EIGHT THEMES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY

Author(s): Tim Ingold

Source: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology , March 1997, Vol.
41, No. 1, Technology as Skilled Practice (March 1997), pp. 106-138
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23171736

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Introduction, Technology and Skilled Practice, On the Separation of
Society and Nature, The Evolution of Technology and its History,
Measuring Technological Complexity, and The Origins of 'Technology.'

SOCIAL ANALYSIS
No. 41(1) March 1997

EIGHT THEMES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY

Tim Ingold

Introduction: Technology and Society

For some years I have been developing an interest in various aspects of the
anthropology of technology. My thinking has converged on this area from a number
of different directions: from questions about how the capacities of human beings are
to be distinguished from those of non-human animals, from issues of human
evolution (especially the evolution of language), from the comparative anthropology
of hunting and pastoral societies, from concerns with the conditions of historical
stability and change, and from critical reflection upon the way in which our
deliberations on all these matters have been structured by the concepts and categories
of Western modernity. My purpose in this article is to retrace sane of the threads of
inquiry I have been pursuing, and to highlight the more intriguing questions that have
arisen along the way. I am still far from being in a position to weave these threads
into a coherent synthesis, but I shall do what I can do draw out the connections
between them.
First, however, I should say a word about why, up to now, anthropology has
contributed relatively little in this field. I think it is true to say that the study of
technology is one of the most undeveloped aspects of the discipline (a view shared,
inter alia, by Lemmonier 1986, Pfaffenberger 1988, 1992, Homborg 1992). I believe
the reason for this lies in the division, conventionally institutionalised in the Western
world, between the domains of technology and society. I do not mean that we
perceive these domains to be unrelated, oily that they are regarded as exterior to one
another. In fact, the history of anthropology reveals two distinct ways of under
standing the relationship between technology and society, namely technological
determinism and technological possibilism. The former holds that the essential insti
tutional forms of society are dictated by the requirements of operating a technological
system of some given degree of complexity, and therefore that social change is driven
by — and depends upon — technological change. The latter, technological possib
ilism, holds that technology exerts no influence on the form of society beyond setting
outer limits on the scope of human action. Within those limits, society and culture
are said to follow their own historical course, irrespective of the nature or complexity
of the technological system.
For the best part of a century, this divergence of approach has been apparent in
arguments between cultural evolutionists and cultural relativists. Evolutionists argued
that technology has an inherent tendency to develop from the simple to the complex
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— from axes and digging sticks to motor-cars and computers — and that as it does
so, the associated forms of social organisation and culture likewise undergo
complexification, driven by the underlying technological requirements (a classic
statement is White 1959:18-28; see also Harris 1968:232). Relativists denied any co
rrelation between the complexity of technology and the complexity of society. We in
the West have an extremely complex industrial or even post-industrial technology,
but a kinship system of unusual simplicity, Australian Aborigines are reputed to have
one of the simplest technologies in the world, but a kinship system of such
complexity as to tap the limits of human ingenuity. As Franz Boas wrote long ago,
'we have simple industries and complex organization', as well as 'diverse industries
and simple organization' (1940: 266-67).
Two views that are diametrically opposed often turn out to be so because they are
based on common premises, and this is certainly the case with the opposition
between evolutionism and relativism that I have outlined here. There are two assum
ptions shared by both sides to which I want to draw attention. The first is that
regardless of whether technology is prescriptive or permissive with regard to society,
it nevertheless consists in an objective system of relations which lies outside the
realm of the social. The second is that technology can be scaled in terms of degrees
of complexity. No one, in shot, seems to doubt that there exists a sphere of
capability in every human population that can be denoted by the concept of
technology, that this sphere is quite separate from the sphere of social relations and
cultural ideas, and that in so-called primitive societies it is characterized by its
relative simplicity.
Having thus placed technology outside of society and culture, the way was open
for anthropologists to ignore it. It was just one of those things, like climate or eco
logy, that may or may not be a determining factor, but whose study you can safely
leave to others — climate to the climatologists, ecology to the ecologists. The study
of technological processes was not seen as an integral part of the study of social
relations, or the study of those systems of meaning that go by the name of culture, and
indeed anthropology lacked any framework of concepts or of theoretical ideas in
which to handle such processes. The result is that insofar as technology appears in
anthropological accounts at all, it generally does so in the form of lists or inventories,
catalogues of tools and techniques which — however valuable in themselves as
documentary records — bear a purely descriptive purpose.
Now it is precisely the notion that society and technology are external to one
another that I wish to challenge. In my view, far from being a timeless datum of the
human condition, this externality is a product of history, and a relatively recent one at
that. It has emerged in the West, in the last few centuries, hand in hand with what
could be called a 'machine-theoretical' cosmology. We cannot, I think, retroject into
history the modern separation of society and technology, or extend it indifferently to
humanity at large, without seriously distorting our understanding. My thesis, in a
nutshell, is that in the societies we study — perhaps even including our own —
technical relations are embedded in social relations, and can oily be understood
within this relational matrix, as one aspect of human sociality. Two further claims
follow: first, that what is usually represented as a process of complexification, a
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development of technology from the simple to the complex, would be better seen as a
process of extemalization or of disembedding — that is, a progressive cutting out of
technical from social relations. Secondly, the modem concept of technology, set up
as it is in opposition to society, is a product of this historical process. If that is so, we
cannot expect to find a separate sphere corresponding to 'technology' wherever we
choose to look. It may be, indeed, that as an ideological construct, 'technology' has
no counterpart at all in the real world of human relations and processes.
I should perhaps add that the critical strategy I am adopting is a well-tried one in
anthropology. Substitute the term 'economy' for 'technology', and everything I have
said would be well in tune with most recent thinking in economic anthropology. Over
the last two or three decades, anthropologists have been at pains to show how 'econ
omy' and 'society' became institutionally separated in the history of Western capit
alism, how the category of the economic is itself a product of this history, how in pre
capitalist societies economic relations are embedded in social relations, and how —
with the development of market-oriented capitalism — economic life was
progressively disembedded from social life (Polanyi 1957, Sahlins 1969, Godelier
1972: 92-103, Dumont 1986: 104-12). All that I am doing is to extend the same kind
of argument to the concept of technology, which up to now has escaped the critical
attention that has been devoted to the concept of economy. I believe this critical work
is an essential first step in building a coherent and theoretically informed
anthropology of technology, one that takes us beyond the mere cataloguing of tools
and techniques from cultures around the world.
So much for my general approach. In what follows I shall review, more spec
ifically, eight different themes in which anthropology can contribute to the un
derstanding of technology, and chart the development of my own interests in each of
them. The first theme concerns the continuities and contrasts between the tool-using
and tool-making practices erf human beings and other animals, in particular our
closest primate relatives. The second concerns the nature and development of skills,
by which I mean embodied capacities of action and perception that people leam in the
course of handling everyday practical tasks throughout their lives. The third theme
has to do with the relation between technology and language, and the possibility that
both may call upon the same evolved mechanisms of cognition. Considering that
both language and technology emerged in tandem as apparently species-specific
capabilities in the course of human evolution, the fourth theme raises the issue of
whether society and nature can be demarcated as distinct domains of adaptation. The
fifth theme concerns the dynamics of technical change, with regard to the possible
analogies between natural and artificial selection. The sixth takes up the thorny
question of how, if at all, we can distinguish between the history of technology and its
evolution. The seventh addresses the nature of technological complexity, and the diff
iculties surrounding its estimation. Finally, I consider the historical origins of the
concept of technology in Western thought, how this concept is linked to the rise of the
machine and of a machine-theoretical cosmology, and how it has, in turn, rebounded
cm the modern concepts of humanity and the human condition. Obviously, these are
all major issues, and the most I can do is to sketch, in a rough and ready way, some
of the main problems involved.
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The Technical Practices of Humans and Non-Human Animals

