Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015)
Autor/a de The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca
Sobre l'autor
Anthony F. C. Wallace is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books including, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca.
Crèdit de la imatge: Photo
Obres de Anthony F. C. Wallace
St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town's Experience With a Disaster-Prone Industry (1987) 52 exemplars
The Social Context of Innovation: Bureaucrats, Families, & Heroes in the Early Industrial Revolution, as Foreseen in… (1982) 9 exemplars
The modal personality structure of the Tuscarora Indians as revealed by the Rorschach test (1952) 7 exemplars
Tuscarora: A History (Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building) (2012) 5 exemplars
Prelude to Disaster: The Course of Indian-White Relations Which Led to the Black Hawk War of 1832 (1970) 5 exemplars
"Revitalization Movements," 1 exemplars
Obres associades
Ethnohistory. Summer, 1957 — Book Reviewer — 1 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom oficial
- Wallace, Anthony Francis Clarke
- Data de naixement
- 1923-04-15
- Data de defunció
- 2015-10-05
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- Canada
- País (per posar en el mapa)
- Canada
- Lloc de naixement
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Educació
- University of Pennsylvania
- Relacions
- Wallace, Paul A. W. (father)
- Organitzacions
- University of Pennsylvania
Membres
Ressenyes
Llistes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 24
- També de
- 2
- Membres
- 809
- Popularitat
- #31,538
- Valoració
- 3.3
- Ressenyes
- 4
- ISBN
- 33
Wallace contributes an understanding of the collective nature of technological innovation.
"The production machines -- the machines that transformed raw materials into consumer products, that generated power, that propelled bullets -- were made by a small group of highly skilled men ..." (p.23)
Not only did the Mechanicians build machines, they built machine tools that built machines. As opposed to managers, these machinists had dirty hands form working with them everyday. The machine shop was peopled by men of all walks of life who sought to learn the general skills of the mechanical trades. These men were, above all, generalists.
Looking at memoirs and recollections of George Escol Sellers, Wallace examines the composition of the "machinists fraternity". He estimates that perhaps 6,000 skilled machinists worked in the Anglo-American world. The circle of professional acquaintances around Sellers alone numbered in the hundreds. Similar to a school of art or a theological tradition, this was "a paradigmatic community." (p. 26)
Invention did not take place in this machinists community as the act of one sole inventor laboring away in a secluded laboratory. It was based on "the collaborative working out, by generations of mechanics, of the potentialities hidden yet implicit in a certain principle of mechanism, and the solving of the problems each successive improvement called forth." (p. 27) Invention was a process of generations of collective effort.
Machinists' communication was through models and diagrams, as opposed to language. Words have limitations for spatial thinkers. Pictures convey the meaning better. We can trace the conflict between science and technology in our modern world to the differences in cognitive styles between these machinists (who thought in pictures) and the community of non-machinists (who thought with language). This dichotomy between technology and science emerged along the lines of practical/dirty hands/pictures vs. abstract/ivory tower/scientific method and scholarly papers. As often as not, argues Wallace, the machinists' (read technologists') approach gives us the innovation we were looking for as an outgrowth of the continued working out of technical challenges in the "real world."… (més)