How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement by Lambros Malafouris (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Brilliantly interesting and intriguing ! Although the theory may have its flaws, I would still highly recommend reading this book as this gives the reader a “new paradigm” in considering material culture in social science studies.

⭐Was really impressed by the wide range of knowledge the author drew upon to make his thesis. His writing is both accessible and thorough. In a way it is revolutionary, and yet at the same time feels like common sense.

⭐Quite easy to follow though the concepts are specific and detailed. Unless already researched in this and similar fields, there will be a lot of terms that are new or hard to understand, but the overall ideas come through. It actually caught my attention in different ways than other books. I felt like I was on the edge of understanding humanity while reading.

⭐Interesting.

⭐What total rambling joke. I found no less than 10 full page paragraphs. It takes 50 pages for him to tell you that his “theory” isn’t actually a scientific theory but “an explanatory path”. I’m sure this is great read for other Ph.D. Archeologists so if that is you, go for it. If not, stay away!!

⭐How things shape the mind represents a sum of the thoughts that the author, Lambros Malafouris, has developed over the course of his career, supplemented by the addition of new explanatory examples and unpublished chapters. The main objective of the book is to finally give body to the thesis of Material Engagement, real keystone that binds the many claims made by the author and that represents an interesting approach for both cognitive science and theoretical archaeology. Doing justice to each of the ideas discussed in the book is difficult in the space of a review and then it is necessary to focus on some of the core aspects.Malafouris proposes a theory of the engagement of humans and artefacts that combines elements of classic embodiment/extended mind with more radical aspects that aim at least to minimize the necessity of mental representations and computations in favour of dynamic human-artefact systems. He proposes a new theory of action, which ascribes agency not only to the human component, but also to the material one. In this way, materiality is not limited to the simple role of information deposit, but it actively alters the deep structure of the cognitive process by virtue of its properties. Material engagement thus becomes a necessary condition for the acquisition of new cognitive processes. From this premise it follows the application of Malafouris’ thesis in cognitive archaeology. The entire book concerns with the idea that the slow transformation of the mind, driven by material engagement, represents the engine of human cognitive evolution. The curved line that is painted on the wall of a cave during the Upper Paleolithic brings forth to consciousness the representation of the back of an animal and enables humans to perceive a new reality, which consists of pictorial images. Unlike the old model in cognitive archaeology, there is no need, therefore, to think that human are provided with a priori mental representations, inscribed by natural selection in the neural system, which are then applied to materiality in order to establish a meaning. In other words, it is not necessary to think of images of animals that are first created in the mind and then reproduced with the pigments on the wall. The image and its meaning emerge as a result of human action on the matter and through the matter itself. This enactive approach produces thus the possibility of perceiving images as representations and it gradually allows human beings to mentally manipulate the process of production of the same image and, gradually, to start think about what other people think of the images. This slow cognitive transformation is supported by phenomena of neural plasticity induced by experience, that lead also to restructuring of both the structural and the functional brain architecture. This opens up to new possibilities of technological development, which produce further neural alterations, creating thus a snow-ball feedback of mutual interactions (see also the notion of metaplasticity within the book ). The crucial question for the entire cognitive archaeology project becomes thus not only the “what” (i.e. the neural substrates required to produce a certain technology), but also the “how”. How is it possible to reach a certain technological expression, by means of going through earlier forms of material engagement? Which mind/artefact interfaces do represent necessary conditions for enacting the production of material symbols?

⭐essential reading and not only for those interested in archeology.

⭐Excellent book, if this is your subject area. Must Have!!

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