Our first question, then, is: do non-human animals have technology, or is this a
specifically human capacity? Classically, the question has been posed as one about
the use and manufacture of tods. Do animals use tools? Do they make tools? Do
they use tods to make tools? And so on. Ever since Benjamin Franklin, in 1778, pro
nounced man as the 'tool-making animal', the issue of tool construction has been
central to debates about the supposed uniqueness of humankind. These debates have
continued unabated to the present day: biologists who study the behaviour of non
human animals are fond of presenting us with apparently irrefutable evidence of the
manufacture and use of tods by a great variety of creatures, whereas anthropologists
— more committed to the premise of absolute human uniqueness — are inclined to
discover reasons why such evidence can be discounted (on the one side, see reviews
in van Lawick-Goodall 1970, Beck 1980 and McGrew 1989; on the other see, for
example, White 1942, Hallowell 1956, Holloway 1969, Gruber 1969). The argu
ments tend to be circular: the manufacture of tools by non-human animals does not
count as making, therefore all tod-making is human. The debate is interminable,
precisely because there is no agreement on the basic concepts: what does it mean, to
'make' or to 'use'? And what is a tool anyway?
My first attempt to deal with these issues (Ingold 1986a: 40-78) hinged on the
distinction between construction and design. Non-human animals construct all kinds
of objects, many of which could reasonably be regarded as tools. Whether or not you
regard such things as spiders' webs or birds' nests as tools is largely a matter of
definitional predilection, but in any case these are constructed objects that are used by
animals in pursuit of their normal activities of subsistence and survival. But can we
say that the spider's web is spider-made in the same sense that the fisherman's net is
man-made? The intuitive response is negative. For the spider, as Marx famously
noted (1930: 169-70), did not first design its web before executing it in the material.
Rather, the design of the web, as indeed the design of the spider itself, is a product of
evolution under natural selection, and the whole point about natural selection is that it
purports to account for the existence of design in the organic world in the absence of a
design agent. The web, in short, is the product of behaviour that is genetically
programmed and that is carried out, to all intents and purposes, without any
conscious direction orintentionality (Ingold 1986b: 345-55; 1988a: 90).
The fishing net, by contrast, is an object that embodies a design that has been
authored by a self-conscious design agent. And so if we say that the fisherman made
the net whereas the spider did not make the web, the definitive criterion of making
must lie not in the constructed nature of the product but in this element of intentional
design. I would like to draw out two implications of this distinction between con
struction and design. The first is that if we are looking for instances, in the animal
kingdom, of capacities that might have been precursors for human tool-making
abilities, we would perhaps be mistaken to concentrate on the construction of
detached or detachable objects. The first designs may have been realized in planned
configurations of limbs or other body parts, as for example in gestural signalling —
which is common in the great apes. Such configurations cannot of course endure
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since body parts have to be used for other things. But it is a fairly small step from
planned gestures to the inscription of design, through such gestures, onto an external
raw material, to produce an object — an artefact — that endures long after the action
that gave rise to it (Reynolds 1981: Ch.4).
The second implication of the distinction between construction and design is that
what I call the intentional co-option of objects is closer to fully-fledged tool-making
than the unintentional construction of objects. What I mean by co-option is the selec
tion of an object in the environment which is most appropriate for the task at hand,
without actually modifying it. For example, if I want to tighten a screw and I don't
have a screw-driver, I search through the objects in my immediate environment and
select the one — perhaps a knife, or a coin — that happens to be best suited for the
purpose. In fact this is something we are doing all the time and, as I shall show later,
I believe it plays a crucial role in technical change.
My general conclusion, back in 1986, was that the planned configuration of body
parts and the intentional co-option of detached environmental objects, neither of
which would conventionally be classed as 'making' at all, are much closer to what
we mean by tool-making when talking about humans, than are instances of non
intentional constructive behaviour in the animal kingdom, which tend to be cited as
evidence that tool-making is not unique to humans. This conclusion does not, of
course, rule out the possibility that non-human animals — and notably the great apes
— may make tools in the sense of executing self-consciously authored designs.
Whether or not they do becomes an empirical question that we have to investigate.
But the mere observation of constructive behaviour does not in itself suffice to enable
us to give an affirmative answer.
A decade later, I have serious doubts about some aspects of this argument. These
doubts have not arisen from the increasing evidence for complex tool behaviour
among chimpanzees that has come from the ever more detailed and sophisticated
studies of free-ranging chimpanzee populations (e.g., Sugiyama and Koman 1979,
Nishida and Hiraiwa 1982, Boesch and Boesch 1990, McGrew 1992). I do not really
mind if chimpanzees are placed on the side of humans as against other primates with
regard to their tool-making capacities. The problem lies not in where we draw the
boundary but in what we mean by it in the first place. It is, in other words, an epis
temological problem, and it concerns the Cartesian presuppositions that are inherent
in our conventional notions of what it is to make something, of what is an artefact.
The suggestion that in tool-making, the body is set to work to execute a design
fashioned by the mind through a process of intellection, that the action follows
mechanically from the thought, of course follows the classic Cartesian model. I am
now convinced that what we should really be concerned with is understanding the
nature of skill.

Technology and Skilled Practice

I would like to draw attention to three points which I believe are crucial to a proper
appreciation of technical skills. First, skills are not, as Mauss classically argued

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(1979 [1934]: 104), techniques of the individual body considered, objectively and in
isolation, as the primary instrument of cultural reason. They are rather properties of
the whole system of relations constituted by the presence of the agent (whether
human or nan-human) in a richly structured environment. Thus the study of skill
demands an ecological approach, which situates the practitioner, right from the start,
in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her
surroundings. Secondly, skilled practice is not just the mechanical application of
external force but involves qualities of care, judgement and dexterity (see Pye 1968:
22). This implies that whatever the practitioner does to things is grounded in an
attenttive, perceptual involvement with them, or in other words, that he watches and
feels as he works. It is precisely because the practitioner's engagement with the
material is an attentive engagement that skilled activity carries its own intrinsic
intentionality, quite apart from any designs or plans that it may be supposed to
implement (Ingold 1993a: 461).
Thirdly, skills are refractory to codification in the programmatic form of rules and
representations (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1987). Thus it is not through the transmission
of any such programmes that skills are learned, but rather through a mixture of
improvisation and imitation in the settings of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991: 94-8).
This is no simple matter. It would be as wrong to attribute improvisation to chance
mutations in behavioural programmes as it would be to think of imitation as their
automatic transcription from one head to another. Rather, innovation and impro
visation are two sides of a learning process that could best be described as one of
guided rediscovery. This process involves a purposeful alignment of the novice's
attention to the movements of others, and a harmonisauon of that attention with the
novice's own movements so as to achieve the kind of rhythmic adjustment or
resonance that is the hallmark of fluent performance (for an example, see Gatewood
1985). And in this process, what each generation contributes to the next is not a
corpus of representations, or information in the strict sense, but the specific contexts
of development in which novices, through practice and training, can acquire and fine
tune their own capacities erf action and perception. This is what Gibson (1979: 254)
calls an 'education of attention'.
Now let me return to my earlier example of the fisherman and the net. I suggest
ed that the fisherman's weaving of his net counts as an instance of making, whereas
the spider's spinning of its web does not, because the fisherman begins with a design,
in his mind, of the artefact that he sets out to create. It is in the authorship of design,
I argued, not in the constructional behaviour that follows from it, that the essence of
'making' resides. To this it could be readily objected that the fisherman may be no
more the author of this design than is the spider the designer of its web: rather the
design could be part of a long-lasting cultural tradition for which no specific authors
could possibly be identified, and that has perhaps arisen through a process of blind
variation and selective retention strictly analogous to natural selection, but operating
in the realm of ideas rather than on the materials of heredity (Durham 1991: 9).
This objection, however, misses the point, which is that the form of the net, as a
physical object, does not issue from a representation of any kind, whether self

