1Since the rising wave of cognitive sciences, many researchers and deciders involved in science policy think that considerable progress in the history of knowledge is taking place before our very eyes. Furthermore, this development affects the supposed fundaments of knowledge itself. For a long time, what there was to be said about this subject was governed by epistemology. Today, it would seem that this epistemological reading has been dethroned by even stronger foundations located in the deepest part of the brain and in neurobiology, or in logic and in what is revealed in surprising computer simulations. Whatever the case, the social sciences do not seem to have anything major to say on the matter. Apparently, both epistemology and neuroscience do not need the social sciences to build their assertions and impose these as the final explanation.

2As well as performing the necessary and useful job of clarifying the effective contribution of cognitive science, researchers from all social science disciplines are letting it be known that their approaches have been seriously neglected. And the consequence of this is that the knowledge production process is being de-contextualised. As early as 1980, Edwin Hutchins showed that the content of arguments – and not just the logic behind them – had to be taken into account in order to understand the Trobriands’ reasoning.

3The cognitive anthropology tradition (D’Andrade, 1995) thus set about producing meticulous descriptions of thought as it is produced within social groups and their material culture. Along the same lines, Hutchins (1994, 1995) and many others (for example Traweek, 1988; Goodwin, 1995; Conein & Jacopin, 1994; Quéré, 2003) showed that reasoning cannot be understood without taking into account the institutions, organisations, collectives, materials and instruments involved. Hutchins introduced the notion of distributed cognition; Suchman (1987) that of situated action. Their work demonstrated that rigorous protocols implemented within a laboratory (of psychology or neurology) are not enough to really get to the bottom of the knowledge process. Analysis, calculation, judgement, memory, synthesis, etc., are all activities that depend on the interactions between different people, between and with various instruments and social conventions as well as with the world (socionature). However, these authors do not dissolve cognitive processes in ultimate sociological or material explanations, or combinations of logic, psychology, social issues or artefacts. On the contrary, they explore cognitive processes by reporting on the way problems and cognition are transformed as a person or an instrument interact with them or shake them up.

5This first issue of the Cognitive Anthropology Review will, we hope, spark high-quality multi‑disciplinary exchanges following on from what has just been outlined. Its editorial team has chosen to open the debate with a number of texts that were put forward to us and which each provide an entry point to the crux of the matter: the knowledge object. The object here is not simply an object to be known and which is the opposite of the subject, as in the Cartesian view of thought as opposed to things. It is more a question of the whole material assembly, a sort of clay from which knowledge is made.

6In a first article, entitled “From knowledge management techniques to cognitive anthropology”, Jean‑Pierre Poitou, former editor of the Technologie, Idéologie, Pratique. Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances, shares his thoughts about knowledge management – often reduced to a combination of ideology and toolboxes. Unlike the prolific amount of literature praising the worth of “Knowledge management” or presenting the useful tips of managers and engineers on the subject, in his article Poitou suggests that knowledge management is a fundamental aspect of any cognitive activity. It is therefore neither a recent problem nor a new practice. On the contrary, knowledge management has a history in which the cognitive aspects of economic history and technological history are tied. According to him, cognitive anthropology establishes a theory of thought as knowledge management. It requires the study of production as a cognitive activity, a study that is confronted with the difficulty of conceiving the collective organisation of mental activities. From this point of view, Poitou suggests introducing several basic notions to fill in the gaps left by knowledge management theories. This, in particular, raises the question of how to report on the relative permanence of shared technical cultural heritage, without having recourse to the biological metaphors of a company’s or learning organisation’s memory. Poitou suggests focusing attention on the company’s technological basis – the “dead work” -, which is the foundation of cooperation as well as employee knowledge. With this in mind, the ability of employees to appropriate what a piece of equipment represents in terms of accumulated knowledge in order to transform this into productive activities corresponds to knowledge management. Rather than presenting the practical consequences resulting from this hypothesis, Poitou outlines here a number of notions, some old, on which a conception of cognitive relations between human beings and their tools can be based. He focuses on the knowledge management skills built from a set of methods – approach to the tool, questioning of the environment, accomplishing of activities, appropriation of the intellectual results acquired through the productive activity – and which are tied up in a cultural and social web. In this way Poitou explores the cognitive dimension of the social conditions of effective action.

