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Abstract
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 with niche-construction). We create things that very often alter the ecology of our minds, re-configure the boundaries of our thinking and the ways we make sense of the world. The plasticity of the mind is embedded and inextricably enfolded with the plasticity of culture – I call that metaplasticity. This ongoing relational transaction at the heart of human becoming has long been recognized in archaeology, philosophy, and anthropology. It also seems natural in view of the way materiality conspicuously envelops our everyday life and thinking. Yet our understanding of the anthropological and evolutionary implications of this seemingly unique human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and extend our minds is severely constrained by several inherited conceptual splits that structure the way we think about the process of thinking in archaeology, anthropology, and beyond. This article explores how a neuroarchaeology of mind grounded on a theory of material engagement can help us to understand the changing prosthetic alignments (communicative, epistemic, or ontological) between brains, bodies, and things. Doing so, I want to highlight what is typically cast in the shadow and to re-instantiate the cognitive life of things and the priority of material engagement in the making and evolution of human intelligence.
Notes
1. Here I draw on various theoretical trends in embodied and situated cognition and more especially those of distributed cognition, extended mind, and enactivism (Hutchins Citation1995, Citation2008; Clark Citation1997).
2. Perhaps it can be argued that neuroscientists, themselves culture-bearers, often adopt the language of representation ready-made as if it refers to a natural state of how the brain operates.
3. For a good discussion of the problems and limitations of the proximate-ultimate dichotomy in evolutionary and developmental biology, see Laland et al. Citation2013.
4. As Geoffrey K. Aguirre (2014, 8) observes, discussing the limits of neuroimaging technologies: “While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits – as important as they are – are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies.”
5. We should also remind ourselves that the signal measured in functional magnetic resonance imaging “is a characteristic of blood rather than brain tissue” (Farah Citation2014, 19).
6. As Dreyfus (2002b, 420) remarks on the same issue it is highly unlikely, if not entirely unwarranted, that “particular brain states are correlated with particular items in the world, let alone that they have content, that is, that they represent such particular items under an aspect.”
7. Of course, one could speak of a triadic (Peircean) semiotic relationship and attempt to construct a neurosemiotic framework to deal with brain dynamics and the so-called “Symbol Grounding Problem” but that’s a different kind of project (for an archaeological application, see Iliopoulos Citation2015).
8. The term metaplasticity is used in neuroscience to describe higher-order properties of synaptic plasticity. It describes the ways in which change in the plastic state of neurons is affected by previous patterns of pre-synaptic and post-synaptic activity. In the present context, the meaning of the term is extended to refer to the properties of the enactive relation between brain and culture (Malafouris Citation2013).
9. Similarly Nancy Munn’s (1986) practice-oriented ethnography in The Fame of Gawa proposes that if praxis makes time then given that people in Gawa engage in different life practices they also have different conceptualizations of time.
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Notes on contributors
Lambros Malafouris
Lambros Malafouris PhD (Cambridge) is Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture at Keble College, and the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. His research interests lie broadly in the archaeology of mind and the philosophy of material culture. His recent publications include How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (MIT Press, 2013), The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind Cambridge: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (with Colin Renfrew, 2010), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach Springer (with Carl Knappett, 2008), and The Sapient Mind: Archaeology Meets Neuroscience Oxford University Press (with Colin Renfrew and Chris Frith, 2009).