The Power of the Machine Global Inequalities

Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machin

Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and professor of human ecology at the University of Lund, Sweden.

List of figures and maps

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction: The Machine As Emperor

1

(8)

Part 1 Technology and Unequal Exchange

Technology and Economics: The Interfusion of the Social and the Material

9

(14)

Cornucopia or Zero-Sum Game: The Epistemology of Sustainability

23

(12)

The Thermodynamics of Imperialism: Toward an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange

35

(14)

Ecosystems, World Systems, and Environmental Justice

49

(16)

Conceptualizing Accumulation from Spondylus Shells to Fossil Fuels

65

(24)

Use Value, Energy, and the Image of Unlimited Good

89

(22)

Language and the Material: Probing Our Categories

111

(20)

Symbolic Technologies: Machines and the Marxian Notion of Fetishism

131

(26)

Part 2 Money, Modernity, and Personhood

Money, Reflexivity, and the Semiotics of Modernity

157

(18)

Ecology As Semiotics: A Contextualist Manifesto

175

(16)

Exchange, Personhood, and Human Ecology

191

(20)

The Abstraction of Discourse and Identity: A Case Study

211

(26)

Afterword: Culture, Modernity, and Power-The Relevance of Anthropology

237

(8)

References

245

(16)

Index

261

(12)

About the Author

273

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The Power of the Machine Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials