Reading :: People are STRANGE

 People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness

By Lambros Malafouris

The link above goes to MIT Press, where you can download this book for free as a PDF. I suggest doing so if you’re interested in Material Engagement Theory (MET) or the link between artifacts and consciousness more broadly. 

I previously reviewed Malafouris’ How Things Shape the Mind, in which he considers how archaeologists treat the mind and suggests MET as an alternate approach grounded in Hutchins, Clark, and Latour. I also reviewed his PhD student Antonis Iliopoulis’ book Early Body Ornaments and the Origins of our Semiotic Mind, which applies MET along with Peircean semiotics. This current book (published 2026) builds on that previous work. 

In Chapter 1, “Selfbound and STRANGE,” Malafouris explains that humans realize self-becoming through the process of Situated TRANsactional GEnesis, at the intersection of mind and matter. He argues that humans enact a self-bounded life world (umwelt) (p.3) He approaches consciousness as a continual process that is codependent on a material world: a system that “emerges in the form of a heterogeneous hylonoetic field (from the Greek hyle for ‘matter’ and noesis for ‘intelligence’” (p.5). He gets here by emphasizing the process of becoming over being: “what we see or experience as an object is actually a process (i.e., self-becoming)” (p.8); “the human condition is in a permanent state of incompleteness,” i.e., “anthropoeisis” (p.10). Thus a “process archaeology of mind” has two characteristics: It “emphasizes the active role of things in human cognitive life” and “sees thought processes as hylonoetic fields — that is, mindscapes extending into the extra-organismic environment” (p.11). He uses the term “thinging” to describe how things around us become part of our minds; thinking is considered a multisensory mode of material engagement (p.12) rather than a passive act of representation (p.13). This brings us to STRANGE:

• “Situated” “denotes codependency of the ‘situated’ on its ‘situation’ and of the ‘situation’ on what is ‘situated’”
• ”TRANsactional” “denotes relations in which the relata only become what they are after their interaction”
• ”GEnesis” “denotes the generative ecology of continuous creation, i.e., becoming” (p.16)

Regarding the second point, he says, “Thinking is a joint transactional accomplishment of the fusion of people and things” (p.21; cf. Hutchins). Meanwhile, culture is understood as “a compound of material forces and energies that mingle and assemble, allowing us to become what we are” (p.25). 

In STRANGE, “humans display a selfbound mode of becoming” (p.29), extending beyond the brain or the organism to the environment around it. 

With this background, he moves to Chapter 2, “Outline of a Theory of Material Engagement.” Using the example of doodling, he says, “Our most habitual actions (psychical or physical) are experienced and become constituted where brain, body, and culture conflate” (p.47). And “Humans think by constructing material signs and memory traces … primarily by using their bodies” in ways that are enacted, not just externalized (p.49). Thus he argues for “a radical continuity between cognition and material culture” (p.50). His unit of analysis for studying human thought is a metaplastic recursive relationship (p.54). To illustrate, he analyzes how a potter makes pottery from clay (p.58 et passim). 

In Chapter 3, “Anthropos: Beyond Nature and Culture,” he asks: “What makes us human?” (p.65). Or: “What mode of becoming are we?” (p.68). His overarching working thesis is that although other organisms show signs of intelligence, such as octopuses, only humans are selfbound (p.74). 

This brings us to Chapter 4, “How Humans Become.” If humans are selfbound, not products of nature or culture, what is human becoming? His position is that — contra Vygotsky — we don’t need to posit a break between evolution and history or between biological and cultural evolution (p.89). Humans become through creative engagement with the material world; for us, creativity and meaning-making are existential conditions (p.90), for “we construct and transform the conditions of our own becoming” (p.91). 

In Chapter 5, “Metaplasticity and Human Incompleteness,” he argues that plasticity and an openness to creative evolution are distinct features of our species (p.95). By metaplasticity, he means the relationship between neural and cultural plasticity (p.98). Contra Geertz, he says, culture is not made of symbols; it is a cognitive ecology grounded in action and material engagement, i.e., “thinging” the world rather than interpreting it (p.103). The mind’s primary function, he says, is not to represent but to form rhizomes with the world (p.104). 

Chapter 6, “What is This ‘I’ that I Know?”, considers the self and postulates three types of self-knowledge: the ecological self, the interpersonal self, and the extended self (pp.112-113). This brings us to agency: The sense of agency is uniquely human, he says, but agency itself is shared across humans and nonhumans as a property of material enactment (p.117). He continues this thread into Chapter 7, “Beyond This ‘I’ That I Know,” considering individuals and dividuals (p.146) and concluding that we cannot separate biological and social aspects of self (p.151).

Chapter 8, “Self-Bounding,” gets to the question of human situatedness. Is a situated body more (i.e., extended through prosthetics) or less (incomplete) (p.158)? He argues with Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia that objects are “hypotheses of action,” with enactive potential. “Things and material environments constitute the ecology that sets our bodies in motion” (p.164). The self only makes sense as a bounding process inside a hylonoetic field of active exploration and sensorimotor engagement; “selfbounding is a tool of relatedness between brains, bodies, and things” (p.169). The self is a self-bounded assemblage (p.170) that is constantly re-self-bounding (p.172). 

Chapter 9, “The Situated Person Perspective,” considers situatedness, which is considered relatedness “captured from the perspective of a process ontology that prioritizes becoming over being” (pp.176-177). He returns to the example of the potter, who has a situated body that engages in a process of dynamic enskillment (p.182). 

In Chapter 10, “Tools for the Self and Body: The Prehistory of ‘Me’,” he examines stone toolmaking (knapping) and body decorations, both of which “constitute an ecology of selfhood” (p.196). Based on these, he argues for two levels of self-binding: causal and intentional/temporal (p.211). 

Chapter 11, “Digital Selves,” uses the term “digital self to refer to those aspects of human consciousness constructed or performed as we engage in or immerse inside this new virtual lifeworld” (p.229). It represents an extension of the process of self-bounding. 

Chapter 12, “Epilogue,” wraps up the book, leaving us with the claim that humans become by creating (p.252).

Quite a read. I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am generally on board with the distributed/extended cognition perspective described here, and I like how the author has surveyed so much literature and illustrated it with so much material. He has spent a lot of time working out MET and its implications for cognition, agency, and selfhood. I also appreciate the focus on processes rather than objects, something that he has in common with dialectical approaches. On the other hand, I felt worn down by the many neologisms, which sometimes felt as if they were standing in for concepts that had already been established under different names. More than anything, I was overwhelmed by the amount of territory covered. So even though I have written the review, I think I will need to reread it along with the book to feel as if I have really gotten it down.

Should you read this book? If you have been interested in the things that interest me — questions of how the cognitive, social, and cultural interact materially in the human experience — definitely. If you have been intrigued by Latour, Hutchins, Clark, Deleuze & Guattari, Bateson, Geertz, or Vygotsky, sure. If you’re interested in how to understand reading and writing as material practices, probably.