erf action and perception. Ingold's work is an important bridge to the ways in which the discipline of Psychology might contribute to understandings of technology as skilled practice, not least in his search for allies in the critique of

cognitivism. Costall is one such ally. "There are two kinds of people", he remarked in his

presentation to the seminar,3 "those who think there are two kinds of people and

those who don't. And there are two kinds of psychologists, those who know they are

dualists and those who don't." Psychology, he argues, is created by dualism, to deal with mind and to posit models for human cognition and intellection. Costall nevertheless reveals, in his discussion of how people attribute meaning to "things", that a disciplinary interest in how knowledge and capacities are developmentally incorporated takes us well beyond cognitivism and the problems of work in Artificial

Intelligence (AI). Indeed it is the critical debates that so much work in AI has generated that have given rise to alternative perspectives such as those represented in

this volume. Costall's paper also reminds us of how clinical psychology has pro vided a rich source of comparative material which he draws on to great effect in his

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discussion of visual agnosia, a condition in which people are unable to recognise objects and/or confuse how certain objects should be used.

The work of Gibson, Merleau-Ponty and Varela, Rosch and Thompson, and their

understandings of auto-poeisis, embodiment and ecological psychology are the

starting points for the articles by psychologists in this volume. All seek to include the social and the historical in their accounts of situated learning, cultural transmission and communication. Haworth, for example, is interested in cognition as embodied action. He draws on Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodiment to consider how four different artists conceptualise the relationship between imagination, creativity and skilled practice in their work. Pickering is concerned with the developmental incorp oration of new understandings of the material environment, particularly the emergent

common-place assumption that "things are social", that machines think, respond and act. He considers how these ideas might affect what children learn and contrasts the modernist distinction between the machinic and the social with a contemporary

emphasis on machinic sociality. The History erf Science and Technology is an essential aspect of these discussions,

not least for the detailed understandings of the continuities on which all notions of radical social change depend. Pickstone in his consideration of changing technical

processes of wine production emphasises the social and political embeddedness of such changes. If techniques are treated as social, their effects will not be domain

specific, nor will they be absolute. His article reminds us that the history of techno

logical change does not necessarily imply the development of new artifacts. Nor do

changes in technique imply the abandonment erf previous techniques. For technical

processes entail ways of knowing which co-exist and are inter-related. Thus in wine

production the pre-industrial type-taxonomies were displaced by the more rational, analytical approaches of industrialized production. However, the displacement itself enabled the emergence erf a new elite market for connoisseurs, for those who were able to display previous ways of knowing to demonstrate good taste and distinction. Pickstone's argument also implies that the appearance of new artifacts, such as for

example increasingly interactive, "social" or "intelligent" machines, does not necess

arily entail either new ways of knowing, or new relationships between humans and

machines. Continuities might be more in evidence. Bloomfield and Vurdubakis trace one such continuity in their discussion of

machinic intelligence—considered specifically in relation to AI and the development and use of chess-playing machines. Graves-Brown's article on the unsustainability of

contemporary western "car culture" also refers to the on-going problem of the deleg ation of responsibility from human to non-human agents in such a way that technical

problems and solutions are made to appear as distinct from social and political considerations.

Taken together then, the articles in this volume offer a combination of the ways in which anthropologists, historians and psychologists seek to understand the technical

practices of persons in specific contexts; contexts which include the specifics of

personal interaction, the rhetorical or tropic fields which frame such interactions, and

the politico-economic forces which limit the effects of cultural imagination.4 In the

5



rest of this introductory essay I intend simply to contextualise the articles in terms of

the wider concerns of the seminar.

Technology

Ingold reminds us of the machine-theoretical cosmology from which the concept of

"technology" emerged. The etymology of the term reveals a combination of the

"teckno", that is the art, skill or craft and "logos", the rational. Thus, the concept ess

entially refers to the rational principles governing the construction of artifacts and

indicates a move from artisan or craft production to the possibilities of embedding skills in machines which can then be "operated" by relatively non-skilled workers.

Pickstone's discussion of the move from artisanal to machine production in the wine

industry gives a clear substantive example of this move from artisan to operator and

the increasing separation between conception and execution within the productive

process that such a move entailed. Pickstone's work also supports Ingold's argument that the history of technological change is one of externalization not one of

complexification. However, to take this view is also to emphasise that it is this dimension of abstracted, rationalized, replicable practice that distinguishes the

technological and of course, appears to remove technological artifacts and processes from the realm of the social.

