The Totem’s Metaphor of Technological Knowledge

Current technological advancements have led humanity to profound changes in its ways of relating to the world, the body, and even the mind. In this work, we use, as a metaphor, the figure of the totem, which represents the ancestry of a collectivity. The totem is a symbol that carries the history, cults, and norms of a collectivity. Our totem is a semiotic construct: The Totem’s Metaphor of Technological Knowledge. For this, we employ a myth: Prometheus as the base of the totem. If the Totem’s Metaphor of Technological Knowledge expresses a semiotic construct of technological evolution, how is this construct elaborated? Our hypothesis is that if there is a social imaginary regarding the various forms of knowledge, this social imaginary can manifest in more sophisticated systems of semiotic constructs: scientific, and in our case, technological. Our goal is to interpret the totemic sign as a possible social imaginary of technological knowledge and relate it to technological evolution.