ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the meaning of ‘technology’, as currently understood in the West, is firmly fixed within this polarity of society and nature. It is important to recognise from the outset, however, that terms such as society, nature and technology are far from mere labels, in themselves harbouring no moral, political or evaluative commitment. Hunters and gatherers have secured their place in Western thought as the bearers of a simple technology, as representatives of the original baseline from which a gradual process of complexification eventually culminated in the advanced technologies of the modern world. The chapter argues that the concept of technology is itself a product of a modern machine-theoretical cosmology. Both technique and technology must, of course, be distinguished from tools. It is commonplace in anthropology to draw an absolute distinction between the domains of technical and social phenomena.