It is also the discourse of abstraction that leads to the subsequent "enchantment"

of objects, which once conceptually separated from the human domain can then offer

their own independent autonomous agency, beyond human fallibility. From this pos ition the artifacts themselves can either threaten or embrace human potential. This is

the challenge which AI responds to, as Bloomfield and Vurdubakis illustrate with their discussion of the way in which the chess computer Deep Blue was set to

compete with Kasparov, the human chess master. But while machinic intelligence might offer ways of over-coming human fallibility in many aspects of daily life, the notion of abstracted agents "makes monsters out of machines" (Bloomfield &

Vurdubakis), as emotion, affect, spontaneity and creativity are those human qualities which appear threatened by machinic sociality.

Such understandings of the technological raise doubts as to whether the concept can take us beyond western presuppositions, for in many ways the notion appears

inseparable from the specific contexts of its own historical trajectory. Does it make sense to think of an Anthropology of non-modern technologies, or would such end eavours simply return us to ourselves? Is the use of the concept merely heuristic in

the way that other western concepts such as "economy" or "aesthetics" have become?

In the context of the seminar two alternative, although not necessarily exclusive,

positions emerged which are reflected in this collection. Either the focus was placed firmly (hi techniques and skills of material production with less discussion of the ra tionalization of such practices, or emphasis was placed on what the concept of

technology does in particular social and cultural contexts.

In the first session of the seminar Pfaffenberger defined technology in an exten sive way, as "the application of skill and knowledge to the solution of a problem that

6



draws cm potentialities of nature in some way". This definition focuses on the ma

terial but in a way that deliberately leaves open to investigation how it is that a

natural or material world might be apprehended. He stressed the importance of dis

tinguishing between such technological activity, and the material artifacts that result

from such activity. Thus, in this view, the technological is the practice not the arte

fact. Anthropologists can thus use such a focus cm technology to compare, as he did,

Melanesian canoe building, Shona iron smelting and network based computer

conferencing. Pfaffenberger's purpose was to stress that technologies act as com

municative mediums, and ethnographic attention to technical practice can thus reveal

how people use artifacts to objectify notions of the self. What the tradition of anth

ropological analysis can highlight is, of course, the relationship between the app arently abstracted, logical, replicable systems and domains of social activity. He was

particularly interested in how technical activities appear to bring forth fundamental moral conflicts. This argument is resonant of that of Strathern, whose example of the

virgin mothers reveals, in very concrete terms, how the abstraction of self in public

domains of productive activity is immediately understood as a moral intervention in social relations.

However, as Latour has pointed out "we have never [in fact] been modern"

(Latour 1993). The study of technical practice will always result in the demonstration of incomplete abstraction, and the need to confront the social nature of things. Fur

thermore, if we want to understand the identities, relationships, and social systems which material practices express, we cannot abstract any single technical process

from others or from the social institutions which gave rise to them. In this sense the

anthropological tradition of contextualising one domain of activity in wider social

contexts can make a distinctive contribution to this field. These points were emphasised by Bray who works with a definition of technology

as a "system of techniques that shape a specific material world".5 She stressed the

importance of not reducing technologies to artifacts, for techniques convey particular

social, political and symbolic ideas as well as producing things. It is in this sense that technologies and skills can be thought of as intrinsic to each other. In her dis

cussion of the history of Chinese textile production, Bray emphasised that "skill" is

not just a knowledge of how to make textiles, but of what textiles signify, what it

signifies to be a person who produces textiles and what it means to be a person who

does not; and of how textile production contributed to an understanding of the world,

to identity and to the dynamic structuring of the social system. Once we have firmly located the technological in the domain of practice, it seems

pertinent to ask again what it is that the consideration of technology introduces to the

analysis of social practice? Does the naming of a specific domain of practice help to understand human social and cultural life more generally? An anthropological app roach would tend to work against such demarcation, yet it is important to acknow

ledge the wealth of cultural information to be gleaned from the study of those

techniques and processes that constitute material culture, not least the processes of

objectification which all technical practice engages in in some way.

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This consideration of the objectification of relations of production was central to Descola's presentation to the seminar.6 Discussing the evolution of techniques, and

particularly why a technique (in this case the domestication of animals) might appear in some places and not others, he argued that technical relations are by definition

relations that can be objectified. If a new technique cannot be represented with the

help of the pre-existing stock of relations considered as logically possible within the socio-cultural totality available to the people concerned, then it will not be taken up

by them, however self-evident the possibility appears to others'.

This point about the way in which technical relations draw attention to culturally specific dialectics of objectification is backed up by the psychological research on which Costall draws. His article shows that not all material relations become object relations in practice. Many aspects of the human environment are simply not atten

ded to in this way as his example of the behaviour of visual agnosia sufferers reveals.

