This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficulties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constrained the Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from extending the concept of fetishism to the domain of technology. Both Marxian and mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. To transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour. However, Latour’s own neglect of technological systems as social strategies of exploitation reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities.
AdasM. (1989) Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2.
AdasM. (2006) Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
3.
Apter, E. and Pietz, W. (eds) (1993) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
4.
BatesonG. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Frogmore: Paladin.
5.
BaudrillardJ. (1972) Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe. Paris: Gallimard.
6.
BaudrillardJ. (1975) The Mirror of Production. St Louis: Telos.
7.
BentonT. (1989) Marxism and natural limits: An ecological critique and reconstruction. New Left Review178: 51–86.
8.
Binfield, K. (ed.) (2004) Writings of the Luddites. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
9.
Bird-DavidN. (1999) “Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology40(1): S67–S91.
10.
BlautJ.M. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: The Guilford Press.
11.
BlautJ.M. (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: The Guilford Press.
12.
Bloch, M. (1989) ‘The symbolism of money in Imerina’. In: Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (eds). Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 165–190.
13.
BloorD. (1999) Anti-Latour. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science30(1): 81–112.
14.
DescolaP. (1994) In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15.
EllenR.F. (1988) Fetishism. Man (N.S.)23: 213–235.
16.
FabianJ. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
17.
FoxN. (2002) Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives. Washington: Island Press.
18.
FrankA.G. (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
19.
FriedelR. (2007) A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20.
FriedmanJ. (1974) The place of fetishism and the problem of materialist interpretations. Critique of Anthropology1: 26–62.
21.
Georgescu-RoegenN. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
22.
GodelierM. (1986) The Mental and the Material. New York: Verso.
23.
GraeberD. (2001) Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our own Dreams. Houndmills: Palgrave.
24.
GraeberD. (2007) Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland: AK Press.
25.
GraeberD. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House.
26.
GrundmannR. (1991) The ecological challenge to Marxism. New Left Review187: 103–120.
27.
GudemanS. (1986) Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
28.
HarrisJ. (2005) The ordering of things: Organization in Bruno Latour. Sociological Review53: 163–177.
29.
HeadrickD.R. (2010) Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
30.
HornborgA. (1992) Machine fetishism, value, and the image of unlimited good: Towards a thermodynamics of imperialism. Man (n.s.)27: 1–18.
31.
HornborgA. (1999) Money and the semiotics of ecosystem dissolution. Journal of Material Culture4(2): 143–162.
32.
Hornborg, A. (2000) ‘Accumulation based on symbolic versus intrinsic “productivity”: Conceptualizing unequal exchange from Spondylus shells to fossil fuels’. In: Denemark, R., Friedman, J. and Modelski, G. (eds). World System History: The Science of Long-term Change. London: Routledge, 235–252.
33.
HornborgA. (2001a) The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment. Lanham: AltaMira Press.
34.
HornborgA. (2001b) Symbolic technologies: Machines and the Marxian notion of fetishism. Anthropological Theory1(4): 473–496.
35.
HornborgA. (2006a) Footprints in the cotton fields: The industrial revolution as time-space appropriation and environmental load displacement. Ecological Economics59(1): 74–81.
36.
HornborgA. (2006b) Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world. Ethnos1: 21–32.
37.
HornborgA. (2009) Zero-sum world: Challenges in conceptualizing environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system. International Journal of Comparative Sociology50(3–4): 237–62.
38.
HornborgA. (2011) Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-sum World. London: Routledge.
39.
IngoldT. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
40.
JonesS.E. (2006) Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism. London: Routledge.
41.
KearneyM. (1984) World View. Novato: Chandler and Sharp.
42.
LatourB. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
43.
LatourB. (1996) Aramis or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
44.
LatourB. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
45.
LatourB. (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press.
46.
MarcusG.E.FischerM.M.J. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
47.
MarsdenB.SmithC. (2005) Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-century Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave.
48.
MarxK. (1867) CapitalVol. 1, London: Penguin.
49.
MaussM. (1990 [1925]) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.
50.
MillerD. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
51.
Miller, D. (ed.) (2005) Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press.
52.
MitchellW.J.T. (2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
53.
Murra, JV. (1975) ‘El tráfico de mullu en la costa del Pacífico’. In: Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 255–267.
54.
PfaffenbergerB. (1992) Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology21(1): 491–516.
55.
Pietz, W. (1985–88) The problem of the fetish, I–III. Res 9: 5–17, 13: 23–45, 16: 105–23.
56.
Pietz, W. (1993) ‘Fetishism and materialism: The limits of theory in Marx’. In: Apter, E. and Pietz, W. (eds). Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 119–151.
57.
Pietz, W. (1998) ‘Afterword: How to grow oranges in Norway’. In: Spyer, P. (ed.) Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London: Routledge, 245–251.
58.
PomeranzK. (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
59.
Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, M. (1977) ‘Coastal fishermen, merchants, and artisans in Pre-Hispanic Peru’. In: Benson, E. (ed.) The Sea in the Pre-Columbian World. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 167–188.
60.
SahlinsM.D. (1976) Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
61.
SaleK. (1995) Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. New York: Perseus.
62.
SalomonF. (1986) Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63.
Shimada, I. (1987) ‘Horizontal and vertical dimensions of prehistoric states in north Peru’. In: Haas, J., Pozorski, S. and Pozorski, T. (eds). The Origins and Development of the Andean State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 130–144.
64.
Spyer, P. (ed.) (1998) Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London: Routledge.
65.
TaussigM.T. (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
66.
Uexküll, J. von (1982 [1940]) ‘The theory of meaning’, Semiotica 42: 25–82.
67.
WinnerL. (1993) Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology. Science as Culture16: 427–452.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
