Event overview
Lambros Malafouris on "Anthropological reflections on the tension between predictive processing and improvisation"
ABSTRACT:
Humans are creative ‘thingers’. We make new things (in the broadest sense of the word) and think with and through them. My talk will be exploring the process of ‘creative thinging’ from the perspective of Material Engagement Theory. I start with a brief overview of the main assumptions of that theory for a continuity of brains, bodies and things, and the vision of thinking as thinging (thinking and feeling with and through things) that it embodies. I also briefly present Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging which is a methodology developed in the context of the ‘HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making’ project designed to facilitate the multimodal sensitivity needed for studying the material conditions and possibilities of creative material engagement. Using examples from my anthropological work with potters and ceramists I will attempt to disambiguate the creative dialogue between maker and material. I will use this example of the attentive and dialogic character of creative thinging (feeling of and for clay) to map out points of friction with Active Inference (AI) theory and Predictive Processing (PP) models. I identify three problems that need overcome for AI and PP models to succeed as explanations of real life creative processes and mind–body–world relations: a) the overreliance on abstract mathematical formalism; b) the problem of misplaced concreteness (I borrow the phrase from A.N. Whitehead), where computational models are mistaken for the real material processes they abstract, and c) the inference-grounding problem, which questions how generative models acquire meaning without reference to embodied, material conditions. Addressing those challenges, I argue that, rather than placing creative cognition in the service of the algorithm, we must put the algorithm into the service of the mind.
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY:
Lambros Malafouris is Professor of Cognitive and Anthropological Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology and Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford. His research is cross-disciplinary and focuses on the dynamic, relational interplay between mind, material culture, and environment. Through his Material Engagement Theory (MET), he argues that cognition is not confined to the brain but emerges through our ongoing, reciprocal engagements with the material world. He is the author of People Are STRANGE (MIT press, 2026), How Things Shape the Mind (MIT press, 2013) and An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing (Bloomsbury, 2020, with Maria Danae Koukouti). He has edited The Cognitive Life of Things (Cambridge 2010, with Colin Renfrew), The Sapient Mind (2009, Oxford University Press, with Colin Renfrew and Chris Frith), and Material Agency (2008, Springer, with Carl Knappett). Lambros Malafouris was also PI of HANDMADE funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Mar 2026 |
4:00pm - 5:00pm All are welcome |
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