Chapter 4 - Anthropologies of the Mechanical Arts

Summary

The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.