A propos de la technologie culturelle. Entretien avec Robert Cresswell

Alban Bensa : On cultural technology. An Interview with Robert Cresswell. In this interview by Alban Bensa, Robert Cresswell resumes the essential features of his contribution to anthropology and the history of techniques. In the wake of André Leroi-Gourhan, he has developed the notion of operating chain, identified the complex relations between technical changes and social inertia or evolution and worked on ways of devising truly rigorous, explanatory models in this field: «In the world of symbols, anybody can say anything, hence the volume of unverifiable discourse. But in technology, mistakes are immediately obvious. As a result, people's interest in techniques waned until they realised that they couldn't say anything about society without taking them into account...»