Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach

Abstract

Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach By Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris New York: Springer, 2008. 256pp. $99.00, ISBN 978-0-387-74710.Despite the volume's title, Material Agency moves beyond echoing Alfred Cell's 1998 call to approach artifacts as agents. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris assemble a group of essays, which emphasize interactions among agents, material or otherwise. The volume presents a varied group of studies, each connecting to a growing body of knowledge known as Actor Network Theory (ANT). ANT, as developed by Bruno LaTour and others, treats agency as a distributed property of agent networks. It concerns itself not only with the agent-nodes of such networks, but with their relations (such as that which exists between driver and automobile), framing those relations as hybrid entities. The volume approaches other distinctions in a similar manner, challenging commonsensical assumptions of division between mind and body, nature and culture, and, by extension, human and nonhuman. The authors emphasize differences as well, separating the concepts of intelligence and agency and conceptually disentangling things, undefined and amorphous artifacts, from named, and thus understood, materials. The volume serves as much then, to retool longstanding dichotomies as it does to generate new ones, aiming in all cases to encourage the development of nonanthropocentric perspectives of agency. However, in the process of refraining that notion its contributors generally gloss over issues of geographic scale and agent-network size, resulting in a certain degree of incommensurability among their case studies.Organized by theme, the volume treats material agency from cognitive science, interdisciplinary, and archaeological perspectives. It establishes the notion of embodied skill early on, applying findings m cognitive, psychological, and robotics studies to ethnoarchaeological and historical cases. Andy Clark reviews recent reconsiderations of human perceptual and action systems in neuroscience and robotics. His contribution reflects a shift in academic perspectives from reliance on the now dated software-hardware analogy to the adoption of concepts that embrace embodiment and distributed cognition. Malafouris taps research uniting people and materials in the process of skilled practice, where action precedes intention and materials engage human agents in a form of dialog. Citing potter interaction with raw material, he concludes that agency is not a fixed attribute of people or objects, rather that it exists as the flow of activity itself (p. 35). John Sutton follows by arguing that simultaneously distributed, embodied, and processual agencies ought, naturally, to have histories. He discusses several Early Modern artifact classes, evaluating the temporally- situated nature of their interactions with human agents.The volume reserves a fair amount of space for studies like Sutton's, which approach human understandings of nonhuman agents over various time scales. One of the volume's more dramatic shifts in scale occurs between the chapter of John Law and Annemarie Mol and that of Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, the former aiming to grant agency to sheep, the latter seeking to offer the same quality to long-lived stands. Law and MoI operate over a comparatively broad geography, analyzing the sizable agent-networks revolving around sheep affected by the recent British foot and mouth crisis. Describing the agency of individual, collective, and conceptual sheep in the same breath, they show little concern for the intersection of those notions with increasing rime scales (pp. 72-74). Jones and Cloke at least acknowledge the potential for problematic theorization of interacting agents over varying geographic and temporal extents. They discuss human interaction with tree places, clusters of trees that survive over the course of many human generations, noting the difficulty of matching tree-place cycles and human soc