Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926333
Maria Paula Diogo
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures</em> by Dirk van Laak <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Maria Paula Diogo (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures</em> By Dirk van Laak and translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 314. <p>The richness of Dirk van Laak's book (originally published as <em>Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur</em>, 2018) can be easily grasped from the preface written by the author for the English version. The time that has passed between the German and English versions is five years. Under normal conditions, that would not be long; but the turbulence of this period and the events that took place during it deeply changed our relationship with society, nature, science, and technology.</p> <p>In this context, the concept of infrastructure acquired new layers and emphasized its structuring role in the design of contemporary society. Infrastructures shape territories both as geographical and political categories, defining both their internal dynamics and hierarchies in terms of management and use of resources and the relationships among national powers. Cables, railways, roads, airports, energy, water, sanitation, and the internet—in a nutshell, infrastructures—are at the core of our networked world and the sheer possibility of them failing makes us deeply worried and exposed to an uncomfortable fragility.</p> <p>If these are the guiding lines of van Laak's analysis of the role of infrastructures and their entanglement with the various dimensions of society at large, the author's approach concerning actors takes us to the anonymous history of practitioners, far from a history of the so-called great figures. This book focuses mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a foray into the twenty-first century; with regards to the geographic scope, the author uses multiple scales—urban, national, and global—to access the transnational dimension of the main infrastructures and the way they act as tools of centralization and decentralization.</p> <p><em>Lifelines of Our Society</em> begins with an introduction in which the author explains and discusses the assumptions of his research—largely summarized in the paragraphs above—including a very interesting disciplinary overview of the meaning of the concept of infrastructure. Once the conceptual and methodological structure underlying the work has been established, the author dedicates the two following chapters to the analysis of the leading <strong>[End Page 699]</strong> infrastructures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: public works related to collective transport of people and goods (canals and railways) and electricity and individual mobility, respectively. This analysis is built as an interactive puzzle—which includes a set of "alternative routes" that look at inf
{"title":"Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures by Dirk van Laak (review)","authors":"Maria Paula Diogo","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926333","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures</em> by Dirk van Laak <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Maria Paula Diogo (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures</em> By Dirk van Laak and translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 314. <p>The richness of Dirk van Laak's book (originally published as <em>Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur</em>, 2018) can be easily grasped from the preface written by the author for the English version. The time that has passed between the German and English versions is five years. Under normal conditions, that would not be long; but the turbulence of this period and the events that took place during it deeply changed our relationship with society, nature, science, and technology.</p> <p>In this context, the concept of infrastructure acquired new layers and emphasized its structuring role in the design of contemporary society. Infrastructures shape territories both as geographical and political categories, defining both their internal dynamics and hierarchies in terms of management and use of resources and the relationships among national powers. Cables, railways, roads, airports, energy, water, sanitation, and the internet—in a nutshell, infrastructures—are at the core of our networked world and the sheer possibility of them failing makes us deeply worried and exposed to an uncomfortable fragility.</p> <p>If these are the guiding lines of van Laak's analysis of the role of infrastructures and their entanglement with the various dimensions of society at large, the author's approach concerning actors takes us to the anonymous history of practitioners, far from a history of the so-called great figures. This book focuses mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a foray into the twenty-first century; with regards to the geographic scope, the author uses multiple scales—urban, national, and global—to access the transnational dimension of the main infrastructures and the way they act as tools of centralization and decentralization.</p> <p><em>Lifelines of Our Society</em> begins with an introduction in which the author explains and discusses the assumptions of his research—largely summarized in the paragraphs above—including a very interesting disciplinary overview of the meaning of the concept of infrastructure. Once the conceptual and methodological structure underlying the work has been established, the author dedicates the two following chapters to the analysis of the leading <strong>[End Page 699]</strong> infrastructures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: public works related to collective transport of people and goods (canals and railways) and electricity and individual mobility, respectively. This analysis is built as an interactive puzzle—which includes a set of \"alternative routes\" that look at inf","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926330
Mario Peters
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America]</em> ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mario Peters (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America]</em> Edited by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia. Buenos Aires: Teseopress, 2022. Pp. 308. <p><em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica</em> is an important contribution to the study of infrastructure in Latin America, a field that has been flourishing over the last decade or so (M. Lasso, <em>Erased</em>, 2019; S. W. Miller, <em>The Street Is Ours</em>, 2018; F. Schulze, <em>Wissen im Fluss</em>, 2022). The book includes fourteen chapters by historians and scholars from neighboring disciplines. It brings together essays on transportation infrastructure—including railways, roads, and airports—water infrastructure, and urban infrastructure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This broad approach to infrastructure and the focus on the past <em>and</em> the present in a single volume is indeed something new. In regional terms, the book focuses largely on South America, especially Argentina, while Mexico and Central America figure less prominently.