Despite being unable to identify commonplace objects, the mistakes that people with visual agnosia make are in fact quite restricted and not completely incapacitating. They do not mistake the meanings of "floors" and "tables" in so far as they can walk

around or sit and draw if asked to without problem. When studied in a series of daily tasks they were found to make "action slips", such as combining incorrect items

when making "coffee", but they did not make basic errors such as confusing cups and

plates, or attempting to transport liquids with a knife. The lesson for Anthropology, as Lave emphasised,8 appears to be that tech

nologies pertain to the philosophical domain of ontology not epistemology. That is, to understand the objectification of person-person, or person-object relations, we need

to think of persons as engaged in activities in the world and not reduce such activity to problem-solving, to contemplation or intellectual abstraction. Once we think about the objectification of social relationships in artifacts, in technical process and in the

ways of knowing they entail, this question of agency comes to the fore.

One of the problems in defining the term "technology" then, is the confusion

between an understanding of technology as the domain of externalised autonomous or

machinic agency and the understanding of technology as technical skills that are

nevertheless intrinsically human. Once these positions are set against each other, as

they commonly are, we reproduce the dichotomy between the social and the technical,

in which humans are (as Cos tall points out) either all active or all passive. Once

agency is understood in more relational terms, however, it becomes possible to think

about the technological in other ways. The relationships between human and non-human "actants" in social life has

been the particular interest of actor network theorists. They have pointed out how the

abstraction and objectification that the technological entails, leads inevitably to the belief in and use of technological agency, a notion that has become particularly sal ient in our current world of electronic agents. Their work can begin to alert us to what it is that this dichotomisation of the social and the technical, of things and per sons does, other than "get it wrong"!

Bruno Latour has published widely on the issue of the agency of the non-human, coining the term "actant" to describe the connected and inter-related agencies of

8



persons and things. In his presentation to the seminar he gave the example of the

"Berliner key", a key which was designed to require a person to relock the door be hind them when entering or leaving a building?

The example of the Berliner key raised the question of what it is that gets

detached/objectified in this technical process. The key is a material artefact that

"incorporates" the actions of both designers and users. It is designed for a specific effect. In this sense the key could be thought to reify particular attitudes towards

property and security (held by those who promoted its design). It could also be seen as the displacement of anxieties about safety. The key now takes the responsibility, and the safety issue becomes a technical problem, with a technical solution. The int

entions, opinions or previous habits of users become irrelevant as the key obliges them to act in a particular way.

This example also highlights Latour's insistent claim that society and technology are not two ontologically distinct entities, but necessarily co-exist in practice in such a

way that the tracing of any technical or social innovation will uncover a complex network of relationships that can never be reduced to a unidirectional force.

Strathern's presentation to the seminar sought to reveal some of the cultural

assumptions that actor-network theorists rely on.10 The approach was itself elaborated

to deal with the particular cultural preoccupation of the modernist distinction between

subjects and objects, persons and things, the technical and the social. Her question is to consider what possibilities such a "technique" might afford, in situations in which such dichotomies are not in fact a problem, for such concepts are not universally set

against each other in this way. One thing that Strathem sought to point out is how the concept of the "network" relies on a notion that connections are by definition

social and that the tracing erf such connections will necessarily enable the appearance of the alliances and inter-relationships between human and non-human entities. For some peoples, such connections are self-evident and cultural practice is directed more towards the severance of connection and making visible the discontinuities between

persons. Much of Melanesian exchange activity appears to be directed to this end.

Divisions are in this sense also connective. Strathem argues that networks and conn

ections are a way of describing the extension of relationships, yet such extensions will

also exist in relation to possibilities of curtailment or limit. In the Western context,

she argues, it is proprietorship that limits the networks that technology extends. Graves-Brown's article brings together many of these ideas from the work of both

Latour and Strathern through his specific example of contemporary "car culture". He

refers to Latour's notion of delegation of responsibility to the non-human and

explores the ways in which the focus on designing more environmentally-friendly machines has the effect of delegating social and political responsibility to a technical domain. He also explores the ways in which car technologies simultaneously extend and curtail relationships, promoting the possibilities for movement, providing literal networks or roadways along which people travel, while at the same time individ

uating drivers whose cars become ever more self-contained and more detached from

the environments through which they pass. Graves-Brown shows how the individ

uating tendency of technical development is a literal effect of car design and road

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plannmg. Strathem's discussion of the "virgin mothers" is a further example of how

people understand this individuating potential in the technological and seek to exploit

it. In the light of these examples it is clear why relationships and networks appear to

offer ways out of social as well as theoretical problems (problems forged after all in

the same social contexts).

