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Article published In: Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture
Edited by Lambros Malafouris, Chris Gosden and Karenleigh A. Overmann
[Pragmatics & Cognition 22:1] 2014
► pp. 140–158

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Creative thinging

The feeling of and for clay

 | University of Oxford
Published online: 10 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22.1.08mal
Humans are organisms of a creative sort. We make new things that scaffold the ecology of our minds, shape the boundaries of our thinking and form new ways to engage and make sense of the world. That is, we are creative ‘thingers’. This paper adopts the perspective of Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris 2013) and introduces the notion ‘thinging’ to articulate and draw attention to the kind of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through and about things. I will focus more specifically on Creative thinging, or creative material engagement, exploring the importance of thinging for understanding our species unique capacity for inventiveness.
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2019. Playing with clay and the uncertainty of agency. A Material Engagement Theory perspective. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18:1 ► pp. 133 ff. DOI logo
March, Paul Louis
2021. Project Holocene: The Clayful Phenomenology of Jōmon Flame Pots. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
March, Paul Louis
2025. Need help blurring the boundaries of your process archaeology? Don’t use agential realism. Try playing with clay. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 24:3 ► pp. 583 ff. DOI logo
March, Paul Louis
2025. What is an art experience like from the viewpoint of sculpting clay?. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 24:1 ► pp. 273 ff. DOI logo
Parisi, Francesco
2019. Temporality and metaplasticity. Facing extension and incorporation through material engagement theory. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18:1 ► pp. 205 ff. DOI logo
Poulsgaard, Kåre Stokholm
2019. Enactive individuation: technics, temporality and affect in digital design and fabrication. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18:1 ► pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Richardson, Amy
2019. Pre‐Pottery Clay Innovation in the Zagros Foothills. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 38:1 ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Rietveld, Erik, Ronald Rietveld & Janno Martens
2019. Trusted strangers: social affordances for social cohesion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18:1 ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo
Walls, Matthew
2019. The Bow and Arrow and Early Human Sociality: an Enactive Perspective on Communities and Technical Practice in the Middle Stone Age. Philosophy & Technology 32:2 ► pp. 265 ff. DOI logo
Woodward, Martyn
2019. Metaplasticity rendered visible in paint: How matter ‘matters’ in the lifeworld of Human action.. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18:1 ► pp. 113 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2017. Joanna Sofaer . Clay in the Age of Bronze: Essays in the Archaeology of Prehistoric Creativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 224pp., 32 b/w illustr., 7 maps, 2 tables, pbk, ISBN 978-0-521-15536-6). European Journal of Archaeology 20:1 ► pp. 190 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2019. Mind and material engagement. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2020. Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things. Current Directions in Psychological Science 29:1 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2021. How does thinking relate to tool making?. Adaptive Behavior 29:2 ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2021. Making hands and tools: steps to a process archaeology of mind. World Archaeology 53:1 ► pp. 38 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2021. Mark Making and Human Becoming. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 28:1 ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2023. Enactychism: Enacting chance in creative material engagement. Possibility Studies & Society 1:3 ► pp. 300 ff. DOI logo
Malafouris, Lambros
2025. People are STRANGE: towards a philosophical archaeology of self. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 24:3 ► pp. 685 ff. DOI logo
Poulsgaard, Kåre Stokholm & Lambros Malafouris
2017. Models, Mathematics and Materials in Digital Architecture. In Cognition Beyond the Brain, ► pp. 283 ff. DOI logo
Poulsgaard, Kåre Stokholm & Lambros Malafouris
2023. Understanding the hermeneutics of digital materiality in contemporary architectural modelling: a material engagement perspective. AI & SOCIETY 38:6 ► pp. 2217 ff. DOI logo
Theiner, Georg & Chris Drain
2017. What’s the Matter with cognition? A ‘Vygotskian’ perspective on material engagement theory. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16:5 ► pp. 837 ff. DOI logo
van Dijk, Ludger & Erik Rietveld
2017. Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework. Frontiers in Psychology 7 DOI logo
Walls, Matthew & Lambros Malafouris
2016. Creativity as a Developmental Ecology. In The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research, ► pp. 623 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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