Material Agency
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
Editors: Knappett, Carl, Malafouris, Lambros (Eds.)
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- Contributions from a wide variety of social scientists
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- About this book
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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.
- Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Where Brain, Body and World Collide
Pages 1-18
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At the Potter’s Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency
Pages 19-36
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Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory
Pages 37-55
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The Actor-Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001
Pages 57-77
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Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time
Pages 79-96
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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- Download Table of contents PDF (101.6 KB)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Material Agency
- Book Subtitle
- Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
- Editors
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- Carl Knappett
- Lambros Malafouris
- Copyright
- 2008
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Copyright Holder
- Springer-Verlag US
- eBook ISBN
- 978-0-387-74711-8
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-0-387-74711-8
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-0-387-74710-1
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-1-4419-4512-9
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XX, 256
- Number of Illustrations
- 49 b/w illustrations
- Topics
