How do we become who we are? How is it that people are so similar in the ways they differ from one another, and so different in the ways they are the same? Christina Toren's theory of mind as not only a physical phenomenon, but an historical one, sets out to answer these questions by examining how the material world of objects and other people informs the constitution of mind in persons over time. This theory of embodied mind as a microhistorical process is set out in the first chapter, providing a context for the nine papers that follow. Questions explored include the way meaning-making processes reference an historically specific world and are responsible at once for continuity and change, how ritual informs children's constitution of the categories adults use to describe the world, and how people represent their relationships with one another and in so doing come to embody history. Mind, Materiality and History has direct relevance to current debates on the nature of mind and consciousness, and demonstrates the centrality of the study of children to social analysis. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars with an interest in anthropological theory and methodology, as well as those engaged in material culture studies.

Mind, Materiality and History has direct relevance to current debates on the nature of mind and consciousness, and demonstrates the centrality of the study of children to social analysis.

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.

Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters stretching around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world--and how the world changed phrenology. This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is the first substantial account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history could help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

What is the relationship between mind and ideas on the one hand, and the material things of the world on the other? In recent years, researchers have rejected the old debate about the primacy of the mind or material, and have sought to establish more nuanced understandings of the ways humans interact with their material worlds. In this volume alternative approaches are presented, deriving from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. Contributors debate the significance of key thresholds in the human past, including sedentism, domestication, and the emergence of social inequality and their impact on changing patterns of human cognition, symbolic expression, and technological innovation. In its global coverage and its broad theoretical scope, this landmark volume offers an innovative and comprehensive assessment of current thinking and future directions.

An in-depth exploration of the interaction between mind and material world, mediated by language, image, and making—in design, the arts, culture, and science. In Material and Mind, Christopher Bardt delves deeply into the interaction of mind and material world, mediated by language, image, and the process of making. He examines thought not as something “pure” and autonomous but as emerging from working with material, and he identifies this as the source of imagination and creative insight. This takes place as much in such disciplines as cognitive science, anthropology, and poetry as it does in the more obvious painting, sculpture, and design. In some fields, the medium of work is, in fact, the very medium of thinking—as fabric is for the tailor. Drawing on the philosophical notions of the “extended mind” and the “enactive mind,” and looking beyond the world of material-based arts, Bardt investigates the realms in which material and mind interweave through metaphor, representation, projection, analogues, tools, and models. He considers words and their material origins and discusses the paradox of representation. He draws on the design process, scientific discovery, and cultural practice, among others things, to understand the dynamics of human thinking, to illuminate some of the ways we work with materials and use tools, and to demonstrate how our world continues to shape us as we shape it. Finally, he considers the seamless “immaterial” flow of imagery, text, and data and considers the place of material engagement in a digital storm.