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  • How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement by Lambros Malafouris
  • Martha Blassnigg
How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement by Lambros Malafouris. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2013. 304 pp., illus. Trade ISBN: 978-0-262-01919-4.

In How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, Lambros Malafouris approaches key questions regarding humanity’s evolution as creative Homo faber from a fresh theoretical intervention originating in the coupling of current debates in philosophy and anthropology of mind with a shift toward object-oriented archaeological perspectives. The main critique, which is lucidly developed through the presented argument for Material Engagement Theory, is directed against representational and non-extended (“internalized”) models of the processes of the human mind and the failure to address the significance and meaning of human artifacts beyond mere inductive symbolism of neuroand anthropocentric perspectives.

The book starts off by laying bare some of the pitfalls of current cognitivism in the so-called brain sciences and related fields and their wider reverberance that impacts the understanding of human engagement with material culture. Approaches to the study of historical artifacts that merely focus on the study of objects in their signifying, symbolic character are thus revealed as inductive, teleological, but most importantly as a missed opportunity to more fully understand both the cognitive life of artifacts and the significance of material engagement in the cognitive shaping of the human mind in the course of evolution.

Drawing from humanities discourses, in particular cultural anthropology and philosophy of mind, among others the foundational intellectual pillars of the likes such as Bateson, Gell, Latour and Vygotsky, Malafouris shifts the focus from the human creative construction of artifacts and their symbolic interpretation to an equally distributed treatment of interactive engagements between humans and materials/objects/things and the consequent epistemological and ontological challenges this carries for readdressing key questions around “agency,” “intentionality,” “causality” and “action.” By building on Gell’s extension of intentionality beyond the human psyche into the ambience as a whole context of enactment, Malafouris shifts the focus away from the subjective and Searle’s representational intention to “intention in action” within a nonrepresentational treatment of material things. This move identifies objects and things as reciprocally coconstructive agents in the bringing forth of form, meaning and cognitive engagement.

Following the lucid account of the theoretical disposition that informs Material Engagement Theory with a specific view to the main thrust of argument in this book, Malafouris moves through an analytical and discursive exploration around Stone Age tools, prehistoric mark-making and contemporary pottery to explicate the dynamic flow between the organic and inorganic in creative, artisan processes, exposing the intertwinedness of mind and matter in the cognitive evolution of human consciousness. Early mark-making is revealed as a key facilitator or scaffolding for emergent human self-reflection, the ability to “think about thinking.” The ultimate question arising from this pertains, following Malafouris, to the “when and how” humans became fully aware of their (re-)mediations as selfreflexive vehicles rather than when they began to leave these trails. Consciousness, although increasingly emerging in the later part of the book, appears as a frequent silent backdrop to the discussion that foregrounds the cognitive interface with materiality. A particularly insightful move is Malafouris’s treatment of temporality in the way material things operate on radically different time scales “e.g. neural, bodily, cultural, and evolutionary,” which may stimulate the conceptual integration of qualitative time scales on ontological levels as, for example, Bergson had proposed in his own critique of neo-Darwinism at the beginning of the 20th century, through his treatment of extended cognition, whereby mind meets matter halfway during their perceptual enactment of their heterogeneous durations.

How Things Shape the Mind is a lucid and well-presented account of the state of the art in connecting an archaeology of mind with the study of material culture to develop a deeper understanding of relational ontology and the importance of mediation for human thinking and cognition more generally. This latter fertile quality of the book seems to justify some reflection beyond its immediate remit, usually taken as an asset of impact and interdisciplinary...

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