</p> <p>The book is of interest to historians of technology because the authors aim to explore how infrastructures create relations between society, technology, the state, culture, politics, and nature. Naturally, some chapters achieve this aim more fully than others. The authors all focus on the role of the state in the planning and administration of infrastructures, which gives the volume coherence. One strength of the book lies in the profound examination of tensions, conflicts, and failures. This is important because in Latin America, <strong>[End Page 693]</strong> infrastructures have long been promoted as harbingers of modernization and progress, while in fact the often-precarious state of infrastructure reflects pressing problems like poverty and extreme social inequality.</p> <p>The chapters written by Anahí Ballent (ch. 8) and Melina Piglia (ch. 13) explicitly address the gap between the promise of infrastructure and reality on the ground. In her essay on the Río Tercero Dam (Argentina), Ballent analyzes how in 1910, early proposals described the dam as a key instrument in socio-territorial transformation, promising to make irrigation in an arid region possible, which in turn was supposed to stimulate settlement and agriculture. By 1935, it was clear that such plans had not worked out, and the dam was now promoted as important to produce hydropower. In her essay, Piglia shows that the modernization of airports became a priority in Argentinean politics in the 1960s, while conditions on the ground remained precarious. Runways, illumination, communication technologies, and m
评论者 Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia Mario Peters (bio) Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] Edited by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia。布宜诺斯艾利斯：布宜诺斯艾利斯：Teseopress, 2022。Pp.308.Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica》是对拉丁美洲基础设施研究的重要贡献，该领域在过去十多年中蓬勃发展（M. Lasso，Erased，2019；S. W. Miller，The Street Is Ours，2018；F. Schulze，Wissen im Fluss，2022）。本书包括 14 个章节，由历史学家和邻近学科的学者撰写。书中汇集了关于交通基础设施（包括铁路、公路和机场）、水利基础设施以及二十世纪和二十一世纪初城市基础设施的文章。这种广泛的基础设施研究方法以及在一本书中对过去和现在的关注确实是一种新的尝试。就地区而言，该书主要关注南美洲，尤其是阿根廷，而墨西哥和中美洲则不太突出。本书之所以引起技术史学家的兴趣，是因为作者们旨在探讨基础设施如何创造社会、技术、国家、文化、政治和自然之间的关系。当然，有些章节比其他章节更充分地实现了这一目标。作者们都把重点放在了国家在基础设施规划和管理中的作用上，这使得全书具有连贯性。该书的一个优势在于对紧张局势、冲突和失败进行了深入研究。这一点非常重要，因为在拉丁美洲，[第 693 页完] 长期以来，基础设施一直被宣传为现代化和进步的先兆，而事实上，基础设施往往岌岌可危的状况反映了贫困和极端社会不平等等紧迫问题。Anahí Ballent（第 8 章）和 Melina Piglia（第 13 章）撰写的章节明确阐述了基础设施的承诺与实际情况之间的差距。Ballent 在其关于 Río Tercero 大坝（阿根廷）的文章中分析了在 1910 年，早期的提案是如何将大坝描述为社会-领土变革的关键工具，承诺使干旱地区的灌溉成为可能，进而刺激定居和农业发展。到 1935 年，这样的计划显然没有成功，大坝现在被宣传为生产水电的重要工具。Piglia 在文章中指出，20 世纪 60 年代，机场现代化成为阿根廷政治的优先事项，而当地的条件却依然岌岌可危。跑道、照明、通信技术和气象服务都无法满足日益增长的航空交通需求，这导致了致命事故的发生，并威胁到国家一体化项目。在导言中，编者强调了采用跨国方法研究拉丁美洲基础设施的重要性。同样，书中有些章节比其他章节更能响应这一号召。在这方面，丹-祖尼诺-辛格（Dhan Zunino Singh）关于拉丁美洲四个城市地铁历史的章节（第 4 章）最为突出。祖尼诺-辛格以布宜诺斯艾利斯、智利圣地亚哥、墨西哥城和圣保罗为案例，展示了国际社会对城市地铁系统建设的影响，包括聘请外国专家、购买技术设备以及从国外融资。与此同时，拉美地铁的历史也是一部国内技术创新、适应性和独创性的历史，因为当地工程师利用他们对当地土壤条件的了解建造隧道和车站。其他章节涉及重要的国际方面，但没有进行真正的跨国分析。例如，瓦莱里娅-格鲁舍茨基（Valeria Gruschetsky）指出，世界其他角落的高速公路为北阿塞索公路（Acesso Norte）的设计提供了灵感，这条公路在 20 世纪 20 年代和 30 年代帮助布宜诺斯艾利斯北部郊区变成了城市富裕居民的周末度假胜地（第 7 章）。Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica》一书与技术史学家所关注的问题不谋而合，尤其是书中探讨基础设施如何通过解决城市无节制发展、地区不平等、贫困和交通拥堵等问题来改变拉美社会的部分。读者可以从中了解到不同的方法和观点。
{"title":"Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia (review)","authors":"Mario Peters","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926330","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America]</em> ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mario Peters (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America]</em> Edited by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia. Buenos Aires: Teseopress, 2022. Pp. 308. <p><em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica</em> is an important contribution to the study of infrastructure in Latin America, a field that has been flourishing over the last decade or so (M. Lasso, <em>Erased</em>, 2019; S. W. Miller, <em>The Street Is Ours</em>, 2018; F. Schulze, <em>Wissen im Fluss</em>, 2022). The book includes fourteen chapters by historians and scholars from neighboring disciplines. It brings together essays on transportation infrastructure—including railways, roads, and airports—water infrastructure, and urban infrastructure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This broad approach to infrastructure and the focus on the past <em>and</em> the present in a single volume is indeed something new. In regional terms, the book focuses largely on South America, especially Argentina, while Mexico and Central America figure less prominently.</p> <p>The book is of interest to historians of technology because the authors aim to explore how infrastructures create relations between society, technology, the state, culture, politics, and nature. Naturally, some chapters achieve this aim more fully than others. The authors all focus on the role of the state in the planning and administration of infrastructures, which gives the volume coherence. One strength of the book lies in the profound examination of tensions, conflicts, and failures. This is important because in Latin America, <strong>[End Page 693]</strong> infrastructures have long been promoted as harbingers of modernization and progress, while in fact the often-precarious state of infrastructure reflects pressing problems like poverty and extreme social inequality.</p> <p>The chapters written by Anahí Ballent (ch. 8) and Melina Piglia (ch. 13) explicitly address the gap between the promise of infrastructure and reality on the ground. In her essay on the Río Tercero Dam (Argentina), Ballent analyzes how in 1910, early proposals described the dam as a key instrument in socio-territorial transformation, promising to make irrigation in an arid region possible, which in turn was supposed to stimulate settlement and agriculture. By 1935, it was clear that such plans had not worked out, and the dam was now promoted as important to produce hydropower. In her essay, Piglia shows that the modernization of airports became a priority in Argentinean politics in the 1960s, while conditions on the ground remained precarious. Runways, illumination, communication technologies, and m","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926318
Carlos Salvador Dimas
abstract:
Focusing on Argentina's sugarcane province of Tucumán from 1870 to 1910, this article examines the processes of engineering professionalization in Argentina and its application to pressing environmental problems. Engineers were central to the processes through which elites in Latin America sought to attract foreign investment in agriculture, integrate their countries into the global economy, and provide expertise that enabled states to advance a techno-scientific imaginary based on liberal economic progress. Progressive bureaucrats and engineers, such as civil engineer Carlos Wauters, believed that they could use hydraulic infrastructure to transform Tucumán from an agricultural monoculture to a polyculture; others believed that infrastructure should be used to support a sugar monoculture. In exploring this issue, this article bridges the fields of engineering history, agricultural history, and environmental history. It also incorporates Latin America into global scholarship on the emergence and evolution of professional engineering.
