L Malafouris
Biographic Data
| ID | 23009 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Malafouris |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Malafouris |
| SIGNATURE | MALAFOURIS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2140-4998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 141 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
People are STRANGE: Towards a philosophical archaeology of self
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 …
Steps to an EnvironMental health
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 sur…
Rethinking the “we” in “we” intentionality: Intention-sharing with —and not simply about —things
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 inse…
Re-thinging Embodied and Enactive Psychiatry: A Material Engagement Approach
Emerging consensus among enactivist philosophers and embodied mind theorists suggests that seeking to understand mental illness we need to look out of our skulls at the ecology of the brain. Still, the complex links between materiality (in broadest sense of material objects, habits, practices and environments) and mental health remain little understood. This paper discusses the benefits of adopting a material engagement approach to embodied and e…
Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging
Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging is being proposed as a method designed to facilitate the heightened sensitivity needed for the anthropological study of the relationship between making and thinking, during the creative engagement with form-generating materials. Technically, this objective is achieved through the juxtaposition of perspectival view points on the process of making. We follow the ways of the hand using a combination of multimodal vi…
La pensée et les choses: Pour une psychologie matérielle
Nous vivons et nous pensons à l’intérieur d’un monde fait de choses fabriquées et de choses trouvées. Pourtant, les recherches psychologiques se sont peu intéressées à la relation entre la cognition et la culture matérielle : l’influence diachronique des choses dans la vie mentale humaine et leur potentiel de transformation demeurent peu étudiés. La plupart des psychologues considèrent les choses comme externes et passives, comme les objets sans …
Understanding the hermeneutics of digital materiality in contemporary architectural modelling: A material engagement perspective
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 layer…
Enactychism: Enacting chance in creative material engagement
This paper reflects on the meaning of chance and the impact that the occurrence of ‘accidents’ have in the creative process. I draw insights from two main sources: material engagement theory and the art of ceramics. In particular, based on observations from my comparative anthropological study of creativity in pottery making I present a process-oriented enactivist vision of chance as a meaningful coincidence where flow and form diverge from the n…
Where the touching is touched: The role of haptic attentive unity in the dialogue between maker and material
This paper, drawing on research from the ‘HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making’ project (sponsored by the ERC), will attempt to show how a focus on the temporality of touch and the tactility of making can help us disambiguate the often discussed, but little understood, dialogue between maker and material. Our main thesis is that with increasing levels of skill, tactile perception plays an active role in transforming a mere …
Mark Making and Human Becoming
This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of…
Process archaeology
Making hands and tools: Steps to a Process Archaeology of Mind
We can only understand what is it to be human by understanding the modes of human becoming. This paper looks at the creative aspect of human becoming taking hands and tools as the focus of reference. I advocate a process archaeology of mind where thinking is thinging. Human cognitive becoming is cast in terms of metaplasticity and creative material engagement. Humans are plastic creatures indeterminate and incomplete, or else, always about to bec…
An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing
"The ability to look at one's face in the mirror and the ability to find one's self in the mirror are two quite different things. The former is a natural capacity that humans share with other animals; the latter is an acquired skill that only humans can master. The craft of mirror-gazing,despite its relevance to daily life is barely understood. An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing provides a metaphysical manual to u…
Mind, Time, and Material Engagement
The study of material culture is changing the way we perceive and study the past, as well as how we understand the process of human becoming. This chapter proposes that a focus on the phenomenon of material engagement provides a productive means to situate and integrate evolutionary, historical, and developmental processes. The material engagement approach brings with it a relational conceptualization of human cognition as profoundly embodied, en…
Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things
We live and we think inside a world of things made and found. Still, psychological science has shown little interest in understanding the exact nature of the relation between cognition and material culture. As a result, the diachronic influence and transformative potential of things in human mental life remains little understood. Most psychologists would see things as external and passive: the lifeless objects of human consciousness, perception, …
Cognitive Archaeology
Homo faber Revisited: Postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory
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…
Bringing things to mind: 4Es and Material Engagement
Human intelligence and its evolution have always been inextricably linked with the material forms people make. Archaeology and anthropology may well testify that human beings are not merely embedded in a rich and changing universe of things; rather, human cognitive and social life is a process genuinely mediated and often constituted by them. The specific details, varieties, and forms of that process are not well understood and demand a cross-dis…
Situated Cognition
Situated cognition examines how the human mind is affected by being in a physical body and a natural and sociomaterial environment, influencing how a person perceives, learns, knows, reasons, decides, and acts. Within the generic term “situated cognition” are various distinctions in which cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, distributed, dynamical, or enactive. In this entry, these views of cognition are explored through influential works i…
