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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, and memory. On the contrary, my main argument in this article is that things matter to human psychology and should be taken seriously. Although things usually pass unnoticed, they are anything but trivial. Things have a special place in human cognitive life and evolution. We think “with” and “through” things, not simply “about” things. In that sense, things occupy the middle space in between what are usually referred to as mind and matter. Material-engagement theory provides a way to describe and study that middle space where brain, body, and culture are conflated.

This is a theoretical paper which presents a Distributed Cognition (DCog) perspective on reading that supplements existing approaches to account for phenomena that appear contradictory. The DCog approach moves understandings of reading beyond the individualistic, mental processing of text to a consideration of reading as situated, embodied material engagement that draws on multiple timescales. Drawing on the field of cognitive anthropology, the DCog framework situates reading within an ecology of three closely connected dimensions: 1) mind-body-material environment coordination, 2) distribution across a social group, and 3) distribution across time. By integrating cognitive, affective, sensory-motor, and cultural dimensions, this framework provides a robust approach to understanding contemporary reading practices in complex multimedia environments. The resulting conceptualisation of reading accounts for seeming disparities in existing empirical research without the need for ad hoc adjustments as new reading ecologies emerge, for instance with digitisation. It is also sufficiently simple to promote communication of research findings to practitioners in the field.

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 between the hand of the potter and the affordances of clay. This specific creative entanglement of flow and form on a fast bodily timescale provides our grounding metaphor for an archaeology of becoming over the long term. Subsequent propositions provide the basis for exploring issues of longer-term material engagement and change.

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 early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.

This paper seeks to understand the skills of operating automated manufacturing machines of the C19th as craft practices, employing externally powered and automated tools around which new cultures of practice emerged. We draw upon situated/embodied/enactive/extended/distributed (SEEED) approaches to cognition to explicate the sensibilities of these practices, as well as the history of science and technology, Anthropology, STS and related fields. Our case study is a body of work focused on embodied/ embedded knowledge in the textile industry – specifically in the making of machine lace. We conclude with a proposal for multi-modal museum exhibits that provide an understanding of know-how, kinesthetic/proprioceptive skills and procedures. The authors are both long term practitioners of crafts, both traditional and industrial (see bios). This experience informs the research at every step.

In this paper, we examine the role of materiality in human cognition. We address issues such as the ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause change in brain functions, and the spans of time required for brain functions to reorganize when interacting with material forms. We then contrast thinking through materiality with thinking about it. We discuss these in terms of their evolutionary significance and history as attested by stone tools and writing, material forms whose interaction endowed our lineage with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains.

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 enactive psychiatry. We propose that the material engagement approach can change the geography of the debate over the nature of mental disorders and through that help to develop theoretical and practical insights that could improve management and treatment for various psychiatric conditions. We investigate the potential role of Material Engagement Theory (MET) in psychiatry using examples of aetiologically different mental illnesses (schizophrenia and dementia) in respect of their shared phenomenological manifestations, focusing particularly on issues of memory, self-awareness, embodiment and temporality. The effective study of socio-material relations allows better understanding of the semiotic significance and agency of specific materials, environments and technical mediations. There is unrealised potential here for creating new approaches to treatment that can broaden, challenge or complement existing interventions and practices of care.

This paper introduces a new perspective on the constitutive role of material culture for memory using the Knossian Kamares pottery style as a case study. It challenges prevalent approaches in mainstream memory studies, which confine memory to individuals’ brains or minds, suggesting a deeper relationship between material culture and memory. Presenting a novel methodology rooted in cognitive archaeology to study the long-term making of Knossian Kamares decorations, I suggest that the Knossian Kamares pottery style is a transgenerational memory that enabled generations of artisans to remember, learn, and update technological skills and knowledge. I also claim that, in assuming this distributed, enactive, and non-representational stance on style as memory, it becomes evident that remembering is something we do: an active engagement that emerges with and through material culture in specific sociomaterial settings.

We examine the question of material agency as raised in material engagement theory (MET). Insofar as MET tends to highlight the causal roles played by extra-bodily material flows in human practices, the term “material agency” does not sufficiently distinguish cases in which these flows are part of an agentive engagement from cases in which they are not. We propose an operational criterion to effect such a distinction. We claim this criterion is organizational, i.e., systemic, and not causal. In the enactive account, agency requires three organizational conditions: self-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity. These conditions can have organic, sensorimotor, and sociomaterial realizations. The dance of human productive practices is indeed spread between brains, bodies, and the world, as MET claims, but it is distributed in an organized manner that involves constraints and norms at various scales. We put forward a relational and non-anthropocentric perspective toward an enactive approach to productive practices. We discuss some aspects of agentive ensembles rendered more intelligible by our proposal, including incorporation, soft assembly and non-decomposability, and the grounding of teleology normative processes at multiple scales. In this manner, we seek to continue the dialog between MET and enactive theory, beginning with the view that a situated system must realize certain minimal organizational conditions to be called an agent.

After several technological revolutions in which technologies became ever more present in our daily lives, the digital technologies that are currently being developed are actually fading away from sight. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are not only embedded in devices that we explicitly “use” but increasingly become an intrinsic part of the material environment in which we live. How to conceptualize the role of these new technological environments in human existence? And how to anticipate the ways in which these technologies will mediate our everyday lives? In order to answer these questions, we draw on two approaches that each offers a framework to conceptualize these new technological environments: Postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory. As we will show, each on their own, these approaches fail to do justice to the new environmental role of technology and its implications for human existence. But by bringing together Postphenomenology’s account of technological mediation and Material Engagement Theory’s account of engaging with environments, it becomes possible to sufficiently account for the new environmental workings of technology. To do justice to these new workings of environmental technologies, we introduce and develop the concept of “Technological Environmentality.”