{"title":"Water, Wealth, and Engineering Wisdom: Shaping Tucumán's Agricultural Future, 1890–1910","authors":"Carlos Salvador Dimas","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926318","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>Focusing on Argentina's sugarcane province of Tucumán from 1870 to 1910, this article examines the processes of engineering professionalization in Argentina and its application to pressing environmental problems. Engineers were central to the processes through which elites in Latin America sought to attract foreign investment in agriculture, integrate their countries into the global economy, and provide expertise that enabled states to advance a techno-scientific imaginary based on liberal economic progress. Progressive bureaucrats and engineers, such as civil engineer Carlos Wauters, believed that they could use hydraulic infrastructure to transform Tucumán from an agricultural monoculture to a polyculture; others believed that infrastructure should be used to support a sugar monoculture. In exploring this issue, this article bridges the fields of engineering history, agricultural history, and environmental history. It also incorporates Latin America into global scholarship on the emergence and evolution of professional engineering.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926326
Helge Wendt
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950</em> by Germán Vergara, and: <em>Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City</em> by Diana J. Montaño <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Helge Wendt (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950</em> By Germán Vergara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 322. <em>Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City</em> By Diana J. Montaño. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 373. <p>Energy history is back in fashion. As environmental history and in light of the Anthropocene, it participates in global historical debates. This environmental history of energy system transformations is the subject of Germán Vergara's <em>Fueling Mexico</em>. Based on the example of Mexico from 1850 to 1950, it looks at the diverse transformations of the Mexican energy system and increases in fossil fuels. The book analyzes structural shifts, the long-term effects of which shaped politics and power dynamics. A second aspect of current energy history looks at sociocultural dynamics. Energy history is no longer written from the perspective of entrepreneurs and large, ever-expanding corporations alone. Instead, as Diana Montaño points out in <em>Electrifying Mexico</em>, conditions such as everyday culture, contexts of use, and (rather Foucauldian) novel discourses are equally important for the diffusion of new technologies.</p> <p>These two studies of Mexico's energy modernity could not be more different. In Vergara's book, the entire country is scrutinized; in Montaño's, the expanding juggernaut of the capital is the focus. Vergara considers the modernization process from the aspect of material conditions and places coal and petroleum at the center. Montaño meets the public debating culture head on, refraining from an investigation of technical innovations or preconditions, instead focusing entirely on the users and collateral damage. Indeed, the detailed presentation of accidents caused by electric streetcars, complete with police and court records as well as newspaper and magazine reports, shows the full range of social discourse in the dynamics of appropriation and (sometimes fatal) application.</p> <p>Vergara's study is a journey through Mexico from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The environmental history of Mexican society is also a history of knowledge about geology, focusing on coal and petroleum. Part of Vergara's account is already known from the work of, for instance, María del Mar Rubio's article from 2010 on the economic history of Mexican oil in the first third of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the perspective taken in this book on the transformations of the Mexican energy system in this long period is particularly innovative. Also, it is beneficial to follow Vergara's accentuation of the regional transformations. These were driven
评论者 为墨西哥加油：能源与环境，1850-1950 年》，Germán Vergara 著：墨西哥电气化：Diana J. Montaño Helge Wendt (bio) 《为墨西哥加油：1850-1950 年的能源与环境》：能源与环境，1850-1950 年》，赫尔曼-贝尔加拉著。剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2021 年。Pp.322.墨西哥电气化：技术与现代城市的变革》，Diana J. Montaño 著。奥斯汀：德克萨斯大学出版社，2021 年。Pp.373.能源史又开始流行起来。作为环境史和人类世，它参与了全球历史辩论。赫尔曼-贝尔加拉（Germán Vergara）的《为墨西哥加油》（Fueling Mexico）一书的主题就是能源系统转型的环境史。该书以 1850 年至 1950 年间的墨西哥为例，探讨了墨西哥能源系统的各种转变和化石燃料的增加。该书分析了结构性转变，其长期影响塑造了政治和权力动态。当前能源史的第二个方面是社会文化动态。能源史不再仅仅从企业家和不断扩张的大公司的角度来书写。相反，正如戴安娜-蒙塔尼奥（Diana Montaño）在《墨西哥电气化》（Electrifying Mexico）一书中指出的那样，日常文化、使用环境以及（相当福柯式的）新话语等条件对于新技术的传播同样重要。这两本关于墨西哥能源现代性的研究报告大相径庭。在韦尔加拉的书中，整个国家都受到了审视；而在蒙塔诺的书中，不断扩张的资本巨头才是重点。贝尔加拉从物质条件方面考虑现代化进程，并将煤炭和石油置于中心位置。蒙塔尼奥则直面公众的辩论文化，避免对技术创新或先决条件进行调查，而是将注意力完全集中在使用者和附带损害上。事实上，该书详细介绍了有轨电车造成的事故，并附有警方和法院的记录以及报纸和杂志的报道，全面展示了社会话语在挪用和（有时是致命的）应用动态中的作用。贝尔加拉的研究是一次从十九世纪中期到二十世纪中期的墨西哥之旅。墨西哥社会的环境史也是一部地质学知识史，重点是煤炭和石油。例如，玛丽亚-德尔-马里奥-卢比奥（María del Mar Rubio）在 2010 年发表了一篇关于 20 世纪前三分之一墨西哥石油经济史的文章，韦尔加拉的部分论述已经广为人知。然而，本书对墨西哥能源系统在这一漫长时期的变革所采取的视角却尤为新颖。此外，韦尔加拉对地区转型的强调也是有益的。这些转变是由各地区转向新能源的可能性、投资模式、生产条件、政治支持以及地质条件所驱动的。就全球能源历史而言，墨西哥走的是自己的路。煤炭只能在短期内满足墨西哥的能源需求。此外，煤炭的使用具有很强的区域性，部分原因是美国对墨西哥煤矿开采的投资发挥了重要作用。由于将重点放在化石燃料上，贝尔加拉并没有研究墨西哥大多数城市使用的水力发电的影响，而蒙塔诺在《墨西哥电气化》一书中提到了这一点。与贝尔加拉的研究不同，这里的 "墨西哥 "仅指首都。在蒙塔尼奥的书中，外国公司和进口技术及其墨西哥化将全球历史背景与城市日常用电形式联系在一起。正如爱德华-比蒂（Edward Beatty）2015 年出版的《墨西哥的技术创新》一书一样，该书的重点是适应性发展。我们从这一视角了解到，技术系统和设备对墨西哥这样的社会文化体系的适应导致了进一步的创新，其中一些创新可能不仅在于它们的应用，还在于对所提供设备的技术改造。这两项研究恰好在突出墨西哥的历史特殊性这一点上相遇。墨西哥通往石油时代的道路与美国或欧洲国家不同，在这些国家，煤炭在各自的能源系统中所占的比重要大得多。墨西哥的石油主要是...
