In defense of materiality: Attending to the sensori-social life of things
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a defense of the concept of materiality in the face of Tim Ingold’s critique of the concept as part of his “efforts to restore anthropology to life” in Being Alive and elsewhere. While acknowledging the forcefulness of Ingold’s stress on the “liveliness” of materials, and doctrine of perception “as action” (not representation), it critiques the way he neuters the perceiving subject, abstracts the senses, disregards the sensuous pleasures of making, and elides the sensori-social life of things. Three case studies are presented by way of illustration: the sensorial archaeology of perception, the “exuberant materiality” of the Byzantine bas-relief metal icon, and the tactility of “ladies’ craftwork” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In place of Ingold’s ideal-typical figures – the rootless wayfarer, the skilled craftsman – this article brings out the situatedness of the human subject within a particular tradition, or sensory and social regime, and how this mediates their construction and perception of things and other persons.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".