Tools of Transformation: Appropriate Technology in U.S. Countercultural Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Peter Mortensen
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Environmental Transformation ◽  
Buckminster Fuller ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Environmentally Sound ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Second Wave

This essay takes its cue from second-wave ecocriticism and from recent scholarly interest in the “appropriate technology” movement that evolved during the 1960s and 1970s in California and elsewhere. “Appropriate technology” (or AT) refers to a loosely-knit group of writers, engineers and designers active in the years around 1970, and more generally to the counterculture’s promotion, development and application of technologies that were small-scale, low-cost, user-friendly, human-empowering and environmentally sound. Focusing on two roughly contemporary but now largely forgotten American texts Sidney Goldfarb’s lyric poem “Solar-Heated-Rhombic-Dodecahedron” (1969) and Gurney Norman’s novel Divine Right’s Trip (1971)—I consider how “hip” literary writers contributed to eco-technological discourse and argue for the 1960s counterculture’s relevance to present-day ecological concerns. Goldfarb’s and Norman’s texts interest me because they conceptualize iconic 1960s technologies—especially the Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome and the Volkswagen van—not as inherently alienating machines but as tools of profound individual, social and environmental transformation. Synthesizing antimodernist back-to-nature desires with modernist enthusiasm for (certain kinds of) machinery, these texts adumbrate a humanity- and modernity-centered post-wilderness model of environmentalism that resonates with the dilemmas that we face in our increasingly resource-impoverished, rapidly warming and densely populated world.

American Indian Soundchiefs

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-411
Author(s):  
Josh Garrett-Davis
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Red Power ◽  
American Media ◽  
Home Recording ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Sound Media ◽  
The 1960S

American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls “Indigenous sonic networks,” fields of obligation and responsibility.

Appropriate technology: the challenge of the second generation

1980 ◽  
Vol 209 (1174) ◽  
pp. 7-14 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
National Planning ◽  
Research Centres

Appropriate technology, defined here as a low-cost technology aimed at helping to meet the most basic needs of the world’s poorest people, can only be a viable proposition if its proponents succeed in making the transition from the first to the second generation, i. e. from the small-scale experiments and pilot innovations of today, to the massive applica­tion of new devices (hardware) and new forms of organization (soft­ware). The main agents in this second generation are national planning institutions, government ministries, established research centres, development agencies, financial institutions and industrial corporations. Some of the ways in which this transition can be facilitated are exam­ined, as well as a number of specific issues such as intelligence policies in appropriate technology, the structure of decision-making mechanisms and the linkage between appropriate technology and overall development strategies.

Up in smoke?

Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (73) ◽  
pp. 12-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Keene
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Region I ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Back To The Land

This paper draws on the work of E. P. Thompson to understand anticapitalist resistance in northern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Through an analysis of the back-to-the-land movement in a region I call “Claytown,” I show how the making of a rural moral economy was in part enabled by the presence of a nascent marijuana industry. However, whereas a relatively small-scale marijuana industry helped forge anticapitalist resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, this industry has become a form through which values of capitalist political economy are being instantiated and reasserted. I situate my ethnographic analysis within a broader historical and legal framework to show how a contemporary moral economy is made and increasingly unmade in the context of late capitalism.

scholarly journals Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luban ◽  
W. Bradley Wendel
Keyword(s):  
Third Wave ◽  
Behavioral Ethics ◽  
Legal Ethics ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
Role Morality ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

30 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 337 (2017)The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, virtue ethics, or fiduciary theory.