{"title":"Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950 by Germán Vergara, and: Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City by Diana J. Montaño (review)","authors":"Helge Wendt","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926326","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950</em> by Germán Vergara, and: <em>Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City</em> by Diana J. Montaño <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Helge Wendt (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950</em> By Germán Vergara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 322. <em>Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City</em> By Diana J. Montaño. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 373. <p>Energy history is back in fashion. As environmental history and in light of the Anthropocene, it participates in global historical debates. This environmental history of energy system transformations is the subject of Germán Vergara's <em>Fueling Mexico</em>. Based on the example of Mexico from 1850 to 1950, it looks at the diverse transformations of the Mexican energy system and increases in fossil fuels. The book analyzes structural shifts, the long-term effects of which shaped politics and power dynamics. A second aspect of current energy history looks at sociocultural dynamics. Energy history is no longer written from the perspective of entrepreneurs and large, ever-expanding corporations alone. Instead, as Diana Montaño points out in <em>Electrifying Mexico</em>, conditions such as everyday culture, contexts of use, and (rather Foucauldian) novel discourses are equally important for the diffusion of new technologies.</p> <p>These two studies of Mexico's energy modernity could not be more different. In Vergara's book, the entire country is scrutinized; in Montaño's, the expanding juggernaut of the capital is the focus. Vergara considers the modernization process from the aspect of material conditions and places coal and petroleum at the center. Montaño meets the public debating culture head on, refraining from an investigation of technical innovations or preconditions, instead focusing entirely on the users and collateral damage. Indeed, the detailed presentation of accidents caused by electric streetcars, complete with police and court records as well as newspaper and magazine reports, shows the full range of social discourse in the dynamics of appropriation and (sometimes fatal) application.</p> <p>Vergara's study is a journey through Mexico from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The environmental history of Mexican society is also a history of knowledge about geology, focusing on coal and petroleum. Part of Vergara's account is already known from the work of, for instance, María del Mar Rubio's article from 2010 on the economic history of Mexican oil in the first third of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the perspective taken in this book on the transformations of the Mexican energy system in this long period is particularly innovative. Also, it is beneficial to follow Vergara's accentuation of the regional transformations. These were driven","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926356
Marcus Popplow
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present</em> by Karsten Uhl <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marcus Popplow (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present</em> By Karsten Uhl. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. 280. <p>Karsten Uhl's volume is, indeed, "the first English-language book specifically on the role of technology in German history" (p. 1). Such an endeavor is more than welcome as, so far, introductions to and surveys of the history of technology focusing explicitly or implicitly on Germany have all been published in German. This is true for Joachim Radkau's <em>Technik in Deutschland</em> (1989), the five-volume <em>Propyläen Technikgeschichte</em> (1990–92), Wolfgang König's <em>Technikgeschichte</em> (2009), Martina Heßler's <em>Kulturgeschichte der Technik</em> (2012), Ulrich Wengenroth's <em>Technik der Moderne</em> (2015), and <em>Provokationen der Technikgeschichte</em>, edited by Martina Heßler and Heike Weber (2019). None of these works has been translated into English, so they have remained inaccessible for non-German readers so far—at least until powerful and easily accessible translation tools have been devised more recently. It is somewhat astonishing that Uhl does not refer to these surveys in more detail and mentions most of them, if at all, only in passing, even if his own approach throughout the book is based on a wide range of secondary literature. As the annotated bibliography also focuses on English titles only, readers are not made familiar with the historiography of German research into the history of technology.</p> <p>According to the requirements of the Bloomsbury History of Modern Germany Series, the book is divided into a first part, "Tracing the History," which is rather descriptive, while the second part covers "New Directions"; that is, the results of more recent historiographical and methodological discussions. The reader should thus not expect a chronological account of the history of technology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, nor an overview structured according to various sectors of technology. Uhl instead loosely pairs the chapters of the first and second parts, so that "traditional" issues correspond with more explorative ones: "industrialization" with the "human body in highly technified environments," "urban" with "rural technologies," "high tech" (aviation, rocketry, nuclear power) with "everyday technologies," and "visions of progress" with "apprehensions of uncertainty"—in the sense of protest against technologies and the emergence of environmental concerns. The latter pair shows, however, that Uhl to some <strong>[End Page 744]</strong> extent subverts this structure, as "visions of progress" so far have not featured in the standard program of introductions into the history of technology. However, this case, as well as Uhl's other topic choices, allows many fresh insights
{"title":"Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present by Karsten Uhl (review)","authors":"Marcus Popplow","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926356","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present</em> by Karsten Uhl <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marcus Popplow (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present</em> By Karsten Uhl. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. 280. <p>Karsten Uhl's volume is, indeed, \"the first English-language book specifically on the role of technology in German history\" (p. 1). Such an endeavor is more than welcome as, so far, introductions to and surveys of the history of technology focusing explicitly or implicitly on Germany have all been published in German. This is true for Joachim Radkau's <em>Technik in Deutschland</em> (1989), the five-volume <em>Propyläen Technikgeschichte</em> (1990–92), Wolfgang König's <em>Technikgeschichte</em> (2009), Martina Heßler's <em>Kulturgeschichte der Technik</em> (2012), Ulrich Wengenroth's <em>Technik der Moderne</em> (2015), and <em>Provokationen der Technikgeschichte</em>, edited by Martina Heßler and Heike Weber (2019). None of these works has been translated into English, so they have remained inaccessible for non-German readers so far—at least until powerful and easily accessible translation tools have been devised more recently. It is somewhat astonishing that Uhl does not refer to these surveys in more detail and mentions most of them, if at all, only in passing, even if his own approach throughout the book is based on a wide range of secondary literature. As the annotated bibliography also focuses on English titles only, readers are not made familiar with the historiography of German research into the history of technology.</p> <p>According to the requirements of the Bloomsbury History of Modern Germany Series, the book is divided into a first part, \"Tracing the History,\" which is rather descriptive, while the second part covers \"New Directions\"; that is, the results of more recent historiographical and methodological discussions. The reader should thus not expect a chronological account of the history of technology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, nor an overview structured according to various sectors of technology. Uhl instead loosely pairs the chapters of the first and second parts, so that \"traditional\" issues correspond with more explorative ones: \"industrialization\" with the \"human body in highly technified environments,\" \"urban\" with \"rural technologies,\" \"high tech\" (aviation, rocketry, nuclear power) with \"everyday technologies,\" and \"visions of progress\" with \"apprehensions of uncertainty\"—in the sense of protest against technologies and the emergence of environmental concerns. The latter pair shows, however, that Uhl to some <strong>[End Page 744]</strong> extent subverts this structure, as \"visions of progress\" so far have not featured in the standard program of introductions into the history of technology. However, this case, as well as Uhl's other topic choices, allows many fresh insights","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926359