Ill

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consciously authored or unselfconsciously acquired (Alexander 1964: 36). It is often
assumed, I think fallaciously, that to ask about the form of things is, in itself, to pose
a question about design, as though the latter contained a complete specification that
has only to be 'written out* in the material. Thus it is supposed not only that behind
every form there must be a design or plan, but also that the plan contains all one
needs to know to explain the form (Turnbull 1993: 319-20). This assumption is
shared even by those who appeal to natural selection, or its cultural analogue, to
account for design in the absence of a designer. Just as the architecture of the org
anism is supposed to be in place, in the virtual form of the genotype, in advance of its
ontogenetic development, so likewise the works of the human architect are said to be
virtually complete, even before anything has been constructed. Construction, then,
amounts to nothing more than the mechanical transcription of prefigured design.
This is not, however, how nets get made. I do not deny that the fisherman begins
work with a pretty clear idea of what a well-woven net should look like. He has his
standards. But watching the fisherman at work, whether weaving new nets or mend
ing old ones, it is clear that the form emerges not from these standards but from a
complex pattern of skilled movement. As Boas noted long ago, in his classic work on
Primitive Art, it is the rhythmic repetition of movement that gives rise to the
regularity of form (Boas 1955 [1927]: 40). More generally, the forms of artefacts are
not inscribed by the rational intellect upon the concrete surface of nature, but are
rather generated in the course of the gradual unfolding of that field of forces and
relations set up through the active and sensuous engagement of the practitioner and
the material with which he or she works. To understand skilled practice, as Rubin
(1988: 375) has succinctly put it, we need to think of making in terms not of the
simple, mechanical execution of complex structures, but of the form-generating
potentials of complex processes.
A group of us in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester have recently been experimenting with different ways of making knots.
One of our experiments was to try making a completely unfamiliar and rather
complicated knot, guided oily by a manual which provided detailed verbal
instructions and step by step diagrams. It turned out to be an immensely difficult and
frustrating task. The problem we all experienced lay in converting each instruction,
whether verbal or graphic, into actual bodily movement. For while the instruction
was supposed to tell you how to move, (me could only make sense of it once the
movement had been completed. We seemed, almost literally, to be caught in a
double bind, from which the only escape was patient trial and error. Of course we
had resort to the instructions, but far from directing our movements, what they
provided was a set of landmarks along the way, a means of checking that we were
still ai track. If we were not — if the tangle of string in front of us did not match the
corresponding graph (and that, in itself, was not easy to discern) — there was no
alternative but to unravel the whole thing and start again!
Our experiments proved, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the practices of
knotting — which are, after all, among the most common and widely distributed in
human societies — cannot be understood as the output of any kind of programme.

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They cannot, then, be learned by taking any such programme 'on board', as part of an
acquired tradition, as if all you needed to know to make knots could be handed down
as a package of rules and representations, independently of their practical application.
In our experiments, despite having a manual to consult, we had to develop the
necessary know-how from scratch. Generally speaking, of course, this is not a
problem that novices face in real life. They are shown what to do by more exper
ienced hands, and this was undoubtedly how our fisherman learned to weave his nets.
As with any skill, the fisherman's craft was mastered through guided rediscovery.
But in seeking to copy the work of the tutor, the novice is guided by the latter's
movements, not by formal instructions that have somehow been already copied into
his head. As Merleau-Ponty put it: 'we do not at first imitate others but rather the
actions of others, and ... .find others at the point of origin of these actions'(1964: 117).
What are we to make, then, of the weaverbird, which carries out the most intricate
knotting and looping with its beak in the construction of its nest (see Figure 1)? "The
bird", according to von Frisch, "works more or less like a basket weaver, and partly
even like a weaver with a loom" (1975: 209). So wherein lies the difference? The
conventional answer is to claim that the human basketmaker follows the dictates of
an acquired cultural tradition, while the bird works to a template that is genetically
transmitted and thus innate. But if, as our experiments suggested, there can be no
programme for such tasks as knotting, looping and weaving that is not immanent in
the activity itself, then it makes no more sense to interpret the weaverbird's behaviour
as the output of a genetic programme than it does to interpret the fisherman's or
basketmaker's as the output of a cultural one. It would seem that in both cases we
are dealing with a skill that is neither innate nor acquired, but developmentally
incorporated into the modus operandi of the body — whether avian or human —
through practice and experience in an environment. There seems, then, to be no
clearcut distinction, after all, between the skilled making of the animal and that of the
human.
Perhaps this conclusion could shed some light on one of the greatest enigmas of
prehistory, the celebrated Acheulean 'hand-axe'. This is a flaked stone implement of
pointed oval form, with two convex faces meeting at a sharp edge all round. No-one
knows what these implements were used for, except that they certainly could not have
been used as hand-held axes since they would have chopped the very hands that held
them (Calvin 1993: 243)! The enigma lies in their spatial and temporal distribution,
over the three continents of Africa, Asia and Europe in sites spanning a period of ova
one million years. Prehistorians have been tempted to view them as cultural artefacts
cut to a traditional design (Holloway 1969), yet the tradition — if such it was —
would have been of a stability and resilience without parallel in the ethnographic
record. The alternative, that our ancestors of around one million years ago were
genetically programmed to make hand-axes, sounds even more implausible. What we
do know, as a result of attempts by prehistorians (e.g. Pelegrin 1993) to replicate
these objects in stone, is that it requires an immense amount of practice and skill to
make one. Viewed as products of skilled craftsmanship, they have their parallels in
the works of both non-human animals and contemporary humans. And it is not so

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Figure 1: Examples of the knots and loops of the weaverbird.
[From von Frisch 1975: 209]

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much their spatiotemporal constancy that has to be explained as the extraordinary
diversification of subsequent human productions, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the
present day. Not without reason, many scholars have looked to the emergence of lan
guage as a possible explanation.