Turkey’s Small Capital, A Player from the Start: Relations with the State and Big Capital

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-108
Author(s):  
EMRE BALIKÇI
Keyword(s):  
State Policies ◽  
The State ◽  
Early History ◽  
Business History ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
State Involvement ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light

This article aims to shed light on the early history of small-scale capital in Turkey. Turkey’s paradigm of development in the 1960s and 1970s, as in other belatedly industrializing countries, meant active state involvement, generally in favor of big capital. This emphasis on the large players has caused small capital’s influence on the era’s state policies to be largely overlooked. This article argues that small capital, popularized in the 1990s with the concept “Anatolian capital,” has deeper roots in Turkish economic and business history than formerly thought.

scholarly journals Covid Conversations 3: Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-222
Author(s):  
Elizabeth LeCompte ◽  
Kate Valk ◽  
Maria Shevtsova
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Wooster Group ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American System ◽  
The North ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Stage Direction ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Elizabeth LeCompte co-founded The Wooster Group with like-minded pioneers in New York in 1975, leading and directing its collaborators as deaths, departures, and new arrivals have changed its composition and emphases over the decades, segueing into a world-wide uncertain present. Kate Valk joined in 1978, the last representative of The Wooster Group’s foundational period, apart from LeCompte herself, who is still a key member of the company. References in this conversation are primarily to works after 2016. LeCompte briefly remarks on the importance of Since I Can Remember – one of the Group’s ongoing works in progress in 2021 – as an archival project that draws on Valk’s memory of how Nayatt School was made during her formative years. Having become, since then, a quintessential Wooster Group performer, Valk extended her artistic skills to stage direction, undertaking, most recently, The B-Side (2017). Both the initiative and idea for the piece came from performer Eric Berryman, who had brought Valk the collection of blues, songs, spirituals, and preachings on the 1965 LP made from the research of scholar folklorist Bruce Chapman. Berryman had been inspired to approach Valk because of her exclusive use of unadulterated historical recordings in Early Shaker Spirituals (2014), her directorial debut. The main work in rehearsal during 2020 and which was still locked down by the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of this conversation is The Mother, a Wooster Group variant of Brecht’s dramatized version of Gorky’s novel, directed by LeCompte. LeCompte discusses the current situation, emphasizing the increased vulnerability of independent artists and small-scale theatre, while giving a glimpse of the disadvantages for such groupings built into the North American system of project funding. The Wooster Group is a salient example of small-scale theatre that, despite continually precarious conditions, which the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated, has achieved its creative goals and has defined its place in the exploratory avant-garde flourishing vigorously in the 1960s and 1970s. This particular avant-garde, LeCompte believes, has seen various important developments over the years but might well now be counting its last days. The conversation here presented was recorded on 31 October 2020, transcribed by Kunsang Kelden, and edited by Maria Shevtsova, Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Artefacts

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison ◽  
John Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Past ◽  
The Relationship

In the Wrst part of the book we considered a number of influences on the emergence of an archaeology of the contemporary past, from the interests in contemporary small-scale societies that developed as part of the New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, to the use of contemporary case studies to address particular archaeological debates about the relationship between material culture and social behaviour posed by post-processual archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s. We have seen how the archaeology of the recent past began with a focus on the First and Second World Wars, and then the Cold War, eventually to encompass a Weld that is concerned with the archaeology of a much wider range of events that have only just passed or are still occurring today (e.g. Penrose 2007). In Chapter 3 we looked in detail at the sorts of Weld methodologies that are being applied by archaeologists of the recent and contemporary past, considering whether their Weld methods might be understood to be distinct from other forms of archaeology. In Chapter 4 we looked at the relationship between archaeology and other disciplines that focus on contemporary materiality, in particular anthropology, material culture studies, art, and documentary photography. And in Chapter 5 we explored some reasons why archaeologists might have developed an interest in the contemporary world, and the period of late modernity in particular, through an exploration of some of the conditions of late modernity that make it distinct from the periods that precede it. In the second part of the book, we look in more detail at how we might approach the archaeology of the contemporary world, with reference to a series of case studies. As you read through this second part, you will notice that one of its distinguishing features is its dual perspective. We consider on the one hand places and material practices that are essentially extinct or have ceased to function, and on the other those places and practices that are still functioning, or, in Tim Cresswell’s (2004: 37) words, are ‘still becoming’.

