Unintended Consequences of Innovation

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Anthropology 2 Article 1; Unintended Consequences of Innovations Due to the subjective and etic foundation of our social infrastructure, the perceived rationality of innovations are not always successful. I will discuss three different cultures and how their infrastructures, superstructures and social structures affected their intended innovations. Any technological innovation in a particular society may have its functional or dysfunctional aspects. Functional aspects are those which are intended and recognized like economic development and modernization. Contrary to these are dysfunctional aspects which are not intended and not functional for the given society. Roger Evertt cites the example of three societies across the globe to prove that technological innovation may have dysfunctions or unintended consequences. In all the three cases an attempt was made to transfer a technology assuming that it will prove beneficial to the local society, but at the end the technology proved more harmful than beneficial. The first excerpt is of the Egyptian villagers who were having extreme problems in obtaining pure clean water around the Nile River Delta. And how their solution was unsuccessful to their problem in the lack of knowledge towards the individuals perception of a new innovation. The second excerpt is about a small Aborigines tribe called the Yir Yoront in Australia. The Yir Yoront for many years used their stone ax as their main tool in using for producing food, constructing shelter, and heating their homes. Until that is when the replacement of the stone ax by the steel ax took form. The social structure of the culture affected the infrastructure which ultimately change the superstructure in the Yir Yoront tribe. The third excerpt is about the Skolt
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