The Relations between Technology and Language

There has been a great deal of discussion, in recent years, about the possibility of a
link, in human evolution, between technology and language, especially since
theorising about the origins of language — a subject once banished from serious
scientific inquiry on account of its inherently speculative nature — has once more
become respectable (see Kendon 1991 for a review). There is an additional reason
why we should be particularly concerned to discover possible connections between
linguistic capacities and technical capacities, which is that if such connections can be
demonstrated, then we might be able to use the evidence of tools, some of which
(unlike words) do preserve in the archaeological record, to make inferences about the
linguistic capacities of their makers. In other words, we would be able to provide our
speculations about the origins of language with a solid empirical foundation of a kind
that, up to now, they have conspicuously lacked.
The literature on the possible evolutionary connections between language and
technology is too vast for me to summarize in the space available, so I shall
concentrate on just two ways of formulating the link, which are most pertinent to my
other themes (see Ingold 1994 for more extensive discussion). The first is to suggest
that both language and technology rest on a single, more fundamental cognitive
substrate. The second lies in the hypothesis that both language and technology might
have evolved together under the same pressures of natural selection. This latter
hypothesis turns on a broader issue of whether it is possible, in principle, to
distinguish between social and technical domains of adaptation. I shall defer consid
eration of this issue to the next section, and confine my discussion here to the former
suggestion. Do the cognitive mechanisms that underly the capacity to speak also
provide the basis for performance in the sphere of technical operations?
It has been argued that language and technology share similar design features,
and that both have a similar generative grammar or syntactical organization (e.g.,
Holloway 1969, Lieberman 1975: 165-70, Montagu 1976, Kitahara-Frisch 1978).
Further evidence for this link comes from studies in neurophysiology which have
shown that the neural mechanisms involved both in the production of speech and in
skilled manual operations are located in the same, dominant hemisphere of the brain,
suggesting a connection between speech and preferential handedness. Moreover,
damage to the brain which affects patients' ability to produce coherent speech also
seems to impair their ability to carry out patterned sequences of action. They can
produce and understand each word on its own but cannot put than together into a
sentence; likewise they can carry out each component act on its own, but cannot put
them together into a complete technical performance {Jradshaw and Nettleton 1982).

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 Against this, it has been claimed that technical performances are not syntactically
organized like the sentences of spoken language. Rather, such performances are
learned as 'strings of beads', in which one thing simply follows another. Whereas
syntax enables the speaker to generate an infinite variety of novel sentences which are
nevertheless comprehensible to a listener who has never heard them before, technical
performances — by and large — entail the routine replication of established
sequences (Wynn 1992).
I believe that beneath this argument about whether or not there is a 'syntax of
technology', a much more fundamental issue is at stake. It concerns whether we are
to think of technical processes basically as exercises in puzzle-solving, or whether we
should think of them as forms of skilled practice. This is an issue that I have already
touched upon, in criticizing my own initial attempts to think of tod-making in terms
of a dichotomy between design and execution. In the puzzle-solving scenario, every
thing depends on working out a novel plan of action for achieving a goal, one that in
volves the use of a detached object. Once the plan is worked out, implementation is
mechanically straightforward. For example, Elizabetta Visalberghi of the Institute of
Comparative Psychology in Rome has done some fascinating experiments with
capuchin monkeys, in which she sets them the task of extracting a nut from inside a
long perspex tube, and provides them with a variety of sticks of different length and
thickness. By using a stick which is long enough and thin enough, or by using one
stick to push another, it is possible to retrieve the nut. Sane monkeys can do it,
others cannot (Visalberghi 1992). But my point is that the operation itself involves
virtually no skill at all — no more, we could say, than the skill required to move a
chess piece accurately from one square to another across the board.
But now let me suggest another example. In my own anthropological fieldwork
among reindeer herdsmen in Finland I had to learn to throw a lasso (Ingold 1993c). It
requires much practice and immense skill to throw the lasso, amidst a swirling mass
of animals in the roundup enclosure, at just the right moment and in just the right
way to catch the animal you want. It is still something that I cannot do very well. But
here the problem is, as it were, already solved. You know what you have to do to
catch the animal. But as we say, 'it is easier said than done'. We presently under
stand very little about how it is possible for humans to perform such tasks as throw
lassos. And we are not going to understand this any better, so long as we think of the
emergence of tool behaviour as a problem in the evolution of intelligence, or of spec
ifically cognitive abilities.
Now the very same division that appears in approaches to technical processes,
between the stress 011 cognitive puzzle-solving and the stress on skilled practice or
artistry, also exists in approaches to language and speech. The dominant approach in
linguistics has been a Cartesian one, represented above all in the work of Chomsky,
according to which language is basically identified with syntactic and semantic
structure, and speech as mere execution (Chomsky 1968). Naturally this approach
resonates with that taken by cognitive psychologists who tend to reduce all technical
actions to the behavioural execution of a syntactically organized design. But that is
not the only possible approach to language. For one can also see language as a form
of skilled practice, as verbal artistry, which grades imperceptibly into song, dance,
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and thence into other forms of artistry which might even involve tools. I think of an
African woman pounding millet with a mortar and pestle in a constant, rhythmic,
dancelike movement, and singing as she does so — that, for me, is the archetypal
situation of human tool-use, not the problem-solving scenarios beloved of cognitive
psychologists. Indeed the whole debate over human tool use and its evolution might
have taken a quite different path, had we taken the musical instrument rather than the
mechanical gadget as our paradigmatic instance of the tool.

On the Separation of Society and Nature

Let me return from that rather long detour to the second of the ways in which the link
has been formulated between language and technology. This is that both have
evolved under the same pressures of natural selection, namely in the context of
extractive foraging activities including the hunting of relatively large, mobile animals
and the gathering of relatively inaccessible plant food. In such a subsistence regime
there are obvious advantages in being able to communicate information about animal
or plant resources of strategic value in the conduct of co-operative foraging. People
can tell each other where to go, where the resources are, they can co-ordinate their
activities in hunting, and so on (Lancaster 1968, Parker and Gibson 1979).
There is, however, a counter-argument, originally put forward in a highly
influential article by Nicholas Humphrey (1976), to the effect that the primary context
for the evolution of language and intelligence lay not in individuals' exploitation of
the natural environment but in their manipulation of one another in the social group
to meet the demands of an ever-shifting configuration of relations with conspecifics.
By contrast, it is claimed, the technical problems that confronted our evolutionary
ancestors were not difficult to solve, and did not impose any great demands on their
intelligence.
I believe this argument is flawed, not only by its assumption, which is widely
shared by psychologists and animal behaviourists working in this field, that human
linguistic and technical capabilities are to be explained in terms of the evolution of
something called 'intelligence', but also by its rigid separation of the domains of
society and nature, inhabited respectively by other human beings and by non-human
components erf the environment. Acts directed towards other humans are accordingly
conceived as social, acts directed towards non-humans are conceived as technical —
that is, as interventions in nature rather than interactions in society. Paradoxically, in
speaking of the management of social interaction, Humphrey uses a dominant
metaphor — that of 'manipulation' — which is actually drawn from the domain of
technical operations. The force of the metaphor is to import into the social domain
the kind of antagonism that is presumed to exist in people's relations with non
human beings.
Yet the relegation of these latter beings to a domain of nature separate from that
of human society, and the assumption that human dealings with them are
fundamentally exploitative, reveal a kind of transactional failure in relations with the
environment that is symptomatic of the modern condition of alienation. For many