In the State’s Shadow of Fair Housing: D.C. (White) Business Leaders and their Revanchist Desires

2020 ◽  
pp. 107808742093551
Author(s):  
Rosemary Ndubuizu
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
City Council ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Black Poor ◽  
The 1960S

This article traces D.C. White business leaders’ advocacy of (low-income) Black suburban relocation and White upper-class resettlement in D.C.’s central neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s. By examining the organizational papers and memos of meetings and policy documents from the Federal City Council, a D.C. nonprofit advocacy organization for the city’s leading business and real estate leaders, I document how predominantly White business leaders appropriated fair housing and regional fair share political stances to articulate revanchist desires. These leaders’ revanchist rhetoric depicted the Black poor—especially the single Black mother with children—as the primary figure of neighborhood blight and domestic deviance. In the wake of these revanchist politics, low-income Black mothers remained principal victims of pro-mobility policies and gentrification agendas that forced them to continually move to support demolition or redevelopment. This article affirms low-income Black mother activists’ political support for placemaking and low-cost, family-friendly, and well-maintained communities.

A useful development in measuring activities of daily living

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (9) ◽  
pp. 1417-1417
Author(s):  
David Ames
Keyword(s):  
Activities Of Daily Living ◽  
Cognitive Aging ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Editorial Team ◽  
Amyloid Pet ◽  
Prodromal Ad ◽  
Prodromal Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
User Friendly

Standard activities of daily living (ADL) scales developed in the 1960s and 1970s do not capture the subtle impairments seen in individuals with progressive mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which in many cases is due to prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD). Given the promise of treatments now in development to modify the underlying AD process, early detection of MCI may become very important in future. De Vriendt and colleagues, whose paper has been chosen by the editorial team of International Psychogeriatrics, to be paper of the month in this issue, are to be congratulated for developing and validating the advanced ADL tool with the aim of providing a useful ADL measure to distinguish normal from pathological cognitive aging. They have assessed a large sample (150 people with AD, MCI and healthy controls) and report acceptable parameters for discrimination of these three groups using the instrument they have developed. The next step will be to try it out in a variety of clinical populations, settings, and cultures and perhaps to see how well it stacks up against other methods of detecting preclinical and prodromal AD (e.g. amyloid PET scans or lumbar punctures). The publication of this very good paper will allow other teams around the world to start using this user-friendly instrument and I await the outcome of further work on it with great interest.

Peasants and Petty Capitalists in Southern Oaxacan Sugar Cane Production and Processing, 1930–1980

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Binford
Keyword(s):  
State Intervention ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Local Equivalent ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sugar Mills ◽  
Isthmus Of Tehuantepec ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Rural Dwellers ◽  
Sugar Source

The documented history of Mexican sugar in the twentieth century begins with the introduction of vacuum-pan technology between 1880 and 1910, subsequently chronicling the progressive expansion and concentration of the industry, and the creeping State intervention which eventually resulted in the nationalisation of most private sugar mills during the 1960s and 1970s.1 Small-scale, labour-intensive rural trapiches producing panela (an unrefined form of semi-crystalline sugar) have largely been left out of this history, despite the fact that trapiches were often predecessors to modern sugar mills and in many areas survived displacement by them. Surveying Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec region in 1940, for example, Ybarra recorded three industrialised mills and 37 small, motorised, panela- producing trapiches.2 In 1947, according to Aragón Calvo and Vargas Comargo, panela accounted for an estimated 25% of Mexican sugar production overall, and consumption of panela exceeded that of refined sugar in the states of Veracruz and Guerrero.3Panela continues to be produced and consumed in Mexico today — albeit in reduced quantities. In Panama, Colombia, India and other nations, panela (or the local equivalent) is an even more important sugar source than in Mexico.4Nationally the labour-intensive panela industry pales into insignificance next to the modern sugar sector. However, in particular regions and communities, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, it has been an important source of employment and capital, providing rural dwellers with their first experience of disciplined factory work and numerous small entrepreneurs with profits that were invested back into the communities to expand control over local land and businesses.

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