7In their article entitled “Humans and non-humans: appraisal of the stage reached in collective sociology”, Rémi Barbier and Jean-Yves Trepos deal less directly with the question of knowledge than with that of action. They suggest renewing action and actor theories and, notably, lending an ordinary sense of objectiveness to the latter. In particular, the idea is to report on actor engagement possibilities and the diversity of an actor’s relations with objects, as this diversity reflects the modes of social existence of objects. Barbier and Trepos thus put forward the idea of first assessing the work carried out within the framework of “object sociology”, the ambition of which is to refill the sociological universe with objects that form part of the subtle construction of society. Starting with Boltanski and Thévenot’s model of the “skilled ordinary person” (1991) and the notion of “basic actor endowment” (Dodier, 1993), the notion of “ordinary sense of objectiveness” put forward by the authors takes into account the opening up of actors to a plurality of ways in which to appropriate an object depending on the pragmatic constraints of an action. They therefore strive to describe the minimum equipment behind this ordinary sense of objectiveness in the face of an ambiguous world: an obviously constructed reality as much as a consistent entity that leads to a form of realism. The authors suggest that the world’s consistency depends both on the ability of people to relate to it in a suitable manner and the holds that such a world offers. In the second part of the article, the authors come back to several notions proposed for the analysis of collectives, assemblies of human beings and non-human beings whose political dimension they underline. They look in particular at three types of assembly: the engagements of people and things, technico‑economic networks and object worlds.

8The article written by Nicolas Veyrat, Eric Blanco and Pascale Trompette, entitled “The incorporated object and the logic of situations. Spectacles through history and their different uses”, offers an original case study. Starting with the rising focus on new communicating objects increasingly coupled with individuals –objects that are carried like the mobile phone or chip card, or incorporated objects–, the authors discuss the dissolving frontier between human beings and the technological equipment they use. These information and communication-providing prostheses lead one to wonder whether modern man is not some kind of “hybrid being”. To explore this idea, the authors set out on a historical detour to understand how a now ordinary and common object through which the subject looks out at the world – a pair of spectacles – has acquired varying thicknesses and uses, during a period spanning more than ten centuries. The article focuses on the study of how the socio‑technical configurations of this tool, which is engaged in world knowledge, have been transformed. The authors show how, moving from the status of a radically external object to that of a device that was held, then worn, then incorporated and which has finally vanished from sight, this tool has attached itself to the knowing subject. The analysis emphasises the variety of types of coupling between subjects, technological artefacts and situations of use. It then leads the authors to extend their analysis of corporal artefacts to the activities in which they are inserted and to their socio‑material ecology. They underline the continuing issues arising from this coupling, by moving between discontinuous situations of use. They suggest that a socio-technical configuration can be thought of as a hybrid assembly of technical and human elements, forever fragile and rebuilt according to the situation.

9Béatrice Cahour, Christian Brassac, Pierre Vermersch, Jean-Léon Bouraoui, Bernard Pachoud and Pascal Salembier also put forward an original empirical study entitled “Study of the subject’s experience in order to assess new technologies; the example of mediated communication”. They embark on an assessment of the use of new communication technologies by focussing their attention both on the cognitive processes and the emotional processes. The proposed case study describes the use of an audio and video communication instrument for remote mobile interactions. It underlines several cognitive/emotional phenomena at work, and in particular the uncomfortable dissymmetry generated by the tool in the way visual exploration is controlled, the difficulty people have following the unforeseeable movements of the other person, and the offsetting of concurrent emotional states. The communicating objects are here introduced as objects of study rather than problematic and explanatory elements. The study helps to shed light on their engagement in action via an original experimental device. As well as examining these communicating objects, the ambition of the article is also to introduce a new dimension, that of affectivity, in the assessment of technological devices via a data collection technique that was put to the test in the process. The article discusses how this experiential methodology can contribute to the study of emerging affects and their functional role during activity, in relation to the action and the decision.

10Finally, coming back to the starting point and the question of collective knowledge processes, Christian Brassac offers his personal thinking in an article entitled “A praxeological vision of knowledge architectures in organisations” in which he discusses the work of Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet (2004). For these authors, one an economist and the other a geographer, knowledge is first a practice that actualises itself within communities woven from interactions between humans and mediated by artefacts. They develop a theory rooted in several human and social science disciplines. They open up an area for discussion about knowledge in organisations. As a social psychologist of collaborative cognitive processes, Brassac puts forward a reading of their work in which he underlines the epistemological convergence around the paradigm of situated action. Knowledge is linked to human activity the analysis of which is broken down into several non-disassociated levels: individual, inter-individual, organisational and societal. Brassac first outlines the path followed by the authors and explores their conceptual references. He then shows how their apprehension of the knowledge‑knowing” pair (knowledge as an object and process) links these authors to cognitive anthropology. Brassac shows how their position lends an apparently fertile conceptual basis to their field of study.

11With this first issue, we hope to launch a multi-disciplinary debate about the way objects are apprehended in the understanding of cognitive processes. Moving away from representationalist and cognitivist approaches to knowledge, the idea is also to adopt a cold stance to approaches to the phenomenon that review it either in terms of the individual or a collective. In particular, it is a question of apprehending collectives as assemblies from which individual support, social frameworks or material aspects cannot be excluded. On the contrary, the idea is to explore the richness of approaches that look at different configurations, what emerges from these and how they are transformed.