The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment

This book will be the talk of anthropology in the next decade, since it provides a compelling connection between culture theory, social justice, and environmental crisis. The linkage of energy, unequal exchange, and world systems theory is original and masterful. The discussion of money, fetishism, and meaning is likewise. Hornborg’s thoughtful and rigorous synthesis renews critical social science in a time of fragmentation and doubt. Scholars in anthropology and interdisciplinary environmental studies are sure to be impressed. — Josiah McC. Heyman, (Michigan Technological University)

The strength of the book is its interdisciplinarity….This book would be appropriate reading for those social scientists, whether anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, or environmentalists, interested in global studies, Marxist critiques of culture, human-environmental relations, and science and technology studies. — Mary C. Ingram, University of California, Santa Barbara ― Journal Of World-Systems Research

At a time when some paleobiologists are predicting that humanity has so fouled its nest that our planet will eventually be ceded to rats and ants, Alf Hornborg is more hopeful… [an] ambitious, thought -provoking study of the tensions between conservation and economic development…Hornborg is convincing. He says one of anthropology’s greatest challenges is to deconstruct the most powerful discourses of our time which present themselves as somehow above and beyond culture. — Jonathan Benthall, University College London ― Anthropological Theory

Hornborg’s The Power of the Machine offers a rich theoretical analysis of how technology masks the inequalities between nations, humans, and ecosystems within the World System… he challenges conventional political economic and sociological perspectives about global underdevelopment… As a truly interdisciplinary writer, Hornborg combines perspectives from natural science, political economy, and cultural anthropology to critique not only global unequal exchange but also the very categories that we, as social scientists, use to analyze such exchange… The strength of this book is its interdisciplinarity. One would hope to find an interdisciplinary focus in a volume written by several authors, but not expect to find such focus in a single-authored text… I appreciate Hornberg’s two-pronged goal: not only does he demonstrate how technology operates as a mechanism of Western hegemony but he challenges us as social scientists to be wary of the role that we play in analyzing such inequities ― to not reify the machine is to call global exchange by its real name: deliberate uneven development. — Mary C. Ingram, University of California, Santa Barbara ― Journal Of World Systems Research, Ix, I, Winter 2003

Hornborg will be aware of the irony that his thoroughly modern study (professional erudition, academic logic and technique, mass-produced book aimed at an academic audience, etc.) is a radical critique of the conditions of its own production. But in so doing Hornborg poses new and interesting questions. By also suggesting how we might approach the issues they raise the author has made a major contribution to debates about modernity, global inequalities, technology and the fate of the environment. ― Ethnos

This is a critical discussion of the whole range of world-system type theories, which is simultaneously a highly original contribution to the genre and a splendid introduction to the implicit and explicit understandings of the relevant literature. The discussion, which ranges widely through cultures and history, is firmly anchored in classic anthropological theory and data even as it projects its conclusions onto the varieties of malaise that bedevil the modern world. The impression is of disciplined, learned open-mindedness. This is the sort of book one reads with pleasure and profit even while one may disagree with some of it―what a real ‘contribution’ is all about. — Igor Kopytoff, (University of Pennsylvania)

This is one of the most thought provoking books I’ve read lately… Hornborg wants to understand how it is that relations of power come to seem inevitable and natural… He urges a truly holistic study of humankind. We Americans would all do well to follow his example and learn from one another. — E. Paul Durrenberger, Pennsylvania State University ― Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 59, 2003