Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.

This chapter shows that language works as a physical tool by impacting how we perceive our body (interoception) and how we perceive and interact with the external world (perception and action). First, I contend that language might help us detect bodily inner signals and states . Then, I show that language recruits object affordances, the opportunities to act objects offer us, but that it does so in its own distinctive way. Language exploits previously originated structures and mechanisms, those of the motor system, but uses them flexibly. Consistent with this, I show that language shapes perception and object manipulation, extends the space we perceive as near, and modulates our perception of objects in space. Finally, using an example of the concept of color, I suggest that not only the faculty of language but also the different languages we use, through spoken words or signs, shape our world differently.

Building on the notions of markedness (which accounts for the special value attached to particular choices in language display) and affordances (which indicate what languages can be used for what purposes in specific contexts) in the Linguistic Landscape (LL), this chapter develops a social indexicality model to account for the role of language choices in pointing to communities of language users. These communities range from the local (such as graffiti crews or friendship groups) through various configurations of territory and community to the truly global. Language choices may make existential claims for marginalised social groups, and they allow for the status enhancement of local communities by enregisterment. Two case studies focus on territory and community. One presents a ‘village model’ in comparing the predominantly Protestant town of Kilkeel with the predominantly Catholic town of Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland, while the other examines ‘urban diversity’ with regard to displays of Greekness in Astoria (New York) and Greektown in Chicago. The chapter further examines the role of transient visitors and remote multinational organisations in shaping the LL.

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

Drawing on recent developments from translanguaging theory, we argue in this chapter that translating and interpreting are by default translanguaging practices of meaning-making, during which process multilayered “translanguaging spaces” are being constantly and accumulatively created by dynamic interactional “moments” (Li, 2011) between the translator/interpreter and the external environment within the broader social–cultural contexts. These emerging insights from the key tenets of the translanguaging lens give rise to the construction of a unified theory of translating and interpreting aptitude consisting of a Macro level, Meso level, and Micro level (i.e., the 3M model), each level subsuming multiple interplaying elements interacting dynamically to generate multilayered translanguaging spaces of meaning-making.

Chapter 3 is about the social and semiotic mediation of experiential grounds. In particular, the way people interrelate the dimensions and degrees of their sensations and instigations, or experience and action. It offers a continuous time semiotics of such processes and uses this to critique widespread notions of materiality, as well as to better theorize the notion of affordances. It builds a bridge between ecological theories of perception and pragmatist notions of meaning.

This chapter explores parallels between CALL and MALL and outlines how the technological affordances of various devices affect the ways in which they are used to achieve specific goals. The chapter describes the interrelationship of technology, research, practice and theory; outlines the evolution of mobile technologies and emphasises the importance of moving from affordance-based practice to pedagogy-based practice as technologies move through the hype cycle (cf. Gartner, 2016). The issue of push and pull modes associated with mobile technologies is outlined here, along with the ability of mobile devices to interact with other devices through a range of networking functions, the potential for mixed-reality learning and context-sensitive learning, and the use of other functions such as cameras and audio recorders for language learning. The chapter continues by pointing out some of the limitations of research on technology use in language education and then considers some of the complexities of both theory and practice in MALL in order to lay the foundations for the later chapters.

Much has been written about human error in the setting of medication safety; much less has been written about violations, which may be equally important and even more common. Violations may vary from and individual's failure to label a syringe to an organization's failure to invest in medication safety. Perhaps the most compelling challenge in this regard is lack of engagement by practitioners in the safety initiatives that exist within their organizations. This chapter includes a discussion of the 4 main reasons for violations: 1) rules must be violated in order for the work to be done; 2) a sense of powerfulness, that one can skillfully complete the job without needing rules; 3) violations represent short-cuts that allow the work to be done better or faster; 4) poor work planning, which results in having to invent the work process as one goes and solve problems as they arise. Reducing violations requires understanding why, and then fixing, the reasons for the violations. An understanding of violation in all its shades and a greater willingness to name this problem and to expect accountability for it within the context of a just culture may well be the key to improving medication safety in the future.

The process of medication management in anesthesia is both complicated (numerous steps) and complex, in that it requires continual adaptation to a continually changing environment. In addition, medication safety depends on systemic factors, some of which involve processes far from the clinical interface. The system in which medications are managed is complex, if only because humans are a key part of this system. The processes of human cognition are particularly complex, and include knowledge, evidence, information, wisdom and expertise. These processes are explored in some detail, including a discussion of short term and long-term memory. Each practitioner responds to an internally developed mental model of the current situation, which may differ considerable from that of other team members. An understanding of complexity and human cognition may often provide an explanation for failure in healthcare: such an understanding provides a foundation for our overall pursuit of medication safety.

Chapter 9 examines a second necessary extension of the analysis of social influence to a consideration of the effects of designed artefacts in social relations. The chapter starts with an elaboration of the notion of inter-objectivity: designed hardware permeates human social relations as infrastructure, tools, gadgets and instruments. How is different hardware used to implement modalities of social influence? Crowds have historically used barricades to enhance their power. People easily recognise the fait accompli, for example as a wall, installed in a collective effort of construction. Such installations provide boundaries and parameters of attitudes and behaviour afforded by design, but do so without prior consent. Legitimation is achieved post-hoc by cognitive dissonance in analogy to forced-compliance. Resistance to such faits accompli is introduced as a hitherto unrecognised modality of social influence. It functions to evaluate and to redesign hardware and systems in ways that correct the initial designs; resistance potentially innovates on the 'innovation'.

Three fundamental anthropologic dimensions are severely disturbed in anorexia nervosa: corporeality, spatiality and temporality. These dimensions constitute an existential form of anorexia which actualizes a disembodied subject in a purely physical world exhibiting rationalistic thoughts. We will not separate corporeality and spatiality, but indeed temporality. In the chapter we describe the most prominent characteristics.