Lambros Malafouris, People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, February 2026)

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Why did you write this book?

This book is about an oddity in the cognitive life of our species, that has puzzled me for a long time: self-consciousness, by that I mean, awareness of experiencing and of being the experiencer. The question that has puzzled me is how this remarkable capacity to experience and to reflect about one’s own self come into being, or else self-becoming. The questions that most interest me, from the point of view of cognitive archaeology, have to do with how different modes of human engagement with the material world relate to this capacity for self-knowledge and self-observation, that both unites and sets humans apart from other animals.

People Are STRANGE sets out to explore these questions, seeking to reclaim them from certain assumptions that hold them captive. For instance, too often, we look for the self as if it were a thing hidden inside the brain. The book’s key message is that self is not found, and cannot be explained by looking only inside the head. Instead, we should be looking into the making and material conditions of self-consciousness adopting as our unit of analysis the ‘middle space’ of material engagement: where brain, body, and culture conflate. Cognitive archaeology’s preoccupation with the changing forms and diachronic mingling of cognition and material culture can correct what other disciplines overlook or misrepresent about how consciousness come into being.

What’s the big idea, or key message?

The main idea is simple: the self is not something we have; it is something we do, an ongoing act of ‘self-bounding’ formed inside a lived suprapersonal space in which mind and matter are constitutively intertwined. The proposal is that humans display a selfbound mode of becoming. Self-bounding is the process by which human ways of being are assembled, owned, or bound into what we call ‘self’ or ‘person’. STRANGE (Situated TRANsactional GEnesis) names the process by which self-bounding is realised. We are situated because selves and situations co-create one another. We are transactional because people and things do not meet as fixed entities; they become what they are through their relations. And we are in constant genesis because the self is always unfinished – continually assembled, and remade through evolutionary, developmental, and historical processes.

My aim, writing this book, is to rethink the major processes and forces that bind humans to one­self from a material engagement perspective – that is, by taking seriously our material environment. The theoretical upshot of this book is, rather than conceiving of self-consciousness as internal and ontologically distinct from the material world, to approach it as a continuous process entangled and fundamentally codependent with it.

Why does it matter?

We are experiencing a period in human history where digital environments are becoming a new habitat for self-bounding, rapidly redesigning the ecologies of selfhood – smoothing away friction and replacing lived texture with algorithmic metrics – often without understanding what they are doing to our most intimate self-understanding. There is a lot of discussion on what new digital technologies and AI do for us or know about us. One urgent, and rather neglected question, is what kinds of selves they make possible.