Material engagement

I reproduce a passage by Colin Renfrew on the theory of material engagement. He is writing from an archaeological perspective.

These observations come together to form an approach to the material record of prehistory that chooses to see past actions in terms of what we may term a process of ‘engagement’ operating between humans and the material world. This material engagement implies an emphasis upon informed and intelligent action, and also the recognition in such actions of the simultaneous application of cognitive as well as physical aspects of the human involvement with the world. Such actions have material consequences. This is an approach that endeavours to transcend the duality implied in those long-standing contrasts between mind and matter, soul and body, or cognition and the material world. The early production of stone tools, for instance hand-axes, offers an excellent example... The techniques of early lithic production might have been passed from one generation to the next without the use of language but by mimesis, through long processes of imitation and of practice, which is how many craft skills are passed on to this day. But these are skills that are not located entirely in the brain: we speak of a ‘skilled hand’, and it is in the hands and the body that the skills of the craft worker or, indeed, the sportsman seem to lie. For the experienced skier it is the long experience of the skis and of their contact with the snow, in different conditions, that counts. The skill of skiing, like that of surfing, does not lie in the brain; it cannot be learnt from a book. It is a product of engagement with the material world.

This approach, moreover, sees that human engagement with the world is not only knowledgeable but involves also the use of symbolic values with a social dimension that are specific to the society in question in its time and place...

Material engagement theory considers the processes by which human individuals and communities engage with the material world through actions that have simultaneously a material reality and a cognitive or intelligent component. It is concerned with what people actually do, in the course of actions that are meaningful and purposive. Their purposes as knowledgeable agents are the result of social motivations that arise in relation to their world-view. So they are at once both physical and mental...

The engagement process is seen as critical in shaping the paths of development and change within societies, and as a fundamental feature of the human condition. And while all evolutionary change, including that in other species, can be seen as one of engagement between the individual or community and the environment, it is the cognitive component that is particularly human and which introduces choice and decision (or ‘agency’) into what would otherwise be a process of natural selection.

Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (2007), p120-3.