STUDIES IN HUMAN-THING ENTANGLEMENT Ian Hodder © 2016 by Ian Hodder. This is an open access book distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0 Published 2016. Cover image: Ralf Kaehler, Oliver Hahn and Tom Abel (KIPAC). Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement Ian Hodder Chapter 1 Introduction............................................................................................................1 Chapter 2 Human-Thing Entanglement: A Long-Term View............................13 Chapter 3 From Process to Practical Entanglement: Shifting the Scales of Inquiry.......................................................................26 Chapter 4 Adopting Agriculture in Order to Hunt Better: An Example of Entrapment and Path Dependency ........................44 Chapter 5 Power and the Poverty Trap........................................................................64 Chapter 6 Creativity and Disentanglement: The Origin of Darwin’s Origin......................................................................77 Chapter 7 Beyond Entanglement: The Role of Religion.......................................93 Chapter 8 (with Angus Mol) Network Analysis, Relational Costs and Benefits and the Measure of Entanglement..............................105 Chapter 9 Afterward: A Response to My Critics..................................................129 Bibliography.........................................................................................................151 4 Introduction 1 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Scott Haddow for help with the editing and layout of the text of this volume, to Birgit Meyer and Ben Arbuckle for helpful comments on chapters 7 and 4, and to Patricia McAnany for bibliographic help with Chapter 5. Chapter 2 is a version of an article published in New Literary History, 45(1), 19-36, copyright © <2014> Johns Hopkins University Press. Chap- ter 8 was initially published by Springer in 2015 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, DOI 10.1007/s10816-015-9259-6. Chapter 9 was originally published in Forum Kritische Archäologie 3 (2014), 150-170, and I am grateful to Susan Pollock, Reinhard Bernbeck, Carolin Jauss, Johannes Greger, Constance von Rüden and Stefan Schreiber for permission to reprint with some changes here. 4 Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Introduction The rich will make temples for Shiva What should I, a poor man, do My legs are pillars The body the shrine The head the cupola of gold Listen O Lord of the Meeting Rivers Things standing shall fall But the moving ever