Entangled (eBook)

Ian Hodder is Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Previously he was Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He has been awarded several awards and honorary degrees. His books include The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük, The Archaeological Process (Blackwell), The Domestication of Europe (Blackwell), Symbols in Action and Reading the Past.

Epigraph ix

List of Figures x

Acknowledgments xii

1 Thinking About Things Differently 1

Approaches to Things 1

Themes About Things 3

Things are Not Isolated 3

Things are Not Inert 4

Things Endure over Different Temporalities 5

Things Often Appear as Non-things 5

The Forgetness of Things 6

What Is a Thing? 7

Humans and Things 9

Knowing Things 10

Conclusion: The Objectness of Things 13

2 Humans Depend on Things 15

Dependence: Some Introductory Concepts 17

Forms of Dependence 17

Reflective and Non-reflective Relationships with Things 18

Going Towards and Away From Things 21

Identification and Ownership 23

Approaches to the Human Dependence On Things 27

Being There with Things 27

Material Culture and Materiality 30

Cognition and the Extended Mind 34

Conclusion: Things R Us 38

3 Things Depend on Other Things 40

Forms of Connection between Things 42

Production and Reproduction 42

Exchange 43

Use 43

Consumption 43

Discard 43

Post-deposition 44

Affordances 48

From Affordance to Dependence 51

The French School - Operational Chains 52

Behavioral Chains 54

Conclusion 58

4 Things Depend on Humans 64

Things Fall Apart 68

Behavioral Archaeology and Material Behavior 70

Behavioral Ecology 74

Human Behavioral Ecology 80

The Temporalities of Things 84

Conclusion: The Unruliness of Things 85

5 Entanglement 88

Other Approaches 89

Latour and Actor Network Theory 91

The Archaeology of Entanglement 94

The Physical Processes of Things 95

Temporalities 98

Forgetness 101

The Tautness of Entanglements 103

Types and Degrees of Entanglement 105

Cores and Peripheries of Entanglements 108

Contingency 109

Conclusion 111

6 Fittingness 113

Nested Fittingness 114

Return to Affordance 115

Coherence: Abstraction, Metaphor, Mimesis and Resonance 119

Abstraction, Metaphor and Mimesis 120

Synaesthesia 124

Resonance 125

Coherence and Resonance at Çatalhöyük 132

Conclusion 135

7 The Evolution and Persistence of Things 138

Evolutionary Approaches 139

Evolutionary Ecology (HBE) 141

Evolutionary Archaeology 142

Dual Inheritance Theory 144

Evolution and Entanglement 147

Niche Construction 149

Evolution at Çatalhöyük 151

Conclusion 156

8 Things happen ... 158

The Complexity of Entanglements 159

Open, Complex and Discontinuous Entanglements 159

Unruly Things: Contingency 159

Conjunction of Temporalities 160

Catalysis: Small Things and the Emergence of Big Effects 163

Is there a Directionality to Entanglements? 167

Some Neolithic Examples 171

Macro-evolutionary Approaches 173

Why Do Entanglements Increase the Rate of Change? 174

Conclusion 177

9 Tracing the Threads 179

Tanglegrams 180

Locating Entanglements 185

Sequencing Entanglements - at Çatalhöyük 189

Sequencing Entanglements - the Origins of Agriculture in the Middle East 195

Causality and Directionality 200

Conclusion 204

10 Conclusions 206

The Object Nature of Things 207

Too Much Stuff? 210

Temporality and Structure 212

Power and Agency 213

To and from Formulaic Reduction 216

Things Again 218

Some Ethical Considerations 220

The Last Thing on my Mind 221

Bibliography 223

Index 245

"Entangledmay be Ian Hodder's most theoretically
ecumenical book to date. The discussion of the various current
approaches being used in archaeology, anthropology, and many other
disciplines makes this an extremely valuable work . . .
"Hodder has written a tremendously useful addition to the
literature on the relationship of people and things that deserves
close reading." (Current Anthropology, 1 August
2013)

"Ian Hodder has written an extremely interesting,
rigorously argued and intellectually adventurous book about the
nature of things. . . Readers working across the social sciences
and humanities, and particularly those working at the intersection
of the physical and human sciences, will find the messy openness of
Hodder's book vibrant and compelling."
(Critical Quarterly, 2 July 2013)

"Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students,
faculty, professionals." (Choice, 1 May
2013)

"The quantity and diversity of Hodder's readings are simply
astonishing. His new conception of material entanglements is going
to change the way archaeologists understand their
field."

- Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan



"Entangled is nothing less than a reframing of
archaeological enquiry into things. It is a fundamental,
first-principles rethinking of how archaeologists should understand
the world around them."

- Matthew H. Johnson, Northwestern University

"This book is a provocative and exciting contribution to
archaeological theory and beyond. Its central thesis is that
entanglement is both a condition of being in the world and a
process of linking entities together in networks or
assemblages. In charting a course across material, social,
and evolutionary domains, it provides a novel way of bridging the
Great Divide between the social and natural sciences."

- Bob Preucel, University of Pennsylvania