Processes of Artefact Creation in the Hybrid-Reality Engaging with Materials through Material Oxymorons

Yet the nature of all these things must of course be physical since otherwise they could not impress our senses - for impression means touch, and touch means the touch of bodies. Lucrezio, "De Rerum Natura". The materiality of things represents the connection between our bodies and the physical world. However, in recent years, with the overlay of a new digital reality onto the existing physical one, materiality has extended its domain of existence into the virtual world through haptic technologies. The sense of touch is no longer restricted to a physical contact with any kind of "thing" existing in our world, but accessed through perception of it. By means of neurocognitive processes, which reproduce the sense of touch by stimulating particular areas of our brain, touch lost its direct and instinctive connection with the physical world to rely more on mnemonic processes of virtual perception that construct hybrid knowledge based on digital rather than physical stimuli. This paper investigates what the human relationship with things is in the age of human sense simulation. Also, what kind of sensuous relationship is established with our surroundings when the main territory of material investigation has shifted to the virtual, understood as "real"? This paper will attend to human-object/thing relationships via the concept of the "material oxymoron". An oxymoron is a figure of speech that juxtaposes elements that appear to be contradictory. The "material oxymoron" finds its hybrid materiality by means of the human’s perception of, and engagement, with things. By embracing the hybrid context (between the digital and the physical) in which we dwell, we would like to define a new kind of relationship between humans and objects/things using Malafouris' theory of “material engagement”. We will articulate the process through which material oxymorons are constructed, and consider the role of material engagement theory in explaining it. In the material oxymoron, the surface quality is no longer defined a priori in reference to information stored in the human brain, i.e. what we expect, but emerges from the process through which material oxymorons are created. We will therefore treat materials as mutable things, continually transformed by humans and material actants, rather than treating them as objects existing ad infinitum. By means of material oxymoron we aim to challenge a sensuous discovery of the physical whose outcome creates composite matter, i.e. a materiality that fosters human perception and engagement with the physical world

Where did anthropology go?: or the need for 'human nature'

I was recently asked the question: “Where did anthropology go? ” by a psycholinguist from a famous American university. She was commenting on the fact that she had tried to establish contact with the anthropology department of her institution, hoping that she would find somebody who would contribute to a discussion of her main research interest: the relation of words to concepts. She had assumed that the socio- cultural anthropologists would have general theories or, at least, ask general questions, about the way children’s upbringing in different cultures and environments would constrain, or not constrain, how children represented the material and the social world. She was hoping for information about exotic societies in order to gain a broader cross-cultural perspective. She was hoping that her enquiry about a topic that is inevitable in any discussion about culture would be equally central to the three disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology, and would therefore be an ideal ground for constructive co-operation, that is, one where the different parties could articulate and challenge the theories on which their different disciplines are built. In fact she found that nobody was interested in working with her, but what surprised her most was the hostility she perceived, caused, not only by the suggestion that cultural social anthropologists were interested in simple exotic societies, but even more by the idea that they might be interested in formulating and answering general questions about the nature of the human species and that, therefore, their work could be compatible with disciplines such as hers. The lack of any generalising theoretical framework within which her research interest might find a place is not surprising when we look at what kind of thing is done in many university departments under the label social or cultural anthropology. Take for example the interests listed on the web site of th