Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things Malafouris, Lambros
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
02/2020, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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We live and we think inside a world of things made and found. Still, psychological science has shown little interest in understanding the exact nature of the relation between cognition and material ...culture. As a result, the diachronic influence and transformative potential of things in human mental life remains little understood. Most psychologists would see things as external and passive: the lifeless objects of human consciousness, perception, and memory. On the contrary, my main argument in this article is that things matter to human psychology and should be taken seriously. Although things usually pass unnoticed, they are anything but trivial. Things have a special place in human cognitive life and evolution. We think “with” and “through” things, not simply “about” things. In that sense, things occupy the middle space in between what are usually referred to as mind and matter. Material-engagement theory provides a way to describe and study that middle space where brain, body, and culture are conflated.
Mark Making and Human Becoming Malafouris, Lambros
Journal of archaeological method and theory,
03/2021, Letnik:
28, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These ...questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.
An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present.
An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science ...views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality—the world of things, artifacts, and material signs—into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.
This paper presents the possible outline of a framework that will enable the incorporation of material culture into the study of the human self. To this end, I introduce the notions of extended self ...and tectonoetic awareness. Focusing on the complex interactions between brains, bodies and things and drawing a number of different and usually unconnected threads of evidence from archaeology, philosophy and neuroscience together, I present a view of selfhood as an extended and distributed phenomenon that is enacted across the skin barrier and which thus comprises both neural and extra-neural resources. Finally, I use the example of a gold Mycenaean signet ring to explore how a piece of inanimate matter can be seen (sometimes) as a constitutive and efficacious part of the human self-system.
Material Agency Malafouris, Lambros; Knappett., Carl
2008, 20080730
eBook
Agency is a key theme that cross-cuts a wide raft of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and beyond, yet it is invariably discussed separately behind closed disciplinary doors. Within ...archaeology, agency has been characterized as a uniquely human attribute, and a means of incorporating individual intentionality into theoretical discourse. In other domains, however, notions of non-human and material agency have been finding currency, and it is our aim to introduce some of these themes into archaeology and develop a non-anthropocentric approach to agency. It is anticipated that such a perspective will not only help us achieve more convincing interpretations of the past, giving a more active role to material culture, but also throw new light on the changing role of artifacts in the present and the future. This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture.
This paper aims primarily at two things: The first is to present an overview of the newly developed field of "neuroarchaeology" and discuss its theoretical grounding in Material Engagement Theory ...(MET) and the extended mind hypothesis. The second is to use the above overview as a basis for advancing some tentative proposals about the role that neuroarchaeology, by placing the mutual constitution of brain, mind, and culture in evolutionary perspective, can play within the field of cultural neuroscience and about the common benefits that can arise out of such a cross-disciplinary coalition.
Mind and material engagement Malafouris, Lambros
Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences,
15/2, Letnik:
18, Številka:
1
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Material Engagement Theory (MET), which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications ...for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In
How Things Shape the Mind
(2013) I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich and extend that vision and discuss its application to the study of mind and matter. I begin by laying out the philosophical roots, theoretical context and intellectual kinship of MET. Then I offer a basic outline of this theoretical framework focusing on the notions of
thinging
and metaplasticity. In the last part I am using the example of pottery making to illustrate how MET can be used to inform empirical research and how it might complement new research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.
How the boundaries of the mind should be drawn with respect to action and the material world is a core research question that cognitive archaeology shares with contemporary cognitive sciences. The ...study of hominin technical thinking, as in the case of stone tool making, is a good way to bring that question to the fore. This article argues that archaeologists who study lithic artefacts and their transformations over the course of human evolution are uniquely well positioned to contribute to the ongoing debate about the marks of the mental. Adopting the material engagement approach, I propose to replace the internalist vision of mentality, that is, the vision of a brain-bound mind that is using the body to execute and externalise preconceived mental plan through the stone, with an ecological-enactive vision of participatory mentality where bodily acts and materials act together to generate rather than merely execute thought processes. I argue that the latter participatory view changes the geography of the cognitive and offers a better description for the continuity of mind and matter that we see in the lithic record.
Abstract Philosophical preoccupation with the hard problem of self-consciousness often takes human becoming for granted. In archaeology, the opposite is the norm. The emphasis is on when and how we ...became human while the problem of self (how did the ability to think about one’s own self come about? ) is largely neglected. This article suggest that those two aspects of human becoming cannot be meaningfully disentangled: humans are both persons and members of a species. I argue that people are STRANGE. I use the acronym STRANGE to describe the Situated TRANsactional and GEnerative process by which the human species (nature) and the human self (culture) become co-constituted in the lived space of material engagement. I propose that to study this middle space of self-becoming a synergy of enactive and situated perspectives from philosophy and archaeology is needed. Drawing on material engagement theory I sketch out my vision of what this synergy entails based on the notions of self-bounding, enactive in/dividuation, and the situated person perspective. I use the archaeological examples of stone knapping (toolmaking) and early body ornamentation to substantiate some of the main issues and methodological challenges.
Humans, more than any other species, have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become ...constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us. This ongoing dialectic has long been recognised from a deep-time perspective. It also seems natural in the present in view of the ways new materialities and digital ecologies increasingly envelop our everyday life and thinking. Still the basic idea that humans and things are co-constituted continues to challenge us, raising important questions about the place and meaning of materiality and technical change in human life and evolution. This paper bridging perspectives from postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory (MET) is trying to attain better understanding about these matters. Our emphasis falls specifically on the human predisposition for technological embodiment and creativity. We re-approach the notion Homo faber in a way that, on the one hand, retains the power and value of this notion to signify the primacy of making or creative material engagement in human life and evolution and, on the other hand, reclaims the notion from any misleading connotations of human exceptionalism (other animals make and use tools). In particular, our use of the term
Homo faber
refers to the special place that this ability has in the evolution and development of our species. The difference that makes the difference is not just the fact that we make things. The difference that makes the difference is the recursive effect that the things that we make and our skills of making seem to have on human becoming. We argue that we are
Homo faber
not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.
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