Despite Lalour's reassurances, it is perhaps the fear that we might be "modem"

that generates our faith in networks, relationships and hybrids and forces a focus on

connections. For the moral dilemmas which technological practice brings into view

are those thrown up by the competing sociality of persons and machines. Graves

Brown's article also focuses on the limits to the creation of new possibilities through

technological extensions. For while in some respects car technologies can be seen in

this light, once the question of sustainability or the quality of relationships is raised, it

becomes clear that cars disconnect in as many ways as they connect. The production of cars and the building of roads are destructive and unsustainable activities.

Nevertheless, for many, technological artifacts are conceived as fully modem

subjects, autonomous agents who then engage in social relationships with other

(human) beings. These machinic agents are conceptualised in terms of standard, now

almost stereotypical modern beliefs in individuals who can stand apart from the

social. Bloomfield and Vurdubakis show, however, that even machines cannot

escape a relational identity. Pickering's twist on this debate is to ask what difference

it would make to consider machines as fully social and, in some contexts,

indistinguishable from other, human agents. To ask about the implications of mach

inic sociality is, as Strathem points out, to ask what future social contexts will be

like. In the field of new technologies, the (anthropological) axiom about under

standing individual events in relational terms, inevitably lends a futuristic and moral

dimension to such enquiries. But there are other ways to think about the relationship between technology and

change. It is important to bear in mind that despite the salience of the idea that tech

nological practice is transformational we tend to appeal with equal frequency to the

ways in which such technical practices entrench previous stratified social relations.

Contexts of Practice

If whal anthropology has to oficr lo the study of technology is an understanding of

contextualized action, we have yet to characterise the contexts of practice in which

these processes take place.

Ingold argues here and elsewhere that when thinking about technical practice we

should focus on involvement in practical activity, on mutual and active engagement. He fears that to think about technology in terms of abstractions and objectifications is

to move away from this more primary and immediate relationship between persons and their material environment. In this volume there is general agreement on the im

portance of practice, although many have chosen to focus on the practical activity of

objectification and abstraction itself.

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This position enables some reflection on the possibilities for and constraints on academic practice, a point which several of the contributors address in some way, most notably Strathem in her attention to the use of the concept of the "relationship" in social science, Bloomfield and Vurdubakis who reflect on the activities of those

working in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and Ingold in his discussion of western theories of evolution. Haworth's article is also very interesting in this regard. Writ

ing about artists rather than academics, his work shows that to draw a line between

those who represent and contemplate and those who engage in some activity in the

world is not an easy matter. His four chosen artists are standing back and contem

plating their own productive process, but they clearly understand the artistic process to be one of embodied engagement with their materials, with their own biographies, and with their conditions of work. This whole discussion of the creative process and

the determination to effect a material presence in the world, does not require them to

think in terms of abstractions or enactments of previous ideas or designs. Both imag ination and contemplation can be conceptualised as activities. Tactile thinking, or

material imagination is not an alien concept in many cultures (Bray talked about Chinese medicine in this regard) and indeed it was pointed out in discussion that such ideas are not unfamiliar in Western design practice. Early test pilots were

known to have bodily knowledge of what the machines felt like to drive, and aircraft

designers had to find ways to translate this knowledge into their more abstract

modelling. Technical activity is thus processual, expressive but not necessarily linked to

change. For, as Costall points out, practice accounts equally for the stability of things as for changes. How do these ideas relate to our notions of history and evolution? Is there a difference between the history and the evolution of technologies? Technology is central to the narratives of human evolution, so what effects do changing notions of

technology have on these narratives? Ingold suggests that if we understand history as

process then there is no distinction to be drawn between evolution and history: ....if history be understood as the process wherein people, through their activities, establish the environmental conditions under which their

successors grow to maturity, developing as they do so the skills

appropriate to a certain form of life, then it is but an extension, into the

human domain, of a process that is going on through out the organic

world. That process is one of evolution (Ingold this volume: p. 127) This formulation reintroduces some of the key tensions in our debates about how to

conceptualise environments, and highlights some of the contrasting understandings of

what limits the mutuality between persons and their environments. Just as Strathern

sought to point out how Latour's intellectual agenda had led to a focus on the

extensive nature of technological activity, so many of the contributors to this volume,

in different ways look at the limits to the mutual adaptation of persons and environments. Costall is interested in the perceptual limits of what particular env ironments afford to those engaged with them. Similarly, but from a more political

perspective, Graves-Brown is interested in social, political and environmental limits.