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non-Western people, and indeed for many people in nominally 'Western' societies,
relations with human persons do not differ fundamentally from relations with other,
non-human agencies and entities in the environment, and both are marked by the
same quality — of mutualism and trust rather than domination and exploitation. In
this context, the idea erf manipulation carries a quite different connotation, that of
achieving a result not by force or chicanery, but through the kind of give and take that
is characteristic of the skilled craftsperson's engagement with his or her material.
Imagine a continuum, on which are arrayed the knapper's relation with flint, the
potter's with clay, the basketmaker's with willow, the gatherer's with forest fruits,
the hunter's with animal prey, the herdsman's with cattle, the master's with his slave
and the mother's with her child. Each of these relations will be qualitatively
different, and will call for distinctive sensibilities. However there is no absolute
Rubicon, as we move from a person's relationships with other humans, animals,
plants and inanimate objects, beyond which we can say, without doubt, that we are
no longer dealing with a relationship between persons in society, but with one
between a person and a thing in nature. In practice, the continuum has been cut (if at
all) in manifold ways by different peoples, and at different times in history. Ojibwa
hunters, according to Hallowell (1960), relate to the animals they hunt as 'other than
human' persons, for the human is just one of the many possible outward forms that
persons can take. The classical Roman author Varro drew only the finest line be
tween human slaves and domestic animals, classified respectively as instruments of a
vocal and semi-vocal kind (Tapper 1988: 59, fii.3). Karl Marx, for his part, placed
domestic animals on a par with simple tools of stone, bone and wood, quite separate
from slaves conceived as 'beings with will' (1964: 102,cf. Marx 1930: 171-2).
Now, according to Humphrey, when people apply an intelligence, fashioned by
natural selection for dealing with social partners, to other kinds of entities in the
environment, they are bound to make mistakes. Such applications, he believes, ex
emplify the "fallacious reasoning", commonly branded as magic, in which "primitive
and not so primitive peoples" are said to indulge. Their mistake, Humphrey tells us,
is to suppose that you can transact with non-human entities just as you can with
human partners. In this, you are bound to be disappointed, since "nature will not
transact with men, she goes her own way regardless" (Humphrey 1976: 313). But it
is surely Humphrey's reasoning, not that of the primitive, that is fallacious. Few it
assumes, from the start, a separation between nature and humanity which is in reality
the consequence of transactional failure, not its cause (Ingold 1993b: 443).

The Dynamics of Technical Change

There is a wonderful footnote in Marx's Capital that sets a whole agenda for
research. It runs as follows:
Darwin has aroused our interest in the history of natural technology, that
is to say in the origin of the organs of plants and animals as productive
instruments utilised for the life purposes of these creatures. Does not the
history of the origin of the productive organs of men in society, the organs

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 which form the material basis of every kind of social organisation, deserve
equal attention? Since, as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between
human history and natural history is that the former is the work of man
and the latter is not, would not the history of human technology be easier
to write than the history of natural technology (1930: 392-3/n. 2)?
This passage suggests three crucial questions. First, are the mechanisms of technical
change comparable to, or quite different from, those that Darwin adduced for the
adaptive modification of organic species? In other words, can we account for
technical change in terms of a principle of variation under selection? Secondly, what
exactly is the difference between the 'history of human technology' and the 'history of
natural technology'? In modern usage, we have grown accustomed to referring to the
former as a process of evolution while reserving the concept of history for the latter.
The question then becomes: how, if at all, can we distinguish between evolutionary
and historical change in the field of technical phenomena? Thirdly, Darwin was much
concerned with the question of whether there is anything inherently progressive about
organic evolution. His considered conclusion was that progress, of a kind, has
occurred, but that there is nothing in the theory of variation under natural selection
that stipulates that it must occur. Is this also the case with technology?
I shall consider the first of these questions in the present section, and the second
and third in the two sections following. To begin, I would like to draw attention to
one remarkable parallel between organic and technical change. A striking feature of
adaptive modification in organic evolution is that new structures, designed for new
purposes, cannot come de novo, out of nowhere. Natural selection can only work on
the stock of materials that are already available. This means that as environmental
conditions change, structures that may have evolved for one purpose are co-opted for
quite different functions for which they happen to come in handy. These new func
tions, then, condition the subsequent process of adaptation. The palaeontologists
Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba have coined the term exaptation to refer to
this process of co-opting one structure to do a different job from that for which it was
originally adapted (Gould and Vrba 1982). More generally, we can say that all ad
aptation is founded upon exaptation. Thus the mammalian ear is derived from a part
of the jaw of the fish, and birds' feathers, with their aerodynamic properties, are
derived from hairs (Mice designed for insulation (Jacob 1977).
Now it is no more possible in the history of artefacts than in organic evolution for
new structures to appear out of thin air. As Basalla puts it (1988: 208-9), 'every
novel artifact has an antecedent'. Indeed most if not all of what we call invention, in
the technical sphere, seems to involve a process of exaptation — of hitting on new
uses for old things — precisely analogous to what goes on in nature. These new uses
then condition subsequent processes of refinement. In other words, when a new need
arises, we search around what is already to hand, pressing into service whatever turns
out to be most apt for the purpose. As the innovatory usage is regularized so the
object in question is adapted to make it better suited to its new purpose — to the
point where its original function may be lost altogether.

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 What I find particularly fascinating is that one can discern the same dynamic in
language change, and indeed in culture change generally. But let me remain with
language, where the equivalent of exaptation is the coining of a metaphor. In lang
uage we have only the existing stock of words on which to draw, so that when we
want to say something new, or innovatory, we do so by using existing words in new,
unconventional or idiosyncratic connections. Indeed the metaphor derives its force
from its very unconventionality. As the metaphoric usage becomes more and more
conventional, so it gradually achieves the status of a lexical meaning — that is, a
meaning of the kind you would find in a dictionary. Most dictionary meanings have
their origins in metaphoric usages that have since becomeregularized.
In considering how words acquire meaning, Wittgenstein encourages us to 'think
of the tools in a tool-box' (1953:11). But we could equally well reverse the pro
cedure: to understand how tools get their uses, let us think of the words in a
language. Then we can see that applying an old tool to a new and unexpected use is
much like coining a new metaphor. Take the object that we usually call a screw
driver. The 'denotation' of the object — equivalent to the lexical meaning of the
word — is 'screwdriver': that is what, according to convention, the tool is for.
Likewise the dictionary tells us what, according to convention, a word 'means'. But I
can use a screwdriver in other ways; for example when painting, I use it as a lever to
remove the lid from the can and as a whisk to stir the paint. Using the screwdriver as
a whisk is like using a metaphorical expression. It is innovatory because the con
vention is to use the object as a screwdriver. Yet conventional meanings have their
origins in past metaphors, and conventional uses of tools have their origins in the
incidental uses of their predecessors.

