For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intriguing interplay between human identity and the objects we create.
When a potter makes a vase, what’s the best way to describe the imaginative process by which the vessel takes shape under the pressure of her fingers and the rotation of the wheel? A standard description might be that the potter thinks about what she wants to happen and then makes a series of motions and adjustments to create the final shape. A more poetic description might say the vase comes into being through a dialogue between what the artist intends and what the clay itself seems to want. Or, as cognitive archaeologist and Oxford University research and teaching fellow Lambros Malafouris puts it, “it is as if the potter’s intentions inhabit the clay and the affordances of clay bring forth the potter’s intentions.” So if the finished vase is seen as an expression of the artist’s self, where does that self reside: solely in her body, or are the self’s boundaries best considered more broadly, encompassing not just brain and fingers but also the artist’s interaction with material artifacts? Malafouris favors the broad view. In recent years he has helped to advance a conception of selfhood called Material Engagement Theory, which argues that who we are is inseparable from the artifacts that we create: we not only make things but are also made by them. It’s an idea that has profound implications for how we think about humanity’s past and how we navigate our present.
Cognitive archaeology — the study of the evolution of the human mind — is much more about processes than essences, Malafouris says. “My underlying theme is that of human becoming, rather than ‘becoming human,” he says. “I argue for an ongoing human becoming which remains unfolding — one that could be seen as an incomplete process rather than an end product called Homo sapiens.” In 2013 Malafouros published How Things Shape the Mind, a book-length exploration of the role of material objects in human cognition. He is currently finalizing the manuscript for a new book, SelfBound: The Making of Human Consciousness, which was produced in part through a writing grant from the John Templeton Foundation.