19 Social Theory of Technology

Social Theory of TechnologyPottery is fully involved in the daily life of people, either individually or collectively, and is a key element in a wide range of activities.Thus, human communities create, use and discard material culture that is strongly related to the values, needs, norms and beliefs of the groups.Within each group, material culture can also inform about the specificity of each of the individuals that takes part in it.In this sense, objects and individuals depend on each other and can be only understood by considering both of them together.Archaeologically, these kinds of perspectives on material culture involves going beyond materiality itself and the explanatory models based on functionalism and ecology, as well as overcoming the economic viewpoints that dominate most interpretations of technology currently developed from ceramic archaeometry.As previously discussed, such approaches are usually focused more on the own view of the researcher than on the others', being characterised by having prejudices that are typical of western and contemporary societies.In these ethnocentric perspectives technology plays a key role and, consequently, is imposed on the cultural meanings of the past.In this way, western rationalist culture has traditionally rejected naturalism as a relevant cultural trait.The natural dimension of the objects is often considered taboo and materiality, as inanimate and unchanging, so that the objects we use in everyday life do not have any symbolic meaning worth studying.In western and modern societies there is a "technological somnambulism" (Winner, 2004) which promotes an explicit division between technology and people, while in pre-modern societies one is embedded in the other.In this way, in all societies -including modern and western culture -pottery must be considered semantically promiscuous (Barley 1994) and that it has meanings that go beyond the technical, economic and functional dimensions.However, in western and modern societies a viewpoint about materiality prevails in which culture acts passively as opposed to technology, which is essentially active and even deterministic (Dobres and Hoffman, 1994; Hodder, 1991; Jones, 2004; Prieto, 1999; West, 1992).These prejudices should be considered and put into question.As discussed above, ethnography and ethnoarchaeology can be used to approach the diversity and complexity of the significance and meanings of material culture.Thus, these disciplines evaluate the different possible interpretations regarding a particular material record while promoting a critical reflection of the "self" and overcoming biased viewpoints.As noted by several authors (Hodder, 1991; Lavan, 2007), technology cannot be understood only from modern and western concepts, since they arise from uni-linear evolutionary viewpoints in which technological progress is accumulative and based on processes of invention, maximum efficiency and functional and technical optimisation.In consequence, new theoretical perspectives which aim at facing more complex technological realities have been appearing for the last decades.Thus, while many researchers believe that the introduction of