Homo faber : technology and culture in India, China and the west 1500-1972

In this book, the author sets out to upset traditionally dominating Western understanding of two of the principal creations of man: technology and culture, through a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary critique of existing literary material in anthropology, political science, history, history of science and technology and other social sciences. Dr. Alvares demonstrates how existing frameworks for the study of technology and culture are inadequate for the development of man and society in different cultures, for they are too exclusively oriented to Western experience.

The Western paradigm of human and technological development is not merely ethnocentric, it is also anthropocentric. It is a view of technology and culture prepared from a configuration of experiences in England, then in Europe, at a particular stage in history. The author goes on to examine how this particular, parochial understanding came to be univer salized, how Western technology and culture came to be seen as the ideals of the culture in this epoch.

In fact, the ability to fabricate technology and invent the distinct symbols and meaning that constitute each culture is not a peculiar Western trait. Dr. Alvares gives various demonstrations of Chinese, Korean, Indian, African and Latin American technology to prove his point.

Dr. Alvares notes that the Southern Countries are getting more and more at one in repudiating the idea that the sole method of meeting the problems of their peoples is through the Western paradigm. It is possible to correlate historically, claims the author, the feelings of cultural inferiority experienced by the once colonized nations with a corresponding feeling of technical backwardness in the face of the technological power of the West. But it is also important to observe how the resistance to Western power through attempts at in dustrialization has been accompanied by corresponding attempts to revitalize national culture to meet contemporary situations. Scholars must now attempt in Southern nations new histories, sociologies, psychologies, and new categories for the perception of social reality.

The Chinese experience here is indicative. China has avoided the hold of the multinational corporations, just as it has preserved its hold on the means of production and the production of knowledge. The author is not suggesting that China provides a model for others to imitate. What China demonstrates is simply that the Western paradigm need not be the sole and ab solute paradigm it is made out to be. Other paradigms are also possible. And man in each society should discover his own.