M. Luísa Sousa
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal]</em> ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> M. Luísa Sousa (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal]</em> Edited by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019. Pp. 410. <p>This volume brings together contributions from eleven authors in ten chapters, based on research carried out over the last twenty years, and reflects the development and maturity of the field of STM history in Portugal. The editors hope that it will serve as a model for urban histories of STM in other territories. Covering the period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, the authors focus on eighteen scientific institutions to analyze how urban problems inspired the framing of STM problems and how the knowledge they produced shaped the city materially, socially, and symbolically (and vice versa). The book is in Portuguese, but parts of it have been published in English, some in this journal.</p> <p>In this volume, "science" is understood in a broad sense, including technology and medicine (p. 28). More than a simplification, this reflects another methodological and historiographical contribution: it goes beyond the monodisciplinary approaches more common in urban histories of STM by bringing together different disciplines and looking at urban scientific institutions such as laboratories; technical workshops; industrial, bacteriological, and biomedical institutes; astronomical observatories; formal and informal universities; and hospitals. Analyzing the blueprints of these buildings shows how STM practices constructed spaces within and around STM institutions and changed the form (and spread) of the city.</p> <p>The interest in interweaving the making of Lisbon as a political and scientific capital is present in the way the book is structured: it has three parts, divided chronologically according to the periodization of political regimes in contemporary Portugal. The first part, covering roughly the period from 1837 to 1910, has two chapters (1 and 4) that deal with the influence of Saint-Simonianism in technical education at different levels (from artisan to engineer) in three institutions (the Polytechnic School, the Army School, and the Industrial Institute), as well as the importance of the development of credit systems, capitalism, dreams of social emancipation, and romantic sensibilities, all seen through the lens of the place-based practices of STM. The development of disciplines such as astronomy and geology, and their services and practices, are discussed in chapters 3 and 4, which show
{"title":"Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal] ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (review)","authors":"M. Luísa Sousa","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926359","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal]</em> ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> M. Luísa Sousa (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal]</em> Edited by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019. Pp. 410. <p>This volume brings together contributions from eleven authors in ten chapters, based on research carried out over the last twenty years, and reflects the development and maturity of the field of STM history in Portugal. The editors hope that it will serve as a model for urban histories of STM in other territories. Covering the period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, the authors focus on eighteen scientific institutions to analyze how urban problems inspired the framing of STM problems and how the knowledge they produced shaped the city materially, socially, and symbolically (and vice versa). The book is in Portuguese, but parts of it have been published in English, some in this journal.</p> <p>In this volume, \"science\" is understood in a broad sense, including technology and medicine (p. 28). More than a simplification, this reflects another methodological and historiographical contribution: it goes beyond the monodisciplinary approaches more common in urban histories of STM by bringing together different disciplines and looking at urban scientific institutions such as laboratories; technical workshops; industrial, bacteriological, and biomedical institutes; astronomical observatories; formal and informal universities; and hospitals. Analyzing the blueprints of these buildings shows how STM practices constructed spaces within and around STM institutions and changed the form (and spread) of the city.</p> <p>The interest in interweaving the making of Lisbon as a political and scientific capital is present in the way the book is structured: it has three parts, divided chronologically according to the periodization of political regimes in contemporary Portugal. The first part, covering roughly the period from 1837 to 1910, has two chapters (1 and 4) that deal with the influence of Saint-Simonianism in technical education at different levels (from artisan to engineer) in three institutions (the Polytechnic School, the Army School, and the Industrial Institute), as well as the importance of the development of credit systems, capitalism, dreams of social emancipation, and romantic sensibilities, all seen through the lens of the place-based practices of STM. The development of disciplines such as astronomy and geology, and their services and practices, are discussed in chapters 3 and 4, which show ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926324
Jasmine Gideon
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945</em> by A. Kim Clark <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jasmine Gideon (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945</em> By A. Kim Clark. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 208. <p>In this highly engaging book, Clark explores the creation of a public health service in Ecuador in the early twentieth century. In essence, the book is a historical analysis of the interconnections between several different technologies, most notably the development and spread of medical knowledge as evidenced through the growing control over the spread of infectious disease, alongside the development of the railway, which facilitated the spread of bubonic plague across Ecuador. Clark employs historical and political anthropological approaches in her work and bases her analysis on a rich source of uncatalogued archives of letters and documents from a variety of stakeholders. This allows her to produce a fascinating institutional ethnography of the establishment of the Servicio de Sanidad.</p> <p>Clark is not the first scholar to consider the complex process of state formation, including in a Latin American context. Among several influences, she highlights political geographer Joe Painter's assertion that the "everyday or prosaic practices can help our understanding of state formation" (p. 10). Moreover, Clark underlines the gendered and racialized nature of these everyday practices, which she previously examined in her book <em>Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador</em> (2012). As Clark notes, few studies have analyzed the question of state formation through a focus on public health, and here she acknowledges Paul Farmer's analysis of Ebola in West Africa in <em>Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds</em> (2020), one of the first books to differentiate between "containment" and "care" in disease eradication.</p> <p>Clark's analysis starts in 1908, when although the laboratory identification of the bubonic plague pathogen had already occurred, many questions around its transmission remained. Unfortunately, as Clark contends, the arrival of plague in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, also coincided with the near completion of the new railway line linking the city with the capital city, Quito, and providing connections between Ecuador's five largest cities. Given the lack of treatment options for plague at the time, containment of the disease was vital, and this became the focus of local health board initiatives in Guayaquil. In effect, the city provided a testing ground for subsequent interventions. Yet, although this was important work potentially bringing health benefits to the population as a whole, there were clearly some very problematic and frequently racialized impacts of these developments. Officials relied on forced labor, often Indigenous peasants
