Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:21:55.277Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Material Imagination: An Anthropological Perspective

from Part I - Theoretical Perspectives on the Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2020

By
Maria Danae Koukouti  and
Lambros Malafouris
Edited by
Anna Abraham
Anna Abraham
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
Get access

Summary

Imagination is said to know no limits. Paradoxically the study of imagination is full of them. This chapter sets out to overcome some of those limits, adopting an anthropological perspective and rethinking imagination’s place in human life and creativity. We step back from the traditional cognitivist view and we try to underline the material bases and enactive character of imagination, challenging the disembodied, purely representational understanding of what it means to imagine. Building on Material Engagement Theory (MET) and focusing on the links between creativity and imagination, we make the case for material imagination: imagination not as a kind of decontextualized mental processing of internal representations, but as a situated dynamic sculpting of heterogeneous resources and processes (both internal and external). In this way the real and the imaginary no longer need to be split apart. Instead, their coming together forms the basis for the endless varieties of human creative gesture. We illustrate that with a simple line; a line imagined out of clay.

Keywords

Material imaginationcreativityMaterial Engagement Theoryenactive imaginationanthropologypottery making
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination , pp. 30 - 46
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abraham, A. (2016). The Imaginative Mind. Human Brain Mapping, 37(11), 4197–4211. doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23300.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Adams, F., and Aizawa, K. (2010). The Value of Cognitivism in Thinking about Extended Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 579–603.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Volume 1. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Bachelard, G. (1983). Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation.Google Scholar
Bachelard, G.(2014). The Poetics of Space. London, UK: Penguin Classics.Google Scholar
Benedict, A. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, UK: Verso.Google Scholar
Blake, W. (1965). The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by Erdman, David V.. Commentary by Harold Bloom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, M. (2012). Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castoriadis, C. (1997). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Draaisma, D. (2000). Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eco, U. (2007). Foucault’s Pendulum. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Elliott, D., and Culhane, D. (eds.) (2016). A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1951). Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford, UK:Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ganis, G., and Schendan, H. E. (2011). Visual Imagery. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2(3), 239–252.Google ScholarPubMed
Gaonkar, D. P. (2002). Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction. Public Culture, 14(1), 1–19.Google Scholar
Gosden, C., and Malafouris, L. (2015). Process Archaeology (P-Arch). World Archaeology, 47(5), 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchins, E. (2010a). Cognitive Ecology. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2, 705–715.Google Scholar
Hutchins, E.(2010b). Enaction, Imagination, and Insight. In Stewart, J, Gapenne, O, and Di Paolo, E. A. (eds.), Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 425–450.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutto, D. D. (2017). Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hutto, D., and Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2012). Toward an Ecology of Materials. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 427–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, T.(2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ingold, T.(2018). Back to the Future with the Theory of Affordances. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(1–2), 39–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kosslyn, S. M., Ganis, G., and Thompson, W. L. (2001). Neural Foundations of Imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2(9), 635.Google Scholar
Lacan, J. (2001). Ecrits: A Selection. London, UK: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malafouris, L. (2004). The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate. In DeMarrais, E, Gosden, C, and Renfrew, C (eds.), Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World. Cambridge, UK: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 53–62.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L.(2008). At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency. In Knappett, C and Malafouris, L (eds.), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Perspective. New York, NY: Springer, 19–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malafouris, L.(2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L. (2014). Creative Thinging: The Feeling of and for Clay. Pragmatics and Cognition, 22(1), 140–158.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L. (2016). Hylonoetics: On the Priority of Material Engagement. In Grigoriadis, K (ed.), Mixed Matters: A Multi-Material Design Compendium. Berlin, Germany: Jovis Verlag, 140–146.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L. (2018). Bringing Things to Mind: 4Es and Material Engagement. In Newen, A, de Bruin, L, and Shaun, G (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 755–771.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L.(2019). Mind and Material Engagement. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(1), 1–17.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L., and Koukouti, M. D. (2017). More than a Body. In Meyer, C, Streeck, J, and Jordan, J. S. (eds.), Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 289–303.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L., and Koukouti, M. D.(2018). How the Body Remembers its Skills: Memory and Material Engagement. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(7–8), 158–180.Google Scholar
March, P. L. (2019). Playing with Clay and the Uncertainty of Agency: A Material Engagement Theory Perspective. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(1), 133–151.Google Scholar
Newen, A., de Bruin, L., and Gallagher, S. (eds.) (2018). The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulsgaard, K. S. (2019). Enactive Individuation: Technics, Temporality and Affect in Digital Design and Fabrication. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(1), 281–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulsgaard, K. S., and Malafouris, L. (2017). Models, Mathematics and Materials in Digital Architecture. In Cowley, S and Vallée-Tourangeau, F (eds.), Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity, and Human Artifice. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 283–304.Google Scholar
Renfrew, C. (2004). Towards a Theory of Material Engagement. In DeMarrais, E, Gosden, C, and Renfrew, C (eds.), Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World. Cambridge, UK: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 23–31.Google Scholar
Sartre, J. P. (2017). L’imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris, France: Éditions Gallimard.Google Scholar
Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., Hassabis, D., et al. (2012). The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain. Neuron, 76, 677–694.Google Scholar
Simondon, G. (2005). L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble, France: Millon.Google Scholar
Sneath, D., Holbraad, M., and Pedersen, M. A. (2009). Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction. Ethnos, 74(1), 5–30.Google Scholar
Strathern, A., Stewart, P. J., and Whitehead, N. L. (2006). Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable. London, UK: Pluto Press, 1–250.Google Scholar
Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Suchman, L. A(2006). Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
van Dijk, L., and Rietveld, E. (2018). Situated Anticipation. Synthese, 1–23.Google Scholar
Walls, M., and Malafouris, L. (2016). Creativity as a Developmental Ecology. In Glaveanu, V. P. (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 553–566.Google Scholar
Willerslev, R. (2006). “To Have the World at a Distance”: Reconsidering the Significance of Vision for Social Anthropology. In Grasseni, C (ed.), Between Apprenticeship and Standards. Oxford, UK: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Willerslev, R.(2007). Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×