Technological encounters
Quick note to readers: after a year and a half, I’m adding a contributing-subscription option to Leeway. I say “option” because I am not putting Leeway behind a paywall. All subscribers will continue to receive the semi-monthly installment and have full access to the archive. Substack does not offer a “donate” feature; for any of you who’d like to contribute something to this effort, you can subscribe monthly, yearly, or as a one-time “founding” subscriber, and cancel that whenever you want.
I am also launching a Leeway Audio Essays Series of longer, more in-depth pieces on maritime technological history, as audio recordings. These will be available to contributing subscribers; they will require considerably more investment on my part to make. The first episode will go out to contributing subscribers next Sunday, 17 December, at 0900. It’s called “Leeway: An introduction to the contemplation of sail-powered watercraft in human history.” It starts simple and sticks to key concepts related to everyday life; no special background or expertise necessary!
For a number of years I’ve made a small donation once a year to the Population Council, which has been around for decades. They lead research on contraception, the freeing of females from subordinate status or worse, and promoting the voluntary control of population numbers across the world. Their patents and firsts are many.
In their newsletter are plenty of accounts of technological encounters—the introduction of new technology into a culture, and what happens next. The Council’s field teams wouldn’t get very far if they didn’t understand that the adoption of a new technology by a group of humans requires a lot more than “here’s this thing and here’s how to use it.” If the new technology cannot somehow fit into the culture, it will fail there. It may change the culture, but it can only do that if it is adopted to a significant extent first. And, a technology doesn’t just change a culture. A culture changes a technology. A successful technology isn’t imposed on a culture. It is appropriated by that culture.
It may be clear to doctors and scientists that condoms are the clear best solution to the high rates of unintended pregnancies and STI transmissions in a certain group. Condoms are cheap, easy to make and distribute, eminently portable, and highly effective. In so many ways, they are near-perfect technology. On the other hand, the use of condoms is no small change when introduced into sexual culture. That was certainly true even in the society that invented the things, let alone those to whom they were a later novelty. Educators and advocates in our society spent years trying to normalize condom usage. One of their tactics was an attempt to overcome one of the highest barriers to consistent condom use: the perception of condoms as an interruption of erotic spontaneity. Leaflets and ad campaigns and websites and magazine pieces have all tried to encourage couples to incorporate condom use into their erotic play; to make it a part of, rather than an outlier to, the progression of a sexual encounter. Condom acceptance has been widespread in our society, but that did not happen quickly.
When you take a technology like condoms into a different culture, with different sexual habits and assumptions, you have to know what those are in order to have a chance of success. What do you do in a sexual culture where virility is closely tied to fathering offspring? What if you tell a man that using a condom will protect him from an STI, and he responds that it will also send a clear signal to his partner that he assumes she is unclean?
What happens in a technological encounter can teach us so much, so quickly, about a culture. We historians learn in school about the Sepoy Mutiny, during the height of the British Raj in India, when Muslim troops in the British Army rebelled against their officers when they discovered they were being issued rifle cartridges greased with pork fat (Muslims, like Jews, traditionally consider pork unclean). This rebellion was, of course, about much more than that; it offers a deep dive into the critically-important subject of colonialism. You have a culturally-clueless, arrogant colonial power, subordinating another people and trying to appropriate them into the colonial culture (the Army), and you have resistance to that. In this case, the violation of a cultural taboo is the inflection point leading to an outright power struggle.
Closer to home for me, intellectually at least, is the adoption of sails by West African canoeists in the early modern period, as a direct response to the burgeoning slave trade between Europeans and West Africans. The area of the West African coast where the trade was centered was one that strongly discouraged the use of sailing craft. Long sandbars just off the beaches created high, dangerous surf. The locals were accomplished canoeists, but they traveled on the maze of inland waterways just behind the barrier islands, eschewing the deadly seacoast itself. Those who lived just down the coast from them, though, had better access to the coast, thanks to geography. They were able to take their big canoes up the coast to take advantage of the opportunity to trade with the pale-skinned newcomers and their native suppliers. When they did, they discovered that the newcomers used sails for power. Soon, the visitors figured out how to fit sails to their canoes, allowing them to make one leg of the two-way trip under sail power, saving a lot of paddling and shortening travel time. The Europeans introduced the technology—and, for that matter, the impetus for using it—but the West Africans from down the coast appropriated it for their own purpose, modified their traditional craft as necessary to use it, and profited, literally, from it.
Technological appropriation has frequently been oversimplified and misinterpreted as “copying.” Some of that comes from considering too narrow a window of time. An unfamiliar technology might well be copied at first; it is poorly-understood, and must be learned. The man who founded what is now the global automotive colossus Hyundai-Kia started building cars in South Korea for Ford. He was not building his own cars; he was building Fords, the way Ford wanted them built. But Ford was accustomed to building cars for the U.S. market, not the South Korean market. It soon became clear that the cars were not exactly—or even close to exactly—what Korean customers wanted. Meanwhile, the Koreans working in the factory, from engineers to riveters, were learning how to build cars on a modern assembly line with the latest equipment and techniques. Eventually, the Koreans parted ways with Ford, and took their understanding and skill, not only of manufacture, but of the Korean market, putting it to work making their own cars—which were not very good at first, and got better over time, and eventually made a drastic impact on the global marketplace, where they are now first-level players.
What I like to focus on when considering a technological encounter is how the appropriating culture modifies the technology, and why. That modification may not be physical; they may not change the object itself, if there is one; they may change how it’s used. Or they may make aesthetic modifications to their taste that do not affect what the technology does.
These encounters between an existing technology and a culture don’t necessarily take place across great distances or between completely separate cultures. They frequently occur between subcultures in a larger society. And those encounters can be fraught with cultural meaning and conflict. An example would be “stance” car culture or “low-riders” in the Western United States. Lowering the suspensions of stock cars to the maximum extent possible, and making extensive aesthetic modifications to both interior and exterior, became a thriving cultural expression among socioeconomically marginalized groups. Because those groups, like all long-marginalized groups living mostly in poverty, included substantial criminal elements, enough people of influence in the privileged cultural group began to associate “stanced” cars with criminals—to an extent that there was at least serious political discussion, if not actual legislation (I can’t recall now) to ban them in certain cities. In response, the culture of these cars coalesced as it had not before, and pushed back against the opprobrium; not only did they refuse to feel shame about their flamboyant rides; they took pride in them.
I don’t know to what extent it will materialize, or what form it will take if it does, but I’d like to do a big project on the effects of technological encounters on watercraft in the early modern world, a time when so many peoples of the world were encountering each other for the first time. Most of those encounters were, of course, via water. To a large extent, though not entirely, they were encounters leading directly to colonialism.
Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray’s recent survey of technology in world civilization offers up plenty of examples of obtuse mishandling of technological encounters by colonialists. The blind imposition of European technological culture on non-European peoples not only did violence to cultures; it routinely failed, on a purely material level, to accomplish what its proponents were so confident it would.
The Population Council may be, to some extent, a relic of the colonial past—a “Western” NGO trying to bring “modern science” to “developing nations.” But any success that it has—and it has had plenty—is due to its ability to work with, not upon, other cultures. Beyond that, those who are most successful at technological encounters are those willing to pay close attention to the technology they find, not just in the technology they bring. In any successful encounter, each party learns from the other. So, if I do get to work on this, I’ll pay equal attention to how the technology of the natives, whoever they were, affected the technology of the foreigners.
Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
Short piece on the Population Council’s latest effort, with cultural context: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/08/1217384103/anti-hiv-drugs-vaginal-ring