评论者： 国家的魔力：1908-1945 年厄瓜多尔高地的公共卫生遭遇》（Conjuring the State：A. Kim Clark 著 Jasmine Gideon (bio) Conjuring the State：A. Kim Clark 著。匹兹堡：匹兹堡大学出版社，2023 年。第 xiii + 208 页。在这本引人入胜的书中，克拉克探讨了二十世纪初厄瓜多尔公共卫生服务的创建过程。从本质上讲，该书是对几种不同技术之间相互联系的历史分析，其中最值得注意的是医学知识的发展和传播，这体现在对传染病传播的控制不断加强，以及铁路的发展促进了鼠疫在厄瓜多尔的传播。克拉克在她的研究中采用了历史和政治人类学方法，并以丰富的未编目档案为基础，分析了来自不同利益相关者的信件和文件。这使她能够对卫生服务机构的建立进行精彩的机构人种学研究。克拉克并不是第一位考虑国家形成复杂过程的学者，包括在拉丁美洲背景下。在众多影响因素中，她强调了政治地理学家乔-佩因特（Joe Painter）的论断，即 "日常或平凡的实践有助于我们理解国家的形成"（第 10 页）。此外，克拉克还强调了这些日常实践的性别和种族性质，她曾在《厄瓜多尔高地的性别、国家和医学》（2012 年）一书中对此进行过研究。正如克拉克所指出的，很少有研究通过关注公共卫生来分析国家形成的问题，在此，她肯定了保罗-法默在《热病、争斗和钻石》（2020 年）一书中对西非埃博拉病毒的分析，该书是最早区分疾病根除中的 "遏制 "和 "关怀 "的书籍之一。克拉克的分析始于 1908 年，当时虽然已经在实验室中确定了鼠疫病原体，但围绕其传播的许多问题依然存在。不幸的是，正如克拉克所言，鼠疫传入厄瓜多尔港口城市瓜亚基尔的同时，连接该市与首都基多的新铁路线也即将完工，为厄瓜多尔五大城市提供了连接。鉴于当时缺乏治疗鼠疫的方法，控制疾病至关重要，这也成为瓜亚基尔当地卫生局的工作重点。实际上，这座城市为随后的干预措施提供了一个试验场。然而，尽管这项重要的工作可能会给整个人口的健康带来益处，但这些发展显然存在一些问题，并经常造成种族化的影响。官员们依靠强迫劳动，通常是土著农民，来从事抗鼠疫运动的 "肮脏"[第 681 页完] 一线工作，导致土著社区大量人员死亡。该书追溯了随着有关鼠疫传播的科学知识的增长，公共卫生服务是如何在全国范围内扩展的。克拉克重点介绍了早期公共卫生官员之间的书信往来，并指出其中许多关系是非常私人的--交流家庭新闻--以及专业关系。鼠疫问题不可避免地沿着铁路开辟的新路线发展，控制鼠疫传播的需求变得越来越迫切。克拉克揭示了那些利用科学知识推动医疗服务机构建设的医生们所遇到的挑战。此外，Servicio 的演变也代表着对 "健康 "理解的彻底转变。在此之前，医生只关注与病人的个别接触，只关注解决病人的特殊症状。相比之下，"公共卫生 "的概念不仅迫使医生，也迫使整个国家将健康视为公众关注的重要问题。公共卫生官员逐渐认识到保存记录的重要性--认真记录所关注的问题，如每一个新的鼠疫病例--以及这些数据如何帮助他们了解疾病的性质。随后的章节探讨了公共卫生官员在争取更大权力以有效实施必要立法保护民众健康时所面临的挑战。例如，官员们获得了进行家庭检查的权力，以确保厕所的安装符合新的卫生标准。
{"title":"Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945 by A. Kim Clark (review)","authors":"Jasmine Gideon","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926324","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945</em> by A. Kim Clark <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jasmine Gideon (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945</em> By A. Kim Clark. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 208. <p>In this highly engaging book, Clark explores the creation of a public health service in Ecuador in the early twentieth century. In essence, the book is a historical analysis of the interconnections between several different technologies, most notably the development and spread of medical knowledge as evidenced through the growing control over the spread of infectious disease, alongside the development of the railway, which facilitated the spread of bubonic plague across Ecuador. Clark employs historical and political anthropological approaches in her work and bases her analysis on a rich source of uncatalogued archives of letters and documents from a variety of stakeholders. This allows her to produce a fascinating institutional ethnography of the establishment of the Servicio de Sanidad.</p> <p>Clark is not the first scholar to consider the complex process of state formation, including in a Latin American context. Among several influences, she highlights political geographer Joe Painter's assertion that the \"everyday or prosaic practices can help our understanding of state formation\" (p. 10). Moreover, Clark underlines the gendered and racialized nature of these everyday practices, which she previously examined in her book <em>Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador</em> (2012). As Clark notes, few studies have analyzed the question of state formation through a focus on public health, and here she acknowledges Paul Farmer's analysis of Ebola in West Africa in <em>Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds</em> (2020), one of the first books to differentiate between \"containment\" and \"care\" in disease eradication.</p> <p>Clark's analysis starts in 1908, when although the laboratory identification of the bubonic plague pathogen had already occurred, many questions around its transmission remained. Unfortunately, as Clark contends, the arrival of plague in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, also coincided with the near completion of the new railway line linking the city with the capital city, Quito, and providing connections between Ecuador's five largest cities. Given the lack of treatment options for plague at the time, containment of the disease was vital, and this became the focus of local health board initiatives in Guayaquil. In effect, the city provided a testing ground for subsequent interventions. Yet, although this was important work potentially bringing health benefits to the population as a whole, there were clearly some very problematic and frequently racialized impacts of these developments. Officials relied on forced labor, often Indigenous peasants","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140942265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-09DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a926339
Ben Russell
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The American Robot: A Cultural History</em> by Dustin A. Abnet <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ben Russell (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The American Robot: A Cultural History</em> By Dustin A. Abnet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 376. <p>This wide-ranging and thought-provoking book is about the <em>idea</em> of the robot in American history. The robot is presented not as a technical creation but as "a multifaceted character that people use to deal with some of the most persistent tensions in their society" (p. 295). Taking the robot as a central interpretative lens, the book identifies "a persistent ideological determination" to connect and conflate machines and humans, "sometimes the self, but more frequently others" (p. 295). The book argues this ideology has been created by American elites—primarily a small subset of American middle- and upper-class men—who, while "unwilling <strong>[End Page 712]</strong> to acknowledge that they themselves might be machines, have been willing to accept that others might or should be" (p. 7). In consequence, humans have been turned into machines and machines into humans, with all the quandaries pertaining to race, gender, and social status that such a transformation entails.</p> <p>The author acknowledges the extant literature, sharing with it an approach taking the robot as a mirror for humans to reflect upon themselves with—see, for example, Jessica Riskin's <em>The Restless Clock</em> (2016). The book quickly defines a dual focus, on America and on presenting a narrative right up to 2019. This stands well alongside works that have been written with a European focus and those that are often necessarily historical case studies—take Adelheid Voskuhl's <em>Androids in the Enlightenment</em> (2013) for the former, for example, and E. R. Truitt's <em>Medieval Robots</em> (2015) for the latter. That said, note that European museums have adopted the book's long historical view in robots exhibits as standard (Technisches Museum, Vienna, 2013; Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, 2014; Science Museum, London, 2017; and MUDEC, Milan, 2020)—and that there is a caveat to how the book adopts this approach in the following discussion.</p> <p>The book is split into three parts. "God and Demon, 1790–1910" addresses the rise of automaton figures such as Signor Falconi's Indian (1788) or Zadoc Drederick's Steam Man (1868), within the context of American society's nineteenth-century industrial transformation. The second, "Masters and Slaves, 1910–1945," sees Karel Capek's newly coined word "robot" applied in an America being transformed into the world's preeminent power. The third, "Playfellow and Protector, 1945–2019," addresses the robot's rise as a creation of popular culture within an America that had huge prosperity but was grappling with the dilemmas of the Cold War. Each section is prefaced with a short case study introducing the key themes to be dis
评论者： 美国机器人：Dustin A. Abnet 著 Ben Russell 译 The American Robot：Dustin A. Abnet 著。芝加哥：芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社，2020 年。Pp.376.本书内容广泛，发人深省，讲述了美国历史上的机器人概念。机器人不是一种技术创造，而是 "人们用来处理社会中一些最顽固的紧张关系的多面角色"（第 295 页）。本书以机器人为核心解释视角，指出 "一种持久的意识形态决心 "将机器和人类联系起来并混为一谈，"有时是自我，但更多时候是他人"（第 295 页）。该书认为，这种意识形态是由美国精英--主要是一小部分美国中产阶级和上层阶级的男性--所创造的，他们虽然 "不愿[完712页]承认自己可能是机器，但却愿意接受他人可能或应该是机器的事实"（第7页）。结果，人类变成了机器，机器变成了人类，这种转变带来了种族、性别和社会地位方面的种种窘境。作者对现有文献表示认可，并分享了一种将机器人作为人类反思自身的镜子的方法--例如，参见杰西卡-里斯金（Jessica Riskin）的《不安分的时钟》（The Restless Clock，2016 年）。该书很快就确定了一个双重重点，即关注美国，并将叙事一直延续到 2019 年。这一点与那些以欧洲为重点的作品以及那些通常必然是历史案例研究的作品并驾齐驱--前者如阿德尔海德-沃斯库尔（Adelheid Voskuhl）的《启蒙运动中的机器人》（2013），后者如E-R-特鲁伊特（E. R. Truitt）的《中世纪机器人》（2015）。尽管如此，请注意，欧洲博物馆已将本书的长历史视角作为机器人展品的标准（维也纳技术博物馆，2013 年；巴黎艺术与工艺博物馆，2014 年；伦敦科学博物馆，2017 年；米兰 MUDEC，2020 年）--在下文的讨论中，对本书如何采用这种方法有一个说明。本书分为三个部分。第一部分 "神与魔，1790-1910 年 "在美国社会十九世纪工业转型的背景下，探讨了诸如法尔科尼（Signor Falconi）的《印第安人》（1788 年）或扎多克-德雷德里克（Zadoc Drederick）的《蒸汽人》（1868 年）等自动机形象的兴起。第二部 "主人与奴隶，1910-1945 "将卡雷尔-卡佩克（Karel Capek）新创造的 "机器人 "一词应用于正在转变为世界卓越强国的美国。第三部分 "玩伴与保护者，1945-2019 年 "探讨了机器人作为流行文化的创造物在美国的崛起，当时的美国虽然非常繁荣，但也面临着冷战的困境。每一部分前都有一个简短的案例研究，介绍将要讨论的关键主题。每一章都重复了这种精心设计的结构，为其中包含的详细原始资料和讨论提供了清晰的框架。本书论述了使机器人成为如此引人入胜的主题的三个特点。首先，它们是边缘性的，存在于成双成对的极端之间的众多光谱上的有争议点上：在作者确定的最高层次上，它们是亲密的/遥远的、神/恶魔、主人/奴隶、玩伴/保护者。正文中还指出或引出了一系列其他此类配对。其次，机器人是有场景的：它们不仅存在于实验室中，还存在于变幻莫测、变化无穷的人类世界中，存在于从电影和戏剧到漫画和卡通等多种不同类型的媒体中。本书自始至终以这些丰富的媒体为素材，对其进行了详细的概述和探讨。最后，机器人是具身的：它们具有不同的物理形态，这些形态会影响机器人与人类环境的互动，并塑造机器人所处的人类环境。关于机器人的边缘性和处境性的总体论点是正确的。对机器人体现的本质还可以再多探讨一些 [尾页 713]。本书的原始资料包括数量可观、物理形态各异的机器人，从下棋的自动装置和机电人到 Unimation 的工业机器人，甚至还有赛勒斯-麦考密克的收割机。令人惊讶的是，这些机器人中并没有软件或电子设备。也许这些技术并不像...