The Evolution of Technology and its History

Let me now return to the analogous processes of exaptation and adaptation in organic
evolution and technical change. It could be argued that behind the similarity there
lies a more fundamental difference. In both fields of change, structures are being
selected, but the selection is natural in the one field and intentional in the other. As
Kenneth Bock has put it, an event in the history of artefacts — such as the con
struction of a Gothic vault — differs from an event in the evolution of species 'in that
the former involves formation of intent or purpose on the part of an acta- while the
latter does not' (1980: 182). The human makers of artefacts, it is implied, have some
conception of the task before them, whereas the animal need have no conception
whatever of the life project for which it has been so well equipped through countless
generations of natural selection.
This argument, however, implies sane kind of threshold in the evolution of our
own kind, at which point our ancestors were sufficiently endowed with the qualities
of intelligence and manual dexterity to become the authors of their own projects of
construction. From this point, the history of technology must have 'taken off, lead
ing from the earliest tods to modem machinery, without entailing any further change
in the species-specific form of the human organism. History, as psychologists David

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Premack and Anne James Premack maintain, consists in 'a sequence of changes
through which a species passes while remaining biologically stable', and of all
species in the world, only humans have it (1994: 350). Thus while the motor car
remains a modern invention, the man behind the wheel remains a creature
biologically equipped for life in the Stone Age.
It follows that the artefactual products of technological culture can be highly
misleading as indicators of the underlying cognitive and biomechanical capabilities
of their makers. A prehistcrian of the future, surveying the material remains of West
ern industrial civilisation, would be making a serious error were he to infer that its
people were considerably more advanced in their innate capacities than were their
predecessors of earlier millennia. As the linguist Philip Lieberman warns, 'who
would think that we had essentially the same biological endowment as the human
populations that lived 30,000 or 20,000 or 500 years ago if all he had to go on were
the preserved artefacts — stone tools versus the ruins of great cities, dams,
interlocking highways, etc.?' (1985: 628).
But the same argument cuts the other way. Who would think that the common
human biological endowment was significantly different from that of chimpanzees on
the evidence of the striking similarity between the toolkits of contemporary free
ranging chimpanzee populations and those of certain ethnographically recorded
populations of human hunter-gatherers? In his controversially entitled book
Chimpanzee Material Culture, Bill McGrew — one of the most experienced
observers of chimpanzees in their natural habitat — attempts a systematic
comparison of the subsistence technology of chimpanzee populations inhabiting a
number of study areas in Western Tanzania with that of the Aboriginal people of
Tasmania, as documented in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Tas
nxanian Aborigines are notorious in anthropological literature for allegedly having
had the simplest material culture ever recorded (Jones 1977: 197, see Figure 2). I
shall not go into the details here of how the comparison was made, though one could
have serious reservations about the selection of items for comparison and the terms in
which they were rendered commensurable. I merely wish to highlight McGrew's
principal conclusion, which is that if we confine our attention to the respective
toolkits, although the human hunter-gatherer toolkit is indeed more complicated than
that of the ape, 'the difference is far from wide, and the gap between hominid and
pongid is bridgeable' (1992: 144).
Not surprisingly, when McGrew first presented his findings, in a conference
devoted to the anthropology of hunter-gatherer societies held in London in 1986, they
drew a storm of protest. Was he really trying to tell us that Tasmanian hunter
gatherers had scarcely advanced beyond the apes, that they were stuck in an
evolutionary time-warp? In his defence, his intention was no more than to suggest the
possibility of an intermediate level of technology in the transition from our ape-like
ancestors to the earliest hominid forms. Yet in taking nineteenth century Tasmanian
Aborigines as exemplars erf early hominids, McGrew canes close to returning to the
unabashed racism of an earlier era of anthropology, when it was quite usual to
regard the 'savage* as representing an earlier stage in human biological evolution,
and thus as occupying a half-way stage in the transition from apes to 'civilised' (that
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 Pebble chopper Hammerstone Spears

Figure 2: The Tasmanian Toolkit. [From Clark 1983 :22]

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is, modern European) humans.
In fact, the simplicity of the Tasmanian toolkit, even when compared with that of
Aboriginal hunter-gatherers on the Australian mainland, presents an enigma that has
never been adequately solved — though it may have something to do with
Tasmania's prolonged and total isolation since rising sea-levels cut it off from the
mainland some 11,000 years ago (Jones 1977). One fact, however, seems incon
trovertible: namely, that a Tasmanian Aborigine, transported to the twentieth century
and raised in an affluent part of the world, would have no particular difficulty in
beaming — say — an airline pilot or a software engineer. But I would not, for my
money, take a plane piloted by a chimpanzee!. Indeed we are drawn almost irres
istibly to the conclusion that behind the apparent similarity of chimpanzee and human
hunter-gatherer toolkits there lies a fundamental difference of capacity, a difference
that is manifested, above all, in the progression of human technology from the axe,
spear and digging stick to the airplane and the computer. Thus while we might
reasonably attribute the failure of chimpanzees to operate a complex technology to
innate incapacity, we can only attribute the failure of Tasmanian Aborigines to do the
same to unfulfilled historical conditions (ngold 1995: 194).
Now the development of human technology is very commonly presented as
though it could be arrayed on a continuum from the earliest stone tools to modem
machinery and electronics. Figure 3 is an example of such a figure. Yet if the con
clusion we reached in the last paragraph is accepted, to posit such a direct line of
continuity from the Oldowan chopper to the space shuttle would be quite absurd.
Comparing the finely flaked blades of Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, dating
from around 30-40,000 years ago, with the crude pebble tools used by Homo habilis
at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa two million years ago, it is hard to deny that the
differences reflect real changes in intellectual and manipulative abilities — changes
that are also reflected in the increasing size of the brain and structural modifications
to the hand. Homo habilis was, after all, a very different kind of creature than Homo
sapiens, in many ways much closer to an ape than a human being. On the other
hand, it would appear that once a recognisably human level of competence had been
achieved, all subsequent technological change — from Palaeolithic hunting and
gathering to modern industry — could take place without any significant further
change in the basic biological endowment of the human species.
In short, it appears that whereas the change from Lower to Upper Palaeolithic tools
belongs to evolution, the change from the latter to modem industrial technologies
belongs to history. When we speak of evolution, it is assumed that changes in tools
depend on — and can therefore be taken as indices of — changes in the forms and
capacities of the creatures that use them. When we speak of history, by contrast, it is
as though technology had acquired a dynamic of its own, and could go on developing
in complexity without any further change in innate human capacities. At what point,
then, does the evolution of technology become the history of technology? How can we
draw a dividing line between these two processes? We are very far from resolving
these questions, but I would like to conclude my discussion of this theme with the
suggestion that the processes of evolution and history may not be so distinct after all.

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Figure 3: The development of material culture.
[From Cotterell and Kamminga 1990: 9]

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 The notion of capacity seems to imply a certain view of human nature, as
comprising a set of universal structures or compartments, fully formed in the life of
every individual from the start, and waiting to be filled up with all manner of
particular cultural content. Thus the capacities are said to be innate, the products of
an evolutionary process; the content acquired, changing through history. My earlier
discussion of skill, however, led me to conclude that the capabilities of action of both
human beings and non-human animals are neither innate nor acquired but emergent
properties of the total developmental system constituted by the presence of the animal
in its environment. In the case of humans, this is as true of the most widely dis
tributed skills such as walking and speaking as it is of those of more restricted
distribution such as swimming and writing. Moreover there are as many different
ways of walking as there are ways of speaking, and to refer to 'bipedal locomotion' or
'language' as a universal capacity, distinct from the manifold skills of walking or
speaking as they are actually deployed in human communities, is to reify what is, at
best, a convenient abstraction (Jngold 1995: 195).
We cannot, then, place universals on the side of evolution and particulars on the
side of history. Rather, if history be understood as the process wherein people,
through their activities, establish the environmental conditions under which their suc
cessors grow to maturity, developing as they do so the skills appropriate to a certain
form of life, then it is but an extension, into the human domain, of a process that is
going on throughout the organic world. That process is one of evolution. To under
stand evolution in this sense, however, is to make a clean break with the conventions
of modem biology, and with the neo-Darwinian paradigm upon which they are
founded. For it is to attribute the changing forms and capacities of living creatures
not to changes in an internal programme, design or building plan (the genotype), but
to transformations in the whole field of relationships within which they come into
being and live out their lives.

