Class Outline

• Technology: possibility and determination?
• (Ethno-)Methodology for (de)constructing human production
• Human (dis-)abilities: expansions through tools and institutions
• Hoes, plows and familial strategies
• Irrigation: Power and social structure
• The power of the printed word
• Possibilities in print: Play and control
• Industrialization I: The imagination of the machines
• Industrialization II: The experience of machines
• Living with the bomb
• The body and the machine
• Further reading

Readings

• Wittfogel, Karl Oriental Despotism. Yale U. Press 1957 pp. 11-100

Discussion

While reading Wittfogel and thinking about 'technology, culture and education" - I remembered a poem I learned while in secondary school in Ireland called "Stony Grey Soil" by Patrick Kavanagh. I feel it's an artistic example touching on the themes of what we have been studying this week. I'm including a link to a very short bio on his life that makes understanding the poem and it's pertinence to the social effects of how society(ies) develop and effect people.

This is the bio link here: [1]

Stony Grey Soil

O Stony Grey Soil of Monaghan

The laugh from my love you thieved;

You took the gay child of my passion

And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood

And I believed that my stumble

Had the poise and stride of Apollo

And his voice my thick tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal!

O green-life conquering plough!

The mandril stained, your coulter blunted

In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills

A song of cowards' brood,

You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,

You fed me on swinish food

You flung a ditch on my vision

Of beauty, love and truth.

O stony grey soil of Monaghan

You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure

All the women that love young men.

O can I stilll stroke the monster's back

Or write with unpoisoned pen.

His name in these lonely verses

Or mention the dark fields where

The first gay flight of my lyric

Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco-

Wherever I turn I see

In the stony grey soil of Monaghan

Dead loves that were born for me.

--Marduignan 12:51, 11 June 2008 (EDT)

Class notes

Water

• where does water come from?
• Samuel Hayakawa, senator of California in the 1970s, had said that they had stole the Panama Canal "fair and square"; was an academic before he became a senator
• how would you go from flowing water to the faucet?
• infrastructure often gets built around other infrastructure (water, power, roads) - (that's how I do it in SimCity, but for aesthetic reasons - Aaron Hung 14:11, 11 June 2008 (EDT))

Wittfogel

• writes in a straight-forward manner; easy to follow
• considered a Marxist; fits with historical moment in anthropology when it went from cultural anthropology (talking about ideas that different cultures have) to focus on how people survive in societies
• worked with archaeological aspects of anthropology
• transformation in agriculture with irrigation systems, using domesticated plants such as wheat and corn, etc.
• Latour might be interested in looking at agricultural patterns to see what a society has to do to domesticate plants and animals
• connection between hydraulic societies and performing arts; leads to specialists in societies (OMG, this is sounding so much like the video game, Civilization - Aaron Hung 14:35, 11 June 2008 (EDT))
• creates differentiation in societies
• Marx usually interpreted in deterministic terms; Wittfogel suggests that, when X happens, other things become possible; less deterministic

Education

• people must have noticed things and educated one another to create technologies such as irrigation and domestication
• Monsanto trying to stop farmers from saving their seeds
• reminds me of the discussion about the suicide gene that companies like Monsanto have created - Aaron Hung 14:26, 11 June 2008 (EDT)
• complex societies will have specialists, their own domain of knowledge, education and transfer to future generations

Agriculture

• populations that shift from pre-agriculture to agriculture will lead to population increase
• societies cannot move back to pre-agriculture because of this increase
• more productive to build farms in flood valleys, but requires construction of structures that controls the floods
• with the exception of the Nile, most flood valleys are more unpredictable
• when there is a food surplus, you increase population; to increase production, there needs to be more differentiation in society
• as public works increase in scale, more people need to be paid and fed; requires taxation and a state organization
• food needs to be distributed to society
• how do you know who owns the surplus? requires need for record-keeping (literacy, mathematics, laws)

Ecosystem

• case study: rice growing terraces in Bali
• very hard to build and manage the terraces
• farmer at the bottom needs to make sure that the terraces above control the water
• rice needs to be flooded at certain times, not flooded at other times
• in Bali, you can get four crops of rice in a year
• water management needs to be staggered from terrace to terrace
• when Europeans arrived, they thought they could do it better; but after 50 years, they could not improve the system
• unclear who really knows how to manage the terraces; seems to be tied to temple system
• various terraces are owned by different people in different villages
• system controlled by religious rituals that are performed in different temples
• maintenance requires large network of people, each of whom will have to know a specific knowledge in order to have the whole system run properly

Defense

• as societies increase, tax collectors will need works of defense and communication (walls, infrastructure)
• aggressive neighbors will be tempted to invade the peripheral
• despotic states in Mesopotamia have collapsed when they are defeated by invaders
• interstate highways funded by Department of Defense to move troops
• height of bridges also had to allow for tanks to be transportable
• when political system collapses, the entire society will fall apart soon after
• governments might be willing to sacrifice small parts of society in order to improve the well-being of the overall system (eminent domain)

Distributed knowledge

• a sub-field of cognition that looks at how knowledge to manage a certain event is distributed among a group of people
• Hutchins work showed how it requires different people, each of whom is an expert in a specific field

Links

• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0262581469
• Rifkin, J. (2000). The age of access: The new culture of hypercapitalism, where all of life is a paid-for experience. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. ISBN 1585420824