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Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920561
Zachary Loeb
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal</em> by Laine Nooney <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Zachary Loeb (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal</em> By Laine Nooney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 352. <p>In the version of its history that Silicon Valley likes to tell about itself, computing's rise is credited to a gaggle of iconoclastic former hippies who envisioned a world transformed for the better by the computer. This is a myth that is dismantled by Laine Nooney in <em>The Apple II Age</em>. Focusing on the titular Apple II, the book rejects the idea that personal computing was "instantly recognized as a revolutionary technology" (p. 7), instead treating computing as a site of clashing ideas. While engaging closely with the Apple II's affordances, Nooney argues that the history of personal computing is less about counterculture types wanting to produce "a social revolution" and more about "financial interests" wanting to secure "their financial standing" (p. 17).</p> <p>Beginning with a brief history of the computer before it became personal, Nooney juxtaposes the spread of large mainframe computers with the growth <strong>[End Page 418]</strong> of a hobbyist subculture of people who wanted their own computers. Though connected to that hobbyist milieu, Nooney frames the path to the Apple II as an attempt to launch a successful consumer product, albeit one offering "a synthesis of hobbyist instincts for access and accessibility" in a package that was "more approachable to novices than anything else available" (p. 65). The Apple II's hardware was not enough for its potential to be realized; nonspecialist users needed to be convinced the machine could fit into their lives, and they needed software to convince them.</p> <p>Thus, Nooney focuses on five applications that illustrate "how the computer became personal" (p. 70). Primary among these is VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program that elevated the microcomputer from a hobbyist toy to a business machine. Beyond business software like VisiCalc, games like <em>Mystery House</em> were also top sellers, as they demonstrated the microcomputer's entertainment potential. The challenge was to teach "potential users … to imagine their lives as available for intervention by a computer" (p. 195), something that the card and banner maker The Print Shop did admirably. Businesses represented valuable markets for the makers of hardware and software, but so too did schools, where programs like <em>Snooper Troops</em> could capitalize on interest in and desire for educational software. And all the while, the technical challenges of microcomputers—such as the need for backups—provided the space for controversial utility programs like Locksmith. These five pieces of software are considered alongside additions like the 5.25-inch floppy drive and the dot matrix printer, which further expanded wha
评论者 The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal by Laine Nooney Zachary Loeb (bio) The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal By Laine Nooney.芝加哥：芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社，2023 年。第 352 页。352.在硅谷喜欢自说自话的历史版本中，计算机的崛起归功于一群具有偶像崇拜精神的前嬉皮士，他们憧憬着计算机能让世界变得更好。莱恩-努尼在《苹果 II 时代》一书中打破了这一神话。该书以 Apple II 为中心，摒弃了个人电脑 "立即被认为是一项革命性技术"（第 7 页）的观点，而是将计算机视为一个思想碰撞的场所。在密切关注 Apple II 功能的同时，努尼认为，个人计算机的历史与其说是反主流文化人士想要制造 "一场社会革命"，不如说是 "金融利益集团 "想要确保 "他们的经济地位"（第 17 页）。从计算机成为个人计算机之前的简史开始，努尼将大型主机的普及与希望拥有自己的计算机的业余爱好者亚文化的发展并列起来。虽然与业余爱好者的环境有关，但努尼将通往 Apple II 的道路描绘成推出一款成功的消费产品的尝试，尽管这款产品 "综合了业余爱好者对访问和易用性的本能"，"比其他任何产品都更容易为新手所接受"（第 65 页）。要实现 Apple II 的潜力，仅有硬件是不够的；还需要让非专业用户相信这台机器可以融入他们的生活，他们需要软件来说服自己。因此，努尼重点介绍了 "计算机如何成为个人电脑"（第 70 页）的五个应用软件。其中最主要的是 VisiCalc，这是一款电子表格程序，它将微型计算机从业余爱好者的玩具提升为商业机器。除了 VisiCalc 这样的商业软件，《神秘屋》这样的游戏也非常畅销，因为它们展示了微型计算机的娱乐潜力。挑战在于教会 "潜在用户......想象他们的生活可以被计算机介入"（第 195 页），卡片和条幅制造商 The Print Shop 在这方面做得非常出色。对于硬件和软件制造商来说，企业是宝贵的市场，但学校也是宝贵的市场，"窥探者部队 "等项目可以利用学校对教育软件的兴趣和渴望。同时，微型计算机的技术挑战--如备份需求--也为像 "锁匠 "这样有争议的实用程序提供了发展空间。这五款软件与 5.25 英寸软驱和针式打印机等新产品一起，进一步拓展了 Apple II 的功能。书名中的 "时代 "一词很有启发性，因为这并不是一部狭隘的单一机器或公司的历史，而是对 Apple II 如何成为个人计算的竞争场所的思考。作为一部坚定的反决定论叙事作品，本书避免了对 Apple II（或苹果电脑）的必然性进行任何形式的歌颂，而是强调，与硬件相比，软件才是 Apple II 的卖点。销售问题是努尼叙述的核心，因为即使书中出现了许多对个人电脑有自己想法的有趣人物，书中也会不断提到这些人物想要创造出能够销售的产品的愿望。虽然书中介绍了一系列新颖的程序，但它们的成功与其说与内在质量有关，不如说与投资者和其他资金来源有关。那些对计算机历史略知一二的人，其先入为主的观念会受到本书的挑战；而那些知识渊博的人，则会从本书的重点分析、理论深度以及对资料来源的深思熟虑（尤其是对计算机杂志的使用）中获益匪浅。也许对本书最苛刻的批评是，有些章节和章节本身就可以写成整本专著，但这恰恰说明了本书在将计算机史建立在计算机杂志基础上所做的重要工作。
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Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920555
Jennifer Hubbard
