Anthropology seeks the meanings of standard or repeated behaviors, social processes, or human creations. This is why anthropologists have explored alien and/or distant social settings. What happens when we try to answer the same questions in our own contexts? In other words, how can we use anthropological theories and tools to discover the meaning of the development and adoption of technological artifacts and processes within our own cultural groups? In this article, we suggest that this can be partly achieved through the generation and exchange of theoretical tools. To this end, we propose the concepts of "technical-symbolic trajectories" and "technological style." These have been drawn from our field research and include influences from disciplines other than anthropology. They are then used to generate mid-range explanations to understand: (1) the symbolic processes that, in conjunction with other social, political, and economic forces, shape a specific and identifiable trajectory of technological development and (2) the technical resources, behaviors, and discourses that actors use to achieve the cultural objectives incorporated into any technological experience.
Islands and the world from an anthropological perspective
