Material Agency : Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach /
Contributor(s): Knappett, Carl [editor.] | Malafouris, Lambros [editor.] | SpringerLink (Online service).
Material type: BookPublisher: Boston, MA : Springer US : Imprint: Springer, 2008.Description: XX, 256 p. 49 illus. online resource.Content type: text Media type: computer Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9780387747118.Subject(s): Philosophy | Cultural heritage | Philosophy and science | Anthropology | Archaeology | Philosophy | Philosophy of Science | Archaeology | Anthropology | Cultural HeritageDDC classification: 501 Online resources: Click here to access onlineItem type | Current location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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E books | PK Kelkar Library, IIT Kanpur | Available | EBK4846 |
Where Brain, Body and World Collide -- At the Potter’s Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency -- Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory -- The Actor-Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001 -- Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time -- Intelligent Artefacts at Home in the 21st Century -- In Context: Meaning, Materiality and Agency in the Process of Archaeological Recording -- The Neglected Networks of Material Agency: Artefacts, Pictures and Texts -- Some Stimulating Solutions -- On Mediation and Material Agency in the Peircean Semeiotic -- When ANT meets SPIDER: Social theory for arthropods -- Agency, Networks, Past and Future.
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.
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