Lambros Malafouris

The making of human consciousness and the question of self-becoming presents a remarkable complication along the continuum of sentient matter. Self-consciousness is an oddity that both unites humans with and differentiates them from other modes of conscious existence. Lambros Malafouris’s evocative proposal is that people are STRANGE, which stands for the process of Situated TRANsactional Genesis, by which self-becoming is realized at the intersection of mind and matter. This book breaks new ground by applying material engagement theory expertly to questions about self-location, the subject-object division, and the nature of self-boundaries. Malafouris argues that self-bounding (the process by which human ways of being are assembled, owned, or else bound to form what we call self or person) is rarely confined to a singular body. Our boundaries shift in response to the changing material environments and our modes of creative material engagement. Moreover, it is the bounding of consciousness that allows the unbounding of human thought and imagination. Self-bounding is the precondition for a borderless mind. Self-bound is thought-unbound. The theoretical upshot is that, rather than conceiving of self-consciousness as internal and ontological distinct from the material world, we must approach it as a continuous process fundamentally codependent with it.

Drawing on digital sensory ethnographic research with potters during the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, along with the literature on clay therapy, this paper explores how engagements with clay afford hedonic psychological wellbeing impacts. Adopting an embodied-enactive-ecological approach, we utilise Material Engagement Theory (MET) and the concept of therapeutic affordances to challenge internalist cognitive approaches and to argue for the active role of material engagements in shaping our affective states. We argue that clay’s materiality is central to such impacts and that wellbeing arises relationally through interactions between specific individuals, materials, and their environment. This paper discusses how the tactile, cohesive, and malleable materiality of clay, as well as the variability in how it can be engaged, allows for mindful, immersive and relaxing experiences, that positively contributed to the hedonic wellbeing of our participants. Additionally, we examine how interactions between potter and clay evolve through the development of skill, as their affordance space changes. Particularly, we highlight the complex nature of control with respect to the volatility of clay and pottery; we explore the tension between the desire for and the pressures of skilful production, we analyse the enjoyment of the processes of making, and discuss the permeability of distinctions between hedonic and eudemonic wellbeing.

What are bodily memories made of? Where do body memories reside and what forms do they take? What is the relationship between embodied memory and material culture? This paper adopts a material engagement approach and sets out to explore body memory as a skilful engagement with the material world. We examine the nature of body memory from a distributed, enactive, and transactional perspective. We use the examples of bicycle riding and pottery making to examine more closely what is changing in the way we understand bodily memory when we approach it from such a distributed and enactive anthropological perspective. Overall, we wish to make a case for the primacy of material engagement over body memory and to propose that the way a body remembers its skills is by re-enacting them inside the world using available forms of material culture and not by re-presenting them inside the brain.

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 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. 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.

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.

This paper aims to place the general thesis for a species-unique “shared” or “we” intentionality, against the theoretical background of the material engagement approach. We will argue that the human ability to enact and share intentions rests upon a relational and participatory foundation of situated activity where intentional transactions between humans as well as between humans and things (in the broadest sense of material environment) are inseparable from the situational affordances of their engagement. Based on that, the paper advocates for an ecological-enactive account of shared intentionality which understands material engagement as central to the evolution and development of human social cognition.

Despite the ‘embodied’ turn that gesture studies have been taking, the extent to which the body actually contributes to the realization of thought remains questionable. Due, in large part, to the preoccupation of ‘embodied cognitivism’ with co-verbal gestures, the material world and the gestures engaging it are usually left out of discussion. That said, there is a small but growing corpus of literature on the cognitive effects of gesture that seeks to account for the performative role of the body, as well as the scaffolding function of the physical world. The purpose of this book chapter is to outline the arguments presented by the main representatives of what we loosely call here ‘ecological’ approaches. Our goal for doing so is two-fold: i) to highlight the important insights gained about gesture through an ecological lens, and ii) to identify promising lines of inquiry for future research. What we identify as an approach suitably geared towards studying gesture, and especially its creative variety, is a theoretical framework grounded on the combination of Material Engagement Theory and Peircean semiotics.

In this paper I attempt to sketch a preliminary framework for understanding the cognitive basis of the engagement of the mind with the material world. I advance the hypothesis that contrary to some of our most deeply-entrenched assumptions the relationship between the world and human cognition is not one of abstract representation or some other form of action at a distance but one of ontological inseparability. That is, what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting an internal cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least, ex hypothesi.

What is the mind? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult to answer. Thus, the question remains open; nothing about it has been resolved, or has lost its freshness. Anthropology and archaeology have kept a close eye on this question. I proposed the blind man’s stick hypothesis as a simple but effective heuristic to overcome the inherited, unproductive conceptual split between the mind and the material world that constrains and imposes limits on our thinking about the process of thinking. In one sense, the example of the blind man and the stick asserts that material things matter; in another sense, the blindness of the person reminds us of a very important universal feature of the human mind that many tend to forget, or prefer to ignore: namely, its ‘incomplete’ nature.

For most archaeologists the meaning of prehistoric art appears to be grounded upon, if not synonymous with, the notion of representation and symbolism. This paper explores the possibility that the depictions we see already 30,000 years before present, for instance, at the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux, before and beyond representing the world, they first bring forth a new process of acting within this world and at the same time of thinking about it. It is argued that the unique ability of those early depictions to disrupt or question the ways the world is experienced under normal conditions makes possible for the visual apparatus to interrogate itself and thus acquire a sense of perceptual awareness not previously available.

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains.

This paper introduces "EnvironMentalism," a novel theoretical framework that foregrounds the constitutive role of material environments in shaping mental health and illness. Drawing on principles from Material Engagement Theory and situated cognition, we argue that mental disorders—exemplified by schizophrenia—cannot be fully understood without considering the dynamic and reciprocal interactions between brain, body, and the affordances of the surrounding physical environment. We distinguish between weak and strong versions of EnvironMentalism, advocating for the latter as a more integrative, process-oriented approach to the study of self-disorders. Strong EnvironMentalism challenges internalist models of psychopathology by conceptualizing the self as a relational and ecologically embedded process. Through empirical and theoretical examples, we demonstrate how this perspective can reconfigure our understanding of psychopathological phenomena and open new avenues for research and clinical intervention.

Material Engagement Theory, 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 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.

Humans are organisms of a creative sort. We make new things that scaffold the ecology of our minds, shape the boundaries of our thinking and form new ways to engage and make sense of the world. That is, we are creative ‘thingers’. This paper adopts the perspective of Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris 2013) and introduces the notion ‘thinging’ to articulate and draw attention to the kind of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through and about things. I will focus more specifically on Creativethinging, or creative material engagement, exploring the importance of thinging for understanding our species unique capacity for inventiveness.