Abstract

This article develops an argument for ‘entrapment’ as a heuristic of social process. Building on classic and contemporary ethnographies of traps and machine interfaces, the article offers the language of entrapment as an alternative to other idioms of complexity in social theory, such as ‘relations’, ‘entanglements’, and ‘assemblages’. The heuristic appeal of entrapment lies in its ability to kindle modes of description where place and landscape, the obligations of bodies and energies, and the haunting presences of predation and the uncanny remain immanent to social process. Moreover, the work that entrapments do is recursively entangled with anthropology’s own capacity for captivating, capturing, and making compatible further ethnographic descriptions.

Highlights

  • This article develops an argument for ‘entrapment’ as a heuristic of social process

  • “The appearance of the Sky Village,” explains Weiner (2001: 70), “fooled the young man into thinking he was in a human, social world; but the exchanges he subsequently enters into on the surface make known to him his incapacity for human relationship [his expression of grief at the sight of his dead brother]—they reveal that he is a ghost.”

  • The recursive strangeness of entrapments, as I have argued in this article, performs three types of work in anthropology

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Summary

Introduction

This article develops an argument for ‘entrapment’ as a heuristic of social process. Building on classic and contemporary ethnographies of traps and machine interfaces, the article offers the language of entrapment as an alternative to other idioms of complexity in social theory, such as ‘relations’, ‘entanglements’, and ‘assemblages’. Weiner draws upon the myth of the Sky Village to make a larger argument about the limits of relationality as a heuristic in social anthropology.2 The marsupial trap in which the sky girl falls holds in suspension—and simultaneously casts into relief—the limits between the human and non-human worlds.

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Conclusion

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