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.
How Things Shape the Mind How Things Shape the Mind A Theory of Material Engagement Lambros Malafouris The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email
[email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. Set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malafouris, Lambros. How things shape the mind : a theory of material engagement / Lambros Malafouris ; foreword by Colin Renfrew. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01919-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Neuroanthropology. 2. Material culture. 3. Archaeology. 4. Cognition and culture. 5. Neuropsychology. I. Title. QP360.6.M35 2013 612.8—dc23 2012045908 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword by Colin Renfrew ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction 1 Chronesthesia, the prehistory of mind 1 Recasting the boundaries of the mind 2 At the tip of the blind man’s stick 4 What is the difference that makes a difference? 8 Setting the scene 10 The realm of material engagement 15 A synopsis of the book 17 I Cognition and Material Culture 2 Rethinking the Archaeology of Mind 23 In search of the ancient mind 23 Where is the mind? 24 Cognitivism 25 Re-presentation: Looking at the other side of the engram 26 Dismantling Hawkes’ ladder 31 3 The Material-Engagement Approach: A Summary of the Argument 35 How to carve mind at its joints 36 Boundaries, paths, and analytical units 36 Understanding evolvability: The developmental challenge 38 “Vital materiality”: How to take material culture seriously 43 vi Contents Metaplasticity 45 Material engagement: The analytical nexus 50 An ontological recommendation 51 II Outline of a Theory of Material Engagement 4 The Extended Mind 57 Beyond cognitivism: Thinking outside the brain The embodied mind 57