Enacting memories through and with things: Remembering as material engagement

Abstract

For mainstream theories, memory is a skull-bound activity consisting of encoding, storing and retrieving representations. Conversely, unorthodox perspectives proposed that memory is an extended process that includes material resources. This article explains why neither representationalist nor classical extended stances do justice to the active and constitutive role of material culture for cognition. From Material Engagement Theory, we propose an alternative enactive, ecological, extended and semiotic viewpoint for which remembering is a way of materially engaging with and through things. Specifically, we suggest that one remembers when one updates their interactions with the world, a form of engagement previously acquired through sociomaterial practices. Moreover, we argue that things are full-fledged memories, since they accumulate and bring forth how we have materially engaged with them over different timescales. Last, we highlight the need for studies considering the cognitive ecologies where remembering takes place in its full complexity.

Toward an Enactive Conception of Productive Practices: Beyond Material Agency

“…MET has indeed attended to other aspects such as enactive signification and its emphasis on embodied activity (e.g., Froese, 2019;Malafouris, 2013, 2016, Overmann, 2019Parisi, 2019;Prezioso & Alessandroni, 2022;Poulsgaard, 2019;Walls, 2019;Woodward, 2019). One exception is Ransom (2019) who briefly discusses the dynamic and asymmetrical relationality of agency and the self-constitution of bodies in the enactive literature, and highlights the potential of MET further engaging these and other ideas in 4E approaches.…”

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19

“…That said, in “thinking extended temporalities” through the circulation of messages and images, we can reconnect the fragmented recollections of embodied experiences and speculate about potential corporeal encounters. This seemingly immaterial ethnographic conundrum is, by necessity, radically immersed in remembrances triggered by our interaction with the world that recalls a form of engagement formerly acquired through socio-material practices ( Prezioso & Alessandroni, 2022 ). Moreover, the recollections of bodily and sensorial experiences of specific socio-ecological realities are activated by emotions, feelings, and embodied actions ( Zubieta, 2022 ) that flow between virtual spaces.…”

An ecological approach to conceptual thinking in material engagement

“…By focusing on the dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and environment rather than on internal infor mation processing (Gallagher, 2017;Newen et al, 2018), contemporary perspectives redefine cognition as adaptive behaviour, which refers to "the sum of all flexible, skillful capacities that an organism possesses for dealing with the environment" (Heras-Escribano, 2021, p. 338). From such a viewpoint, various scholars have convincingly offered nonrepresentationalist explanations of cognitive phenomena, including motor skills and their development (Adolph, 2019;Travieso et al, 2020), situated anticipation (van Dijk & Rietveld, 2021), action planning (Keen et al, 2014;Ossmy et al, 2020), creativity and innovative action (Baber et al, 2019;Malafouris, 2014;Yakhlef & Rietveld, 2020), tool making and tool using (Malafouris, 2018(Malafouris, , 2021Nonaka & Stoffregen, 2020;Overmann & Wynn, 2019), conversation and linguistic thought (Di Paolo et al, 2018;Gallagher, 2020a;Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2021), memory (Prezioso & Alessandroni, 2023;Sutton et al, 2010), and social cognition (Abramova & Slors, 2015;De Jaegher et al, 2017;Lindblom, 2020).…”