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft & the Sciences of the Sea</em> by Samantha Muka <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jennifer Hubbard (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft & the Sciences of the Sea</em> By Samantha Muka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. viii + 242. <p>For the uninitiated, large public aquariums might seem like glorified goldfish bowls. Samantha Muka's richly textured <em>Oceans Under Glass</em> explodes this simplistic view and shows how "tank crafters" create complex and intricate systems for a variety of purposes. Specialized aquaria function as simulacra of different aspects of oceans in miniature, which have shaped our perceptions of the undersea world and even scientific understanding. To my surprise, much of the "undersea" footage of David Attenborough's award-winning <em>Blue Planet</em> was aquarium based, although viewers assumed expert cameramen-divers had been filming underwater. While "no tank system can perfectly replicate the natural environment" (p. 60), information gained from keeping undersea species alive in such tanks necessarily informs our knowledge of these difficult-to-monitor lifeforms.</p> <p>Although the title <em>Oceans Under Glass</em> captures Muka's focus on the centrality of aquaria to marine biology, she also seeks, in this highly original work, to give due credit to an extended community of hobbyists, engineers, and professional or self-trained experts in "tank craft." Through tinkering and successful improvisations to advance tank technology and techniques for keeping marine species alive, these experts are essential to scientific investigations but have preferred in-person and in-situ communication rather than formal publications. Meanwhile, marine scientists usually divorce biological information from its derived context in their publications, seldom mentioning the technicians and hobbyists who have enabled their investigations. Due to the scarcity of sources on the history of tank crafting, Muka was forced to dive into hobbyist manuals, magazines, journals, and global online communities to learn their history. She visited public, private, and for-profit aquariums to interview willing tank crafters and also to view these miniature oceans.</p> <p><em>Oceans Under Glass</em> is divided into five main chapters. While each focuses on different aspects of aquarium history, Muka presents the different specializations in their chronological order of emergence, beginning with a general introduction to the tank-craft community. Later chapters focus on photography and film aquariums; aquaria specialized for keeping delicate animals such as jellyfish alive (Kriesel aquariums, in which water is agitated to simulate the natural environment); reef tanks; and breeding tanks. In <strong>[End Page 407]</strong> each, she highlights the contributions by key individuals and links their advances to external outcomes. Earl
评论者 玻璃下的海洋：玻璃下的海洋：坦克工艺与海洋科学》（Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft & the Sciences of the Sea），萨曼莎-穆卡（Samantha Muka）著，詹妮弗-哈伯德（Jennifer Hubbard）（简历）译：Tank Craft & the Sciences of the Sea 作者：Samantha Muka。芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社，2023 年。第 viii + 242 页。对于不了解水族馆的人来说，大型公共水族馆可能就像是美化了的金鱼缸。萨曼莎-穆卡（Samantha Muka）的《玻璃下的海洋》（Oceans Under Glass）一书质感丰富，打破了这种简单化的看法，展示了 "水族箱设计师 "如何为各种目的创造复杂而精巧的系统。专业水族馆的功能是模拟海洋不同方面的缩影，它塑造了我们对海底世界的看法，甚至是科学认识。令我惊讶的是，大卫-爱登堡（David Attenborough）的获奖影片《蓝色星球》（Blue Planet）中的大部分 "海底 "镜头都是在水族馆中拍摄的，尽管观众都以为是专业摄影师-潜水员在水下拍摄。虽然 "没有一个水族箱系统能完美复制自然环境"（第 60 页），但在水族箱中饲养海底物种所获得的信息，必然有助于我们了解这些难以监测的生命形式。虽然《玻璃下的海洋》这个书名反映了穆卡对水族馆在海洋生物学中的核心地位的关注，但在这部极具原创性的作品中，她也试图对由爱好者、工程师、专业或自学成才的 "水族箱工艺 "专家组成的庞大群体给予应有的肯定。通过修修补补和成功的即兴创作，这些专家推动了水族箱技术和海洋物种生存技术的发展，他们对科学研究至关重要，但他们更喜欢面对面的现场交流，而不是正式的出版物。与此同时，海洋科学家在其出版物中通常将生物信息与其衍生背景割裂开来，很少提及促成其研究的技术人员和业余爱好者。由于有关水族箱制作历史的资料很少，穆卡不得不钻研爱好者手册、杂志、期刊和全球网络社区，以了解它们的历史。她走访了公共、私人和营利性水族馆，采访了愿意制作水族箱的人，也参观了这些微型海洋。玻璃下的海洋》分为五个主要章节。每一章都侧重于水族馆历史的不同方面，穆卡按照出现的时间顺序介绍了不同的专业，首先是对水族馆工艺社区的总体介绍。之后的章节重点介绍了摄影和胶片水族箱、专门饲养活水母等娇嫩动物的水族箱（Kriesel 水族箱，其中的水被搅动以模拟自然环境）、珊瑚礁水族箱和繁殖水族箱。在 [第 407 页末] 每一个方面，她都强调了关键人物的贡献，并将他们的进步与外部成果联系起来。二十世纪早期的海洋透视画被用来阐述民族主义主题：德国柏林自然科学博物馆利用海洋透视画 "让（公众）参与到德国海军和海洋学扩张的新目标中"（第 34 页）。摄影水族箱可以改进海洋分类图解，因为海洋物种在死亡后会迅速退化。专门的珊瑚礁水族箱需要精细和持续的修补：一些爱好者使用 "活石"（即布满天然生物群的岩石）和天然海水，而其他爱好者则使用消毒过的岩石、精心引入的生物群和人工海水来控制和预防疾病。这两种方法都不能更深入地了解自然生态系统。理想的美学驱动着水族爱好者的选择，影响着我们对自然的理解。在思考 "珊瑚礁和他们对珊瑚礁的实际体验 "时，即使是经验丰富的海洋潜水员也更愿意设想海洋世界在佛罗里达州奥兰多市巨大的露天可游泳的 "发现湾 "水箱中的超真实、丰富的人工珊瑚礁系统。因此，他们允许 "模拟成为新的真实环境"（第 177 页）。玻璃下的海洋》还探讨了一个具有讽刺意味的现象：为了满足全球鱼缸制作者和爱好者的需求，热带物种被大量捕捞，到 2005 年，自然种群数量已经减少到原来的 2% 到 20%。夏威夷的女业余科学家开创了 "生命循环 "的先河，她们在多个鱼缸中繁殖和饲养人工饲养的物种，为从幼虫到成鱼的各个生命阶段提供适当的环境和食物。穆卡回顾了对受欢迎的珊瑚礁物种进行规模化但往往是秘密的商业繁殖操作的历史，这可能会拯救自然种群。她还提出了水族馆的新作用，即作为保持野生物种（包括许多珊瑚）生存的空间，直到条件适合重新引入这些物种。对于任何人...
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