Pickering raises the question of "what if' we were to take seriously the idea that con

temporary electronic agents, are themselves providing environments that do modify in

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relation to those who act in relation to them. These smart machines might, Pickering

suggests, herald evolutionary change. It is worth pointing out that in Ingold's terms

we do not need to be concerned with whether we are facing an evolutionary shift or

simply passing through the latest version of the historically enduring dualisms

between nature and society, humans and machines. For humans have always co

evolved with their environments.

There was general agreement in the seminar, however, that future work of this

nature will require thorough and grounded ethnographic attention if we are not

simply to reproduce the deeply entrenched cultural presuppositions that surround our

thinking on the technological.

*******

The articles in this volume have not been ordered in terms of disciplinary focus as

in many ways we have been working to erase such boundaries. I have tried instead to

link them in relation to my understandings of the recurrent themes of the seminar. In

many ways I think of the volume as comprising two main sections. The first section deals with contexts in which technologies are characterised as autonomous agents. All the articles in this section reveal the limits to this "Western" or modern concept of

the distinction between humans and machines (and thereby also challenge such

stereotypical understandings of the "West"). The second section focuses to a great extent on embodied technical activity and the relationship between ideas and meaning in practice. Here we find more discussion of the notion of skill. Costall's paper is

transitional, as he lodes at the skill of attributing object status to things. Ingold's paper serves as a conclusion, and provides a very wide-ranging overview of debates

in this field and a summary of the various ways in which he has worked to reveal and

question the pervasive distinction between subject and object in Western thought. He

shows how the focus on skilled practices takes us to the heart of the anthropological

enquiry into the nature of humankind. The volume starts with the article by Strathem.

The piece serves to un-nerve and to preempt any easy or premature resolution to the

problems that the field of technological practice presents. I note finally, and with sane regret, that there is an absence of ethnographic

writing in this volume which is unusual for this journal. In some senses it is an

unrepresentative omission. Several of the presentations to the seminar were more

ethnographic than those presented here. In another sense it results from the nature of

our deliberations which focused on general issues, often at the expense of elaborating the specifics. What I hope for the volume is that it will provide questions for the future substantive work that all agree will help to move these debates forward.

NOTES

1. This seminar was funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council

through its Research Seminar scheme. Five meetings were held in the two-year period

12



from 1994-1996. I am extremely grateful to all invited speakers, who in addition to those

represented here included Bryan Pfaffenberger, Ed Wilmsen, Philippe Descola, Francesca

Bray, Jean Lave, Lucy Suchman, Peter Reynolds, Bruno Latour, Sharon Traweek, Jordan

Goodman and Michael Bravo. I am also grateful to the many colleagues and postgraduate students who attended these sessions and whose comments constituted a vital part of the

on-going discussions.

2. Bryan Pfaffenberger gave the first presentation to the seminar in January 1995:

'Technical Ritual: of Yams, Canoes, and the De-legitimation of Technology Studies in Social Anthropology". 3. This presentation, given in May 1995, was entitled "Affordances: The Historicity of

Things". 4. Some of the papers cross the disciplinary niches more than others. For further discussion of the relationship between Anthropology and Science Studies see: Downey, Dumit and Traweek (19%); Franklin (1995); Rabinow (1994); Traweek (1993); and Hess and Layne (1992). 5. Francesca Bray's paper was presented to the seminar in May 1995, and was entitled

"The Social Meaning of Technical Skills: Rethinking the History erf Technology". 6. Philippe Descola's paper was {resented in January 1995 and was entitled

"Genealogies of Objectification: technical choices and cultural constraints". 7. In the discussion of this presentation, it was noted that there is a tension between a

Marxist notion of reification in which objectification creates things, and a more

phenomenological approach in which objectification refers to the incomplete externalization erf ideas and relationships. Descola emphasised that he was not referring to

reification but to the objectification of a relation between terms (humans and non-living or

living matter, including oneself). The process is dialectical, triggered by contingency, but

constrained also by embedded schemes of praxis such that not all technical innovations are

equally likely. 8. The title of Lave's presentation to the seminar in May 1995 was "Communities of Practice, Technology and Knowledgeably Skilled Identities". 9. Latour's presentation in January 19% was entitled: "Coordination, Interobjectivity,

Quasi-subjects: a non-constructivist view of technology".

10. This presentation has subsequendy been published and is not the paper presented in

this volume: see Strathem (19%).

Downey, G., J. Dumit and S. Traweek (eds) 19% Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in the Borderlands

ofTechno-Science, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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1993 We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, London: Harvester

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