Measuring Technological Complexity

Is there, then, anything progressive about technical change? It is remarkable that
although the majority of anthropologists are deeply suspicious of the idea that there is
any inherently progressive tendency in the history of human culture, they are inclined
to make an exception of technology, and are quite content to talk about peoples with
'simple' and with 'complex' technologies. Indeed, in their self-conscious and rather
contrived attempts to avoid the derogatory connotations of the concept of primitivity,
anthropologists have tended to qualify their references to 'simple societies' with the
observations that 'simple* refers to technological simplicity, and that it carries no
implications as regards the sophistication of social organization or culture.
Precisely how the simplicity or complexity of a technology is to be gauged, however,
has remained far from clear. One of the few attempts to construct such a measure has
been made by Wendell Oswalt (1976). Oswalt defined the complexity of a tool by
the number of 'technounits' that make it up. A technounit is a physically distinct part
that makes a particular contribution to the overall implement. It was in these terms

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Figure 4: Inuit (Angmagsalik) toggle-headed 'feather' harpoon and throwing board
for hunting large seals from a kayak. [Drawing by Patrick Finnerty, from Oswalt
1976: 100.]

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that McGrew compared the relative complexity of chimpanzee and human hunter
gatherer technologies. He found that none of the tools used by chimpanzees in the
procurement of subsistence comprised more than one technounit, whereas the mean
number of technounits (1.2) for the Tasmanian Aboriginal repertoire was very slightly
greater. In fact, no Tasmanian implement was of more than one technounit; the
raised mean is fully accounted for by two kinds of fixed facility used in hunting,
involving two and four technounits respectively (McGrew 1992: 138, 144). By
contrast, the Inuit (Eskimo) sealing harpoon shown in Figure 4 has no fewer than 26
structurally distinct components.
On the basis of a comparative survey of the toolkits of hunter-gatherers, farmers
and herdsmen, Oswalt was able to refute the common assumption that hunters and
gatherers have simpler tools than any other human groups. In fact, the most complex
tools were found among specialised hunters, especially hunters — like the Inuit — of
large aquatic mammals, who have to use considerable ingenuity to obtain in
accessible or potentially dangerous prey. The herdsman, who has ready access to
comparatively docile animals, faces nothing like the same technical challenges, and
his toolkit is correspondingly simpler: thus the lasso, the principal instrument by
which the reindeer herdsman catches hold of his animals, is no more than a length of
rope tied to a sliding toggle (Ingold 1993c). The equipment of the gatherer tends to
be simpler than that of the hunter (plants do not attempt to escape those who 'hunt'
them, nor do they have to be outwitted or outmanoeuvred), but again, the tools of the
farmer are no more complex. For both gatherer and farmer, the essentials may consist
of just an axe or adze, digging stick, and some form of carrying device for
transporting harvested produce.
But comparisons based on the structural properties of the tools themselves can be
misleading. Returning the objects to the contexts of their use reveals a different
picture. The Inuit harpoon is a rather specialised piece of equipment, which is used
only for sealing. The reindeer herdsman's lasso, by contrast, can be put to use in all
manner of different ways. I have seen herdsmen use their lassos for setting traps, for
tying animals to sledges for transport home, and for countless other purposes. Like
wise among hunter-gatherers with an apparently simple inventory of tool types
(including Tasmanian Aborigines), it is common to find that each kind of object is
turned to account for an astonishing variety of different tasks.
Among the Aboriginal people of the Australian Western Desert there is a clear
division between men's tools (principally the spear and spear-thrower) and women's
tools (principally digging-sticks and wooden bowls). The spear-thrower, in the
context of hunting, is designed to enhance the flight of the spear by imparting extra
angular momentum to the throw. But it has numerous other uses: as a friction stick
in making fire, a woodworking tool (with the addition of a hafted stone adze-flake), a
mixing tray for pigments or tobacco, a percussion instrument in songs and dances, a
device for clearing an area of thorns and pebbles when preparing a campsite, and
(when embellished with decorative markings) a mnemonic for recalling the sequence
and locations of waterholes and other features of the landscape (Gould 1970: 22,
Figure 5). The woman's digging-stick is similarly multifunctional. It can be used to
obtain burrowing animals as well as plants, as a weapon in small-game hunting and
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 [ Yilmt jltjara
I l**oi«rtvoi«)

cm scaie

Figure 5: Decorated spear-thrower from the Nyatunyara people

Western Desert. Designs depict waterholes and landmarks al
totemic snake. [From Gould 1970: 28]
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in small-game hunting and in self-defence. Small wooden bowls can be used to carry
produce, but also to shovel away soil when digging. Large bowls can be used to
carry both infants and drinking water (Hamilton 1980: 7).
Comparing Australian Aboriginal and Inuit toolkits, it might seem at first glance
that the first is extremely simple and the second rather complex. But a more
significant difference is between the economy and versatility of the Australian toolkit
and the diversity and specialisation of the Inuit erne. Australian Aboriginal people
have few tods, but use them in whatever way they cone in handy, for manifold
purposes that we might never come to think of when we classify the objects by
function — for example, as spear-throwers or digging-sticks. Inuit have many tools,
some of them — like the harpoon — of great complexity and ingenuity, but each is
used for a prescribed purpose which governs, at least to some extent, the manner of
its construction. It is only because of a peculiar bias that leads us to look for
technical operations in the properties of the tools themselves, rather than in the know
how of their users, that we are led to conclude that Inuit are somehow more
'advanced', in the technical sphere, than Australian Aborigines. As I shall show in
the next section, the source of this bias lies in the concept of technology itself.
These observations all point towards a single conclusion: that to comprehend the
technical accomplishments of hunter-gatherers, or of any other people for that matter,
it is not sufficient just to look at the tools. We have to understand their knowledge.
Tools are of no use if you don't know how to work with them; moreover up to a point,
the simpler the tool, the more knowledgeable and skilled you have to be to be able to
work it effectively. The reindeerman's lasso is a simple tool, but it requires immense
skill to use it effectively. The same could be said of an axe, digging stick, spear or
boomerang. The Kenwood Chef on my kitchen table is, by contrast, an extremely
complex tool, with hundreds of interconnected parts. But it took only a few minutes
to learn to use it. As Robin Ridington has put it (1982:470), understanding technical
know-how means focusing on artifice rather than artefacts, mi tool-use as skilled
practice rather the mechanical operation of exterior devices. But by artifice we do not
mean the kind of objective, generalisable, scientific knowledge which, in its
application, might be covered by the modern concept of technology. It is rather
knowledge of a very personal kind, partly intuitive, largely implicit, and deeply
embedded in the particularities of experience. One grows into such knowledge in
much the same way as one learns one's country or one's kinship system. It is know
ledge that both enables a person to navigate effectively in a world of human and non
human others, and that endows him or her with a specific identity.
Clearly, then, the artifice of the skilled practitioner is lndistmguishably social and
technical. The more, however, that complex machinery (such as the Kenwood Chef)
comes to replace the work of skilled hands, the more that subject-centred knowledge
and skill gives way to objective principles of mechanical functioning built in to the
machines themselves. The result is the progressive disembedding or 'cutting out' of
the technical from the social that, as I argued in the introduction, lies behind the
institutionalised separation of technology and society that is such a pronounced
feature of modernity. Yet however much the separation may be stressed in theory, it

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is far from being realised in practice, and in all likelihood it never will be. To be sure,
one could describe the history of modem industry as a series of attempts to 'capture'
the skills of manufacture, and to incorporate them into the workings of machines that
could perform the same tasks more quickly, more efficiently and on a vastly increased
scale. But as Francois Sigaut has persuasively argued, no sooner are old skills built
into machinery than new skills develop around the machines themselves: thus skill
capturing never quite catches up with skill-producing (Sigaut 1993: 110). And for the
same reason, as fast as technical relations are cut out from social relations in one field
of activity, they are reincorporated in another.

The Origins of 'Technology'

This leads me to my final area of concern, which is with the connection between the
historical origins of the concept of technology and the rise of the machine and a
machine-theoretical cosmology. The issue is crucial, since it is clear that this essent
ially modern concept has had a critical bearing on our contemporary conception of
humanity and of the human condition. It is important to recognise, from the outset,
that the terms in which we portray our own capacities as human beings, and our diff
erences from non-human animals, have a specific history in the Western world during
the last few centuries. These terms include society, nature and, separating the two,
technology. Of the concept of society, it has been observed that to use it is not to
denote a thing but to make a claim (Wolf 1988:757). Similarly, if we want to know
what words like nature and technology mean, then rather than seeking some
delimited set of phenomena in the world — as though one could point to them and
say 'There, that's nature!' or 'that's technology!' — we should be trying to discover
what sorts of claims are being made with these words, and whether they are justified.
In the history of modern thought these claims have concerned the ultimate supremacy
of human reason. Thus society is considered to be the mode of association of rational
beings, nature is the external world of things as it appears to the reasoning subject,
and technology is the means by which a rational understanding of that external world
is turned to account for the benefit of society.
The word 'technology' is in fact a compound formed from two words of classical
Greek provenance, namely tekhne, which meant the kind of art or skill that we
associate with craftsmanship; and logos, which meant roughly a framework of
principles derived from the application of reason. Just occasionally, tekhne and logos
were combined in classical literature to denote the art of reason, or the skill involved
in rhetorical debate. But in contemporary usage the meaning of technology is just the
reverse: namely, the rational principles that govern the construction of artefacts — or
more simply, the reason of art rather than the art of reason. In this sense, the term did
not come into regular use until well into the seventeenth century (Mitcham 1979).
And it is no accident that its coinage coincided with the radical transformation in
Western cosmology ushered in by such figures as Galileo, Newton and Descartes.
For the specific achievement of these pioneers of modern natural science was to
establish the idea that the universe itself is a vast machine, and that through a rational

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scientific understanding of its principles of functioning, this machine could be
harnessed to serve human interest and purposes. Thus technology is the application
of the mechanics of nature, derived through scientific inquiry, to the ends of art.
The shift from the classical concept of tekhne to the modern concept of technology
has brought about a profound change in the way we think about the relation between
human beings and their activity. The image of the artisan, immersed with the whole
of his being in a sensuous engagement with the material, has given way to that of the
operative whose job it is to set in motion an exterior system of productive forces,
according to principles of mechanical functioning that are entirely indifferent to
particular human aptitudes and sensibilities. The artisan of classical Greece, Vernant
tells us (1983:294), worked to fulfil demands that were prescribed within the order of
nature, by means of task-specific skills acquired through long apprenticeship in the
trade. The work of the operative, by contrast, falls within the order of manufacture,
an order that is premised on the essentially modern idea that human industry can run
ahead of nature and, in so doing, transform it. Whereas the artisan carries out fam
iliar tasks without any precise specification of the methods by which they are
achieved, the operative implements a technology consisting of formal rules of
procedure whose validity is independent of the specific ends to which they are applied
(Ingold 1988b: 152).
The idea of technology thus forces a thoroughgoing distinction between
conception and execution which is heavily institutionalised in many domains of
modern society. The creative part of making things lies, in this view, in the element
of design or planning. The actual implementation of the design or plan is regarded as
'merely technical' in other words as mechanical. This dichotomy between design
and implementation is evident, for example, in the opposition between architecture
and the building industry: the architect, classically a 'chief-builder', is now a creator
of structures that are left to the industry to put up. The architect designs the house,
the builder implements the architect's design. One creates but does not execute; the
other executes, but does not create. An identical logic, incidentally, underwrites the
distinction in natural science between theoretical work and experimental observation.
And of course it was this very logic that initially led me to think of the distinctiveness
of human tool-making as lying in the element of design as opposed to execution, and
it is what leads students of cognitive evolution to consider the origins of tool-making
as a problem in the evolution of intelligence.
I should stress that in speaking of the emergence of technology, I am concerned
with a transition on the level of ideas. I do not mean to claim that skill has actually
disappeared, or even been reduced in scope, with the rise of industrial production.
Builders and laboratory technicians are still skilled practitioners. My point, however,
is that the concept of technology has, in recent times, become such an established part
of contemporary thinking on the 'human condition' that we are inclined to use it as a
window through which to view tool-assisted practices of all kinds, past and present,
Western and non-Western, human and animal. Thus we imagine that where tools are
being used there must exist a technology, as though every tool came along with an
explicit set of operational principles — something akin to an instruction manual —

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which the user is bound to put into effect, regardless of context or previous
experience.
In the absence of written manuals, which of course do not exist in primarily oral
cultures and are a rarity even in literate ones, such a perspective could only lead us to
suppose that these operational principles are engraved on the minds of practitioners in
the form of words, diagrams, charts or formulae. Like the linguist who naively
assumes that the 'language' of a non-literate community already exists, complete
with grammar and lexicon, implanted in the unconscious minds of its speakers, the
student of technology is led to believe that a body of context-free, prepositional
knowledge about tools, their interrelations and how to use them, lies fully-formed
inside people's heads, simply waiting to be revealed and written down. Indeed
writing itself has often been regarded as a kind of technology (Ong 1982), and it is
tempting to suggest that writing codifies the art of speech in much the same way that
technology codifies technical skill. It has been argued, I think with some justif
ication, that writing leads us to reify language as an autonomous, rule-governed
system. We have been disinclined, as Roy Harris (1980: 6-18) has observed, to re
cognise the extent to which our view of what language is, and our theories of lan
guage, are affected by taking written language as the paradigm case.
I believe the same may be true of technology, and that we need to recognise how
our understanding of the technical practices of non-industrial peoples may be being
distorted by the assumption that they, too, constitute an autonomous system, a
'technology', which is already in place pending its discovery by the visiting
anthropologist. Indeed, attempts to render such practices in prepositional form mis
construe the very nature erf skill, which, as we have seen, consists not in acquired
mental representations or cognitive models but in developmentally embodied
capacities of attention and response. As Maurice Bloch (1991) has pointed out, in
writing technology we do not simply copy onto the page what has already been
copied, by sane process of learning, into the minds of practitioners. For the cod
ification of skill as technology, like the codification of speech as language, does not
merely describe, but actually transforms, the practical activities involved. But (Mice
written, a technology can set standards of procedural correctness which may
profoundly affect judgements of practice, in much the same way that writing has
affected the estimation of propriety in speech. And just as the rationalisation of
speech to conform with the regulations of written language has spawned a specialised
genre of 'poetry' whose expressive power lies in its freedom from the established
rule, so the rationalisation of skilled practice as technology has turned what is now
called 'craft' into an equally specialised genre of expressive art.

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