This collection of essays concerns entanglement, defined here by Ian Hodder as “the dialectic of dependence and dependency between humans and things” (p. 235). Reviewing the paperback edition (2020) of a book that originally appeared in 2016 presents an opportunity to assess the contribution made with more perspective than is normally possible. For most edited volumes that begin with a conference session or—as in this case—a university course, lasting contributions may be provided by specific chapters that contribute theoretical framing (here, Stephen W. Silliman's chapter) or case studies of original, synthetic, or interpretive value (exemplified by chapters by Hodder and Stephen A. Mrozowski). Enduring audiences for books like this can also come from clusters of case studies dealing with one region, such as the Andean region featured in a strong group of chapters in this volume by Noa Corcoran-Todd, Justin Jennings and Willy Yépez Álvarez, and Francesca Fernandini.
But a retrospective review can also provide a vantage point for a more analytic response to the conversation that led contributors and editors to participate in a project like this one. Reading these essays five years after they first appeared, the question they raise is how we should understand the concept of “entanglement,” which Hodder began developing a decade before this book was first published, and which was described in 2011 in “Human-Thing Entanglement: Towards an Integrated Archaeological Perspective” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17:154–177).
Running through all the chapters is a tension between the idea of entanglement being a theoretical entity that we might treat as a model or heuristic, as a method or theory. Silliman notes that Hodder called for an entanglement theory but argues that it is not a theory because although it may “describe, guide, criticize, interrogate, and represent the past,” it may not “explain, interpret, or categorize it” (p. 39). In their introduction, editors Der and Fernandini repeatedly characterize entanglement as a metaphor. This proposition reappears in many, but not all, the chapters that follow.
Yet these are not as easily separated as might appear. At one end of the spectrum, we might place Paul J. Lane's chapter, in which an examination of Charles Darwin's image of the “entangled bank” anchors a poetic description of domestication in East Africa. A salutary reminder that thinking about entanglement has a long history, this chapter nonetheless provides more than mere metaphor; here, entanglement is a historical process that entraps humans and nonhumans.
When entanglement is understood primarily as metaphor, it seems to be a vivid image of messiness that increases over time through historical contingency and that weaves a net around people, and that in colonial situations meshes together threads with different origins and histories. In this sense, Silliman and Corcoran-Todd see it as replacing the concept of hybridity. Yet it could still be characterized as a label for a process; as Silliman writes, “a better term for the process otherwise inherent in the Australian notion of ‘shared’ histories” (p. 36). A metaphor, then, in the sense of a word bringing with it a different batch of associations.
The power of a terminological shift like this is not to be undervalued. Yet in the original discussion of entanglement, it was something much more robust: a historical process, not just a metaphor or even a model of a process. As Silliman (p. 39) notes, Hodder proposed entanglement theory as a way to unify a variety of theoretical agendas (agency, practice, evolution, history, and networks being the enumerated ones). Not surprisingly, then, in the chapter by Hodder, entanglement is not just a new label: it is a form of engagement through which humans and nonhumans become mutually dependent. As Hodder focuses on dependency in this chapter, he grapples with how history creates irreversible relationships.
Other contributions (by Michelle Hegmon and colleagues, and Dorian Q. Fuller and colleagues) that examine entanglement as a label for or alternative to the concept of path dependence similarly seem to be describing not a metaphor but a theoretical construct. The juxtaposition of entanglement with path dependency is instructive. With a decade's distance from the original articulation of entanglement, the productive equation of more processual and more poetic ways of thinking about historical, directional, yet unpredictable change emerges as one of the key contributions of this book. If that is entanglement as metaphor rather than theory, it is still productive today in ways that go beyond mere language, and it points to the ways that phenomena emerge in legible—if not predetermined—ways.
