Popular conceptions of ‘technology’ tend to associate that term with activities governed by science and involving important ‘hardware’ content; i.e., tools, devices, machines. Conversely, ‘technique’ would pertain to more mundane activities; built upon non-reflexive routines and implying more direct forms of engagements with materials. This view has been severely challenged for the last three decades. As stressed by Harcourt (1964) and sight (1987), the ‘technology’ label should more appropriately designate the ‘science of techniques’, which is above all ‘a science of human activities’ (Harcourt 1964: 28). In this chapter, I will accordingly use the term ‘technique’ and ‘technical practice’ in reference to any action upon matter, hereby conceived as a dynamic combination of both tangible (actors, actions, instruments, materials, energy ...) and intangible (knowledge, representations) components.
That being said, associating techniques with concepts such as ‘religion’ and ‘rituals’ may sound a bit unsettling, especially for a Western audience. Granted, we may all think of one or several examples of such association. The Christian cross, for instance, is the main component of a Roman killing technique used together to materialize a religious affiliation and what believers deem to be the core of the Christ’s message. Similarly, the design of the tireless tractor used in modern Amish communities has clearly been influenced by religious considerations (Morel 2002: 64–6). Apart from these obvious examples, however, a more consensus is that techniques are essentially utilitarian in nature: they aim at fulfilling basic needs, in the most efficient and rational way possible. Such a ‘standard view’ relegates social and symbolic preoccupations to the back of a ‘technical core’ supposedly governed by physical and functional constraints. Religious aspects, if any, would simply be adjunct to a set of practices and implements that develop essentially outside the cultural field.
Starting with Mass (1979 [1934]), social scientists have since then attempted sporadically to break the ideological covering under which techniques were buried. It is only by the late 1970s, however, that a new conception has started to be imposed as a viable alternative, thanks to a multiplication of anthropological, archaeological, and sociological case studies. What follows is a short overview of the way in which social sciences reinvested the technical domain and renewed it with a more culturally oriented conception of techniques that included its religious and ritual dimensions.
For archaeologists on both sides of the Atlantic, 1977 was the year two seminal papers on style came out, that would respectively mark the end and the beginning of an era. The first was by MartinWobst. It envisioned style as residing in the parts of an artifact relating to its participation in processes of information exchange. In other words, only visible, non-functional, and nontechnical parts of an artifact were deemed ‘stylistic’ and said to inform us about the deliberate marking of social boundaries. Although Worst did not address the issue of technology, his definition of style may be seen as the epitome of a duelist conception of human practices that clearly separates technique from human seminal papers on style seminal papers on style.
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