Acknowledgements
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Peter-Paul Verbeek and Dr. Tsjalling Swierstra. Dr. Verbeek, as principal supervisor of the thesis, has closely followed the development of this work right from the choice of the topic through the organization of the proposal to the write up of the chapters. This final product wouldn’t have been a reality without his relentless comments on each and every step of the analyses and interpretations I made. I am also very much grateful to Dr. Swierstra, my second advisor, for giving me very decisive comments on the proposal and the first draft of the paper. My gratitude also goes to all of the professors who introduced me to the various areas of philosophy of science, technology, and society. I cannot forget the warm reception and help I always get from Ms. Petra Bruulsema, Secretary of the Department of Philosophy. Ato Shiferaw Bekele, associate professor of history at Addis Ababa University, has generously assisted me in selecting archival materials for the case analysis as well as commenting on the third chapter of the thesis where I discussed historical narratives. Thanks Gash Shiferaw. My study was sponsored by Addis Ababa University. I would therefore like to acknowledge the support I received from the university. I would more specifically like to thank Dr. Bekele Gutema, then Dean of the College of Social Sciences, Professor Endeshaw Bekele, then Academic Associate President for Research, and Professor Andreas Eshete, President of the University, for facilitating the grant. I have also received a waiver for the program fee from the University of Twente. Great thanks for Ms. Dionysia Loman, Ms. Frances Leusink, Ms. Babs Bussmann, and Mr. Jan van Diepen for giving me all their support. Last but not least my thanks go to all my family members in Ethiopia. My wife Tigist Elias, my twin sons Alula and Abiy, have contributed a lot to my study by all their love and support. My special thanks go to my brother Shimels Kenaw. I do not have really enough words to express my thankfulness to him. He has done everything from sending me materials from Ethiopia to taking care of my family during my absence. Great thanks Shime. 2 PREFACE Drawing on the postphenomenological perspectives developed by Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek, this thesis will deal with the cultural translation of technological modernization and the technological mediation of cultures. Postphenomenology radically departs from classical phenomenology (as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Marleau-Ponty) by conceptualizing the field of human-world relation as a relation of mutual constitution and coshaping. Technological artifacts are part and parcel of this relation. In mediating this relation, technological devices actively modify or coshape it. This thesis will try to expand on this posphenomenological theory by extending its interpretive framework to a cross-cultural context where technologies get new cultural meanings while also actively mediating or coshaping culture. The paper has got four chapters. The first chapter deals with the conceptual framework and defines the research questions. Chapter two, after reviewing literature that deal with cultural preparation of technological modernization, presents the postphenomenological theory of technological mediation. This chapter also discusses the cultural mediation of technologies with particular emphasis on Ihde’s theory of technology transfer. Chapter three presents how technologies could be reconstituted into new cultural frameworks. This chapter critically reviews Ihde’s theory of technology transfer. The second part of the chapter is devoted to discussing a few examples from Ethiopia in light of the postphenomenological theory of technology. This section especially discusses how technologies Ethiopia imported during the end and beginning of the twentieth centuries was reconstituted into the social and cultural reality of the country. The fourth chapter focuses on the role of technologies in shaping culture. This chapter has also both theoretical and empirical analyses. Finally, we have a conclusion. Here, in addition to further critiquing various theories of technology transfer, I will present my own views and suggest that phenomenology calls for an elaborate theory of culture. 3 4 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter introduces the conceptual framework of the thesis and the research questions that it will be dealing with in subsequent chapters. As the title is suggestive of, the conceptual framework of the paper is the postphenomenological perspective. The whole project is an attempt to build on the postphenomenological perspective on the basis of philosophical discussion of the various forms that the perspective takes within cross cultural transfer of technological artifacts. In this respect, the first two subsections will try to provide us with preliminary definitions. An attempt will be made to define concepts such as postphenomenology and cultural translation. Equally central concern of this chapter is formulating the research questions of the study. Thus, the second section of the chapter will discuss the research questions. The third section third section will focus on methodological considerations. It will be here that we will discuss how to go about answering the research questions. We shall preview how to combine the theoretical discussions with the cases. Finally, we will embark on the organization of the remaining part of the paper. 1.1 Conceptual Framework This thesis aims at expanding the postphenomenological philosophy of technology and applies it to the cultural level of technological mediation. The postphenomenological theory has been developed by the American philosopher Don Ihde. This theory was later elaborated by Peter-Paul Verbeek within the broader context of other traditions and theories of philosophy of technology. In this section, I will introduce key concepts that I will use in this thesis. Section 2.1 deals with the meaning and development of postphenomenology. Section 2.2 will deal with the concept of cultural translation of technology and with a few preliminary questions related to technology transfer. 1.1.1 Postphenomenology In his book What Things Do, Verbeek traces back the roots of postphenomenology to classical phenomenology. For Verbeek one of the things that overshadowed classical phenomenology’s career was its attempt to describe reality itself. Verbeek argues that this could be 5 understandable in light of phenomenology’s reaction to the scientific claim that it is the only intellectual enterprise to fully describe and explain reality. Phenomenology then contended that while science can only provide a rational explanation of the world, phenomenology chose itself as a method that brings in the description of reality in its original form. It [phenomenology] correctly pointed out that the scientific disclosure of reality is not a disclosure of “reality itself” but always that of a quite specific kind – but from this fact it failed to draw the conclusion that no final contact with “true reality” is possible at all, and that therefore even “lived reality” is always liven in a specific way. (Verbeek 2005a: 105) Phenomenology can only surpass this futile search for the description of an original world if it comes to terms with the postmodern understanding that there is no such thing as one point of view. It must endorse the view that there are multiple points of view instead. The antidote for this phenomenological tendency to look for something residual is found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception. Like other phenomenologist philosophers before him, Merleau-Ponty is in fact known for presenting phenomenology as a method used to describe the world and he presented this method as an alternative to the scientific approach. This therefore might still leave him in the camp that claims for having true or original access to the world. “Where then does the remedy lie in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy?” one might ask at this point. Verbeek argues here that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the word “describe” was not actually used in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in the sense of claiming a “representation” of reality as something separate to humans. Merleau-Ponty does not, then, describe the world, but rather the way in which human beings comport themselves to it. The “things themselves” that he addresses appear to be not the things of the world but rather the relations between human beings and the world. (Verbeek 2005a: 108). For Merleau-Ponty the act of description is tantamount to examining the structures of the relations humans have to the world. His theory is therefore relational. In his theory, we have only a hyphenated relation in between humans their world. We have human-world, and not humans on the one hand and the world on the other. Merleau-Ponty writes: 6 My body is geared into the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world. (Quoted in Ihde 1990: 39) This Merleau-Pontean understanding is therefore one of the starting points for developing the postphenomenological perspective. But we still need to go a little further to bridge the gap between classical phenomenology and postphenomenology. Verbeek finds this connection in Edmund Husserl’s conception of intentionality and he takes the concept “intentionality” as a key word in converging the phenomenological understanding as one larger tradition in which we can find a common line of interpretation. Consciousness for Husserl exists as consciousness of something. And it is this “other- directedness” of consciousness that Husserl refers to as intentionality. Both Ihde(1990: 37) and Verbeek (2005a: 108-109) relate that Husserl has eventually hinted that his interpretation could further be extended way beyond the realm of consciousness and use it to describe human-world relations. In this human-world relation, consciousness seems to be only one aspect of the relation.