Mind and material engagement
Material Engagement Theory (MET), 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 (2013) I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special …
Metaplasticity and the Primacy of Material Engagement
Humans (not just brains) have been evolving as relational self-conscious beings that undergo situated ontogenetic histories and lead creative cognitive lives. More than just evolving (in the restricted Darwinian sense of variation under natural selection), we have been altering our own developmental paths by making and changing the material means by which we engage the world (in a more extensive sense that blends Bergsonian creative evolution wit…
Process archaeology (P-Arch)
We advocate a Process Archaeology (P-Arch) which explores modes of becoming rather than being. We advance three theoretical postulates we feel will be useful in understanding the process of becoming. And then six temporal propositions, with the latter arranged from the briefest to the longest timescale. We lay down the basic conceptual foundation of our approach using the example of pottery making and we follow the process of creativity in betwee…
Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay
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 …
Creativity, cognition and material culture: An introduction
Preview this article: Creativity, cognition and material culture: An introduction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/pc.22.1.001in-1.gif
Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
Process archaeology (P-Arch)
We advocate a Process Archaeology (P-Arch) which explores modes of becoming rather than being. We advance three theoretical postulates we feel will be useful in understanding the process of becoming. And then six temporal propositions, with the latter arranged from the briefest to the longest timescale. We lay down the basic conceptual foundation of our approach using the example of pottery making and we follow the process of creativity in betwee…
Mind and material engagement
Material Engagement Theory (MET), 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 (2013) I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special …
Mark Making and Human Becoming
This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of…
Beads for a Plastic Mind: The ‘Blind Man's Stick’ (BMS) Hypothesis and the Active Nature of Material Culture
In this article I employ the example of the ‘Blind Man's stick’ (BMS) in order to redraw the traditional boundaries that separate brains, bodies and things. It is argued that the functional anatomy of the human brain is a dynamic bio-cultural construct subject to continuous ontogenetic and phylogenetic remodelling by behaviourally important and socially embedded experiences. These experiences are mediated and sometimes constituted by the use of m…
Process archaeology
Making hands and tools: Steps to a Process Archaeology of Mind
We can only understand what is it to be human by understanding the modes of human becoming. This paper looks at the creative aspect of human becoming taking hands and tools as the focus of reference. I advocate a process archaeology of mind where thinking is thinging. Human cognitive becoming is cast in terms of metaplasticity and creative material engagement. Humans are plastic creatures indeterminate and incomplete, or else, always about to bec…
Ceramics (As Containers)
This article focuses on the importance of ceramics in material cultural studies. It proceeds to say that ceramics are considered a key feature of human material culture because of what they are taken to represent in economic, technological, and evolutionary terms. The innovation of taking the plastic medium of clay and marrying it with pyrotechnology to create irreversibly a resilient object — usually in the form of a container, has frequently be…
Re-thinging Embodied and Enactive Psychiatry: A Material Engagement Approach
Emerging consensus among enactivist philosophers and embodied mind theorists suggests that seeking to understand mental illness we need to look out of our skulls at the ecology of the brain. Still, the complex links between materiality (in broadest sense of material objects, habits, practices and environments) and mental health remain little understood. This paper discusses the benefits of adopting a material engagement approach to embodied and e…
Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: Technology, language and cognition in human evolution
Archaeological and palaeontological evidence from the Early Stone Age (ESA) documents parallel trends of brain expansion and technological elaboration in human evolution over a period of more than 2 Myr. However, the relationship between these defining trends remains controversial and poorly understood. Here, we present results from a positron emission tomography study of functional brain activation during experimental ESA (Oldowan and Acheulean)…
Why religion is nothing special but is central
It is proposed that explaining religion in evolutionary terms is a misleading enterprise because religion is an indissoluble part of a unique aspect of human social organization. Theoretical and empirical research should focus on what differentiates human sociality from that of other primates, i.e. the fact that members of society often act towards each other in terms of essentialized roles and groups. These have a phenomenological existence that…
At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency
Beads for a Plastic Mind: The ‘Blind Man's Stick’ (BMS) Hypothesis and the Active Nature of Material Culture
In this article I employ the example of the ‘Blind Man's stick’ (BMS) in order to redraw the traditional boundaries that separate brains, bodies and things. It is argued that the functional anatomy of the human brain is a dynamic bio-cultural construct subject to continuous ontogenetic and phylogenetic remodelling by behaviourally important and socially embedded experiences. These experiences are mediated and sometimes constituted by the use of m…
The sapient mind: Archaeology meets neuroscience
Introduction - The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience 1. Neural correlates of Early Stone Age tookmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution 2. Tool use, communicative gesture and cerebral asymmetries in the modern human brain 3. Biology is only part of the story ... 4. Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of the mind 5. Wild agency: nested intentionalities in cognitive neuroscience and archaeo…
Ceramics (As Containers)
