Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network
ISBN: 9780226558691
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Technology and Society;

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo's commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine , Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo's commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life--one with unique limitations and possibilities.

An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure--and the planet itself--will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.