How things shape the mind : a theory of material engagement / Lambros Malafouris ; foreword by Colin Renfrew.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction -- Chronesthesia, the prehistory of mind -- Recasting the boundaries of the mind -- At the tip of the blind man's stick -- What is the difference that makes a difference? -- Setting the scene -- realm of material engagement -- synopsis of the book -- I. Cognition and Material Culture -- 2. Rethinking the Archaeology of Mind -- In search of the ancient mind -- Where is the mind? -- Cognitivism -- Re-presentation: Looking at the other side of the engram -- Dismantling Hawkes' ladder -- 3. Material-Engagement Approach: A Summary of the Argument -- How to carve mind at its joints -- Boundaries, paths, and analytical units -- Understanding evolvability: The developmental challenge -- "Vital materiality": How to take material culture seriously -- Metaplasticity -- Material engagement: The analytical nexus -- ontological recommendation -- II. Outline of a Theory of Material Engagement -- 4. Extended Mind -- Beyond cognitivism: Thinking outside the brain -- embodied mind -- distributed-cognition approach -- Remembering through, or how a Linear B tablet helps you forget -- intelligent use of clay -- Were it to happen in the head: From "parity" to "complementarity" and beyond -- hypothesis of the constitutive intertwining of cognition with material culture -- Things matter: The coupling-constitution fallacy -- Being where? The locational fallacy -- affect of engagement -- 5. Enactive Sign -- Moving beyond representation -- fallacy of the linguistic sign -- Searching for the properties of the material sign -- enactive logic of the material sign -- Projections through matter -- Material anchors and integrative projections -- Making numbers out of clay -- Learning to count in the Neolithic -- material sign and the meaning of engagement -- 6. Material Agency -- Material culture and agency -- Toward a non-anthropocentric conception -- Actor-Network Theory -- argument for material agency -- Methodological fetishism -- Intentionality and secondary agents -- Agency and intentionality -- Rethinking "things" as agents -- Ask not "What is an agent?" but "When is an agent?" -- conceptual talisman -- III. Marking the Mental: Where Brain, Body, and Culture Conflate -- 7. Knapping Intentions and the Handmade Mind -- Homo faber. Prosthetic gestures -- tools of the Stone Age -- Where does the knapper end and the stone tool begin? -- Tools for a plastic mind -- "handaxe enigma" revisited -- Reassembling the mind of the toolmaker -- Enactive intentionalities: The merging of flesh with stone -- Tools are us: A "cyborg" species -- 8. Thoughtful Marks, Lines, and Signs -- Mark-making humans -- prehistory of mark making -- What is so special about these marks? The tyranny of modernity -- From "deliberateness" to "symbolic or representational intent" -- Were they symbols? -- What kind of line? Getting outside the engraver's mind -- Learning to see: On being conscious of marks and pictures -- liberation of sight -- Becoming symbol-minded -- 9. Becoming One with the Clay -- Thrown on the wheel -- At the potter's wheel: Agency in action -- Agency and "sense" of agency -- "I did it": The problem of agency -- Agency in pottery making -- Time, agency, and material engagement -- Situated bodies and the feeling of clay -- 10. Epilogue: How Do Things Shape the Mind? -- Methodological ramifications -- What is it to be human? -- Homo faber -- Homo symbolicus: When is a symbol? -- Unlearning modernity -- At the tip of the blind man's stick: "We have never been modern" -- spike of culture.

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

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