This article focuses on the importance of ceramics in material cultural studies. It proceeds to say that ceramics are considered a key feature of human material culture because of what they are taken to represent in economic, technological, and evolutionary terms. The innovation of taking the plastic medium of clay and marrying it with pyrotechnology to create irreversibly a resilient object — usually in the form of a container, has frequently be…
How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement
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 philos…
Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay
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 …
Creativity, cognition and material culture: An introduction
Preview this article: Creativity, cognition and material culture: An introduction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/pc.22.1.001in-1.gif
Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
Metaplasticity and the Primacy of Material Engagement
Humans (not just brains) have been evolving as relational self-conscious beings that undergo situated ontogenetic histories and lead creative cognitive lives. More than just evolving (in the restricted Darwinian sense of variation under natural selection), we have been altering our own developmental paths by making and changing the material means by which we engage the world (in a more extensive sense that blends Bergsonian creative evolution wit…
Process archaeology (P-Arch)
We advocate a Process Archaeology (P-Arch) which explores modes of becoming rather than being. We advance three theoretical postulates we feel will be useful in understanding the process of becoming. And then six temporal propositions, with the latter arranged from the briefest to the longest timescale. We lay down the basic conceptual foundation of our approach using the example of pottery making and we follow the process of creativity in betwee…
Bringing things to mind: 4Es and Material Engagement
Human intelligence and its evolution have always been inextricably linked with the material forms people make. Archaeology and anthropology may well testify that human beings are not merely embedded in a rich and changing universe of things; rather, human cognitive and social life is a process genuinely mediated and often constituted by them. The specific details, varieties, and forms of that process are not well understood and demand a cross-dis…
Situated Cognition
Situated cognition examines how the human mind is affected by being in a physical body and a natural and sociomaterial environment, influencing how a person perceives, learns, knows, reasons, decides, and acts. Within the generic term “situated cognition” are various distinctions in which cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, distributed, dynamical, or enactive. In this entry, these views of cognition are explored through influential works i…
Mind and material engagement
Material Engagement Theory (MET), 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 (2013) I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special …
Homo faber Revisited: Postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory
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…
Mind, Time, and Material Engagement
The study of material culture is changing the way we perceive and study the past, as well as how we understand the process of human becoming. This chapter proposes that a focus on the phenomenon of material engagement provides a productive means to situate and integrate evolutionary, historical, and developmental processes. The material engagement approach brings with it a relational conceptualization of human cognition as profoundly embodied, en…
Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things
We live and we think inside a world of things made and found. Still, psychological science has shown little interest in understanding the exact nature of the relation between cognition and material culture. As a result, the diachronic influence and transformative potential of things in human mental life remains little understood. Most psychologists would see things as external and passive: the lifeless objects of human consciousness, perception, …
Cognitive Archaeology
Mark Making and Human Becoming
This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of…
Process archaeology
Making hands and tools: Steps to a Process Archaeology of Mind
We can only understand what is it to be human by understanding the modes of human becoming. This paper looks at the creative aspect of human becoming taking hands and tools as the focus of reference. I advocate a process archaeology of mind where thinking is thinging. Human cognitive becoming is cast in terms of metaplasticity and creative material engagement. Humans are plastic creatures indeterminate and incomplete, or else, always about to bec…
An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing
"The ability to look at one's face in the mirror and the ability to find one's self in the mirror are two quite different things. The former is a natural capacity that humans share with other animals; the latter is an acquired skill that only humans can master. The craft of mirror-gazing,despite its relevance to daily life is barely understood. An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing provides a metaphysical manual to u…
Where the touching is touched: The role of haptic attentive unity in the dialogue between maker and material
This paper, drawing on research from the ‘HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making’ project (sponsored by the ERC), will attempt to show how a focus on the temporality of touch and the tactility of making can help us disambiguate the often discussed, but little understood, dialogue between maker and material. Our main thesis is that with increasing levels of skill, tactile perception plays an active role in transforming a mere …
Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging
Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging is being proposed as a method designed to facilitate the heightened sensitivity needed for the anthropological study of the relationship between making and thinking, during the creative engagement with form-generating materials. Technically, this objective is achieved through the juxtaposition of perspectival view points on the process of making. We follow the ways of the hand using a combination of multimodal vi…
Psychology (23 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Cognitive science (18 works) · Embodied and Extended Cognition (18 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Art (12 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (11 works)