Technology and Magic

Abstract

The author is reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics and has done fieldwork in both Papua New Guinea and central India. This paper was given on 6 January last at a seminar in London on Tool Use in Man and Animals organized by W.C.McGrew for the RAI's Committee on Biological and Social Anthropology, a report on the seminar will appear shortly in A.T. 'Technological' capabilities are one of the distinguishing features of our species, and have been since a very early stage in evolution, if not from the very beginning. It is no longer possible to claim 'tool using' as an uniquely 'human' characteristic, because there are distinct tooluse traditions among apes, especially chimpanzees, and rather more rudimentary examples of tool-use among some other species as well. Human beings, however, have elaborated 'technological' means of realizing their intentions to an unprecedented degree. But what is 'technology'? and how does it articulate to the other species characteristics we possess? The answers which have been suggested to this question have suffered from a bias arising from the misconceived notion that the obtaining of subsistence necessities from the environment is the basic problem which technology enables us to surmount. Technology is identified with 'tools' and 'tools' with artefacts, like axes and scrapers, which are presumed to have been imported in the 'food quest'. This 'food quest' has been imagined as a serious, life-or-death, business, and the employment of technology as an equally 'serious' affair. Homo technologicus is a rational, sensible, creature, not a mythopoeic or religious one, which he only becomes once he abandons the search for 'technical' solutions to his problems and takes off into the realms of fantasy and empty speculation. But this opposition between the technical and the magical is without foundation. Technology is inadequately understood if it is simply identified with tool-use, and tool-use is inadequately understood if it is identified with subsistence activity. Although it may be useful for certain classification purposes-especially in prehistory-to identify 'technology' with 'tools', from any explanatory point of view technology is much more than this. At the very minimum, technology not only consists of the artefacts which are employed as tools, but also includes the sum total of the kinds of knowledge which make possible the invention, making and use of tools. But this is not all. 'Knowledge' does not exist except in a certain social context. Technology is coterminous with the various networks of social relationships which allow for the transmission of technical knowledge, and provide the necessary conditions for cooperation between individuals in technical activity. But one cannot stop even at this point, because the objectives of technical production are themselves shaped by the social context. Technology, in the widest sense, is those forms of social relationships which make it socially necessary to produce, distribute and consume goods and services using 'technical' processes. But what does the adjective 'technical' mean? 'Technical' does not, I think, indicate an either/or distinction between production processes which do, or do not, make use of artefacts called 'tools'. There can be 'techniques'-for instance, the 'techniques of the body' listed by Mauss-which do not make use of tools that are artefacts. What distinguishes 'technique' from non-technique is a certain degree of circuitousness in the achievement of any given objective. It is not so much that technique has to be learned, as that technique has to be ingenious. Techniques form a bridge, sometimes only a simple one, sometimes a very complicated one, between a set of 'given' elements (the body, some raw materials, some environmental features) and a goal-state which is to be realized making use of these givens. The given elements are rearranged in an intelligent way so that their causal properties are exploited to bring about a result which is improbable except in the light of this particular intervention. Technical means are roundabout means of securing some desired result. The degree of technicality is proportional to the number and complexity of the steps which link the initial givens to the final goal which is to be achieved. Tools, as extensions of the body which have to be prepared before they can be used, are an important category of elements which 'intervene' between a goal and its realization. But not less 'technical' are those bodily skills which have to be acquired before a tool can be used to good effect. Some tools, such as a baseball bat, are exceptionally rudimentary, but require a prolonged (i.e. circuitous) learning-process, in appropriate learning settings, before,they can be deployed to much purpose. Highly 'technical' processes combine many elements, artefacts, skills, rules of procedure, in an elaborate sequence of purposes or sub-goals, each of which must be attained in due order before the final result can be achieved. It is this elaborate structure of intervening steps, the steps which enable one to obtain result X, in order to obtain Y, in order to (finally) obtain Z, which constitute technology as a 'system'. The pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever, means, is the peculiar aptitude of the technological animal, Homo sapiens. But it is not at all true that this propensity is displayed exclusively, or even mainly, in the context of subsistence production, or that this aptitude is unconnected with the playful and imaginative side of human nature. Indeed, to state the problem in these terms is to see immediately that there can be no possible distinction, from the standpoint of 'degree of technicality', between the pursuit of material rewards through technical activity, and the equally 'technical' pursuit of a wide variety of other goals, which are not material but symbolic or expressive. From the palaeolithic period on, human technical ability has been devoted, not just to making 'tools' such as axes and harpoons, but equally to the making of flutes, beads, statues, and much else besides, for diversion, adornment, pleasure. These objects had, without any doubt, their place in a 'sequence of purposes' which went beyond the elementary delight they afforded their makers. A flute, no less than an axe, is a tool, an element in a technical sequence; but its purpose is to control and modify human psychological responses in social settings, rather than to dismember the bodies of animals. If a flute is properly to be seen as a tool, a psychological weapon, what is the technical system of which it forms a part? At this point I would like to offer a classificatory scheme of human technological capabilities in general, which can be seen as falling under three main headings. The first of these technical systems, which can be called the 'Technology of Production', comprises tech6 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 4, No 2, April 1988

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