Microarchaeology, Materiality and Social Practice

The Materiality of Practice in Ancestral

Economies are strange beasts; in the idiom of The Market, they are said to perform, to be bullish or bearlike. Although few living in the twenty-first century conceive of the market in true animistic terms, the power, the prevalence, the fundamentality of market capitalism within our society imbue it with a vitality that is conducive to animistic tropes. Economies are foundational: humans canno...

Materiality and Organizing Social Interaction in a Technological World

Minds, Things, and Materiality

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be ‘systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’ (Malafouris 2004, 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the t...

Emerging Materiality

In this article we look at how materiality emerges from complex chains of mediation in creative software use. The primarily theoretical argument is inspired and illustrated by interviews with two composers of electronic music. We argue that computer mediated activity should not primarily be understood in terms of simple mediation, but rather as chains of complex mediation in which the dominatin...

Materiality , materialization

What is materiality? And is it of a different order from semiosis? In this commentary I reflect on the place of materiality—that quality of material phenomena—and materialization—the processes by which such qualities are actualized in social life—in Matthew Hull’s brilliant book, Government of paper (GoP). The analytic materiality is central to Hull’s ethnography, both theoretically (it informs...