People Are STRANGE

A groundbreaking exploration of self-consciousness through material engagement theory, redefining what it means to be human in a constantly changing world.

The making of human consciousness and the question of self-becoming presents a remarkable complication along the continuum of sentient matter. Self-consciousness is an oddity that both unites humans with and differentiates them from other modes of conscious existence. Lambros Malafouris’s evocative proposal is that people are STRANGE, which stands for the process of Situated TRANsactional Genesis, by which self-becoming is realized at the intersection of mind and matter. This book breaks new ground by applying material engagement theory expertly to questions about self-location, the subject-object division, and the nature of self-boundaries.

Malafouris argues that self-bounding (the process by which human ways of being are assembled, owned, or else bound to form what we call self or person) is rarely confined to a singular body. Our boundaries shift in response to the changing material environments and our modes of creative material engagement. Moreover, it is the bounding of consciousness that allows the unbounding of human thought and imagination. Self-bounding is the precondition for a borderless mind. Self-bound is thought-unbound. The theoretical upshot is that, rather than conceiving of self-consciousness as internal and ontological distinct from the material world, we must approach it as a continuous process fundamentally codependent with it.1. Selfbound and STRANGE: Introduction and précis
PART I
2. Outline of a theory of material engagement
3 Anthropos: Beyond nature and culture
4 How humans become
5 Metaplasticity and human incompleteness
PART II
6 What is this “I” that I know?
7 Beyond this “I” that I know
PART III
8 Self-bounding
9 Towards a situated person perspective (SPP)
PART IV
10 Tools for self and the body: The prehistory of “Me”
11 Digital selves
12 EpilogueENDORSEMENTS

“Given Lambros Malafouris’s track record, it is not at all strange that he has provided an insightful and innovative rethinking of self and self-consciousness. His account is an archaeological and process-oriented one; it overturns classic Cartesian and cognitivist principles of being a self-entity in favor of a truly transactional self-becoming, and it opens up a new possibility for self-understanding.”
—Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis

“This is a beautiful book by one of our most inventive and profound thinkers. It is undisciplined because it transcends disciplinary limitations, and it is prohuman even as it resists all forms of anthropomorphism. This is a manifesto, but also an invitation, engaging the reader materially with the ways we become what we are, individually and as a species, in our material engagements.”
—Alva Noë, author of Action in Perception and The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We AreLambros Malafouris is Professor of Cognitive and Anthropological Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology and Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford. He is the author of How Things Shape the Mind (MIT Press) and is Principal Investigator of “HANDMADE: Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making” funded by the European Research Council.