The Cyclic Relationship Between Culture And Technology

Trying to determine the effect of culture on technology is a difficult task. This is due to the cyclic nature of the relationship between culture and technology. Working with the general notion of culture (1), it is easy to see why the task of analyzing the effect of culture on technology is hard. This is because technology itself is part of this definition of culture, “all other products of human work and thought” (2). In a sense, we are trying to find the effect of culture on culture itself, which initially sounds strange. However, considering technology as one of the venues that a given culture utilizes to transform itself, the challenge to examine the effect of culture on technology can be narrowed down to the investigation of the cyclic relationship between culture and technology. Thus, this paper discusses, what we will label, ‘technology-induced cultures’ and ‘culture-induced technologies’, in order to show the feedback loop between culture and technology.

The class readings provide several instances of how technology affects and transforms its encompassing culture (i.e. the culture that was responsible for bringing forth the very same technology). One such technology is agriculture.

The hunting and gathering way of life was already being saturated when the world population was about 4 million. With human population reaching 200 million by 200 B.C., it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to survive by just gathering and hunting. (3). Even though it is hard to claim that early man consciously pursued agriculture as the solution to this problem, it is uncontested that the hunter-gatherer society is the culture that was responsible for the invention of agriculture, as Ehrlich points out, “agriculture was thus invented gradually, piecemeal, and quite probably sometime reluctantly as groups changed time-honored lifestyles”(Ehrlich 15/26). The effect of this technology on the hunter-gatherer society was phenomenal, as it “put humanity on the road to sociopolitical complexity”(Ehrlich 17/26).

The constant mobility as well as the scarce resources involved with the hunting and gathering way of life did not allow for the development of a complex society, as Ehrlich explicitly mentions, “Without the ensuring agricultural revolution and the sedentary life and divisions of labor it eventually made possible, cultural evolution could never have produced our complex modern civilization. Without farming, which freed some people of the chore of wrestling nourishment from the environment, there would be no cities, no states, no science, and no mayors”(4).