Shapland, Michael;
(2021)
Material culture and consciousness: a thought experiment.
Time and Mind
, 14
(4)
pp. 517-535.
10.1080/1751696x.2021.1995267.
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Abstract
Archaeology has become good at using metaphors for the person-like properties of material culture, seeing objects as accruing life-histories and biographies. This paper seeks to further this debate by introducing an old concept – known as panpsychism – which has experienced a resurgence in modern physics. It holds that sentience is a universally distributed property of the material world, meaning that all matter must be, to some extent, conscious. This theory is applied to an existing study of the person-like characteristic of early medieval swords, as a first step in understanding that all of the objects with which we deal may have some quality of consciousness. One implication of this is the seriousness with which archaeologists can afford to take animist beliefs.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Material culture and consciousness: a thought experiment |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/1751696x.2021.1995267 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1751696x.2021.1995267 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
| Keywords: | Consciousness; extended mind; object biography; object agency; animism; panpsychism |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology > Institute of Archaeology ASE |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10189042 |
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