Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric ApproachCarl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris Springer Science & Business Media, 2008 M12 15 - 256 pages Agency is a key theme that cross-cuts a wide raft of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and beyond; yet it is invariably discussed separately behind closed disciplinary doors. Within archaeology, agency has been characterized as a uniquely human attribute, and a means of incorporating individual intentionality into theoretical discourse. In other domains, however, notions of non-human and ‘material’ agency have been finding currency, and it is our aim to introduce some of these themes into archaeology and develop a non-anthropocentric approach to agency. It is anticipated that such a perspective will not only help us achieve more convincing interpretations of the past, giving a more active role to material culture, but also throw new light on the changing role of artifacts in the present and the future. This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture. |
Contents
1 | |
An Argument for Material Agency | 19 |
Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory | 37 |
Cumbrian Sheep in 2001 | 57 |
Trees in Place and Time | 79 |
Intelligent Artefacts at Home in the 21st Century | 97 |
Meaning Materiality and Agency in the Process of Archaeological Recording | 121 |
Other editions - View all
Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach Carl Knappett,Lambros Malafouris Limited preview - 2008 |
Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach Carl Knappett,Lambros Malafouris No preview available - 2008 |
Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach Carl Knappett,Lambros Malafouris No preview available - 2010 |