problem is rather how to remember and transmit such counterintuitive ideas (Mithen
1998a, 104). It is only at this point that material culture enters into the picture. In other
words, religious ideas appear as the natural epiphenomenona of cognitive fluidity.
Religious concepts and ideologies are natural because they relate to the intuitive
knowledge regarding psychology, biology and physics, which are genetically encoded in
the human mind (Boyer 1993; 1996; Mithen 1998a). I do not wish to dispute that
altogether, however, I believe that those innate mechanisms are themselves insufficient to
bring about those religious concepts; i.e. they create the potential but do not instigate the
realisation of that potential. To claim the opposite is to assume that those concepts pre-
exist their actual objectification, not only temporally but also ontologically. This is
precisely the point where my disagreement with Mithen’s argument lies. Whereas Mithen
perceives material anchors in the conventional sense of external representations, I
propose they should be instead perceived as enactive signs, that is, as signs that bring
forth rather than simply represent a pre-existent concept (Malafouris 2007).
From such an enactive perspective, the capacity of cross domain conceptual
mapping that characterize the counterintuitive projections, of the type we discussed in the
above example, could not have been possible to realise in the absence of some ‘external
scaffolding’ such as the one provided by the figuration itself. Thus, the cognitive
significance of the Hohenstein-Stadel figurine is much more than a simple mnemonic
trick. More specifically, my argument is that although the cognitive efficacy of the
figurine may well be seen as that of a material anchor, this would be a material anchor
that enacts and objectifies, rather than represents, the conceptual blending between
intuitive and counterintuitive domains of experience (Hutchins 2005; Fauconnier and
Turner 2002). From this point of view, cognitive projections like those we see realised in
and through material culture are neither substitutes nor translations of pre-existing
concepts into matter. The iconicity of the image does not simply reflect visual
resemblances but rather establishes ontological ones; it is significant for what it does
rather than what it refers to as a message or metaphor. In our previous example, the
figurine serves as the tangible medium of integration between the domain ‘human’ and
the domain ‘animal’ so that the domain ‘supernatural creature’ can emerge. In other
words, ‘first’ and ‘second’ ordering anchoring are not the separate and discrete stages of
a ‘mentally’ driven sequential process. They are instead the continuous and interactive
parts of an extended cognitive system (Figure 26.3) that incorporates materiality in order
to solve the problem of the absent ‘representational stability’ (see also Hutchins 2005)
enabling thus the emergence of the transcendental stance.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the Caroline Malone, David Barowclough and
Simon Stoddart for their kind invitation to contribute to this volume and their editorial
comments. The research presented is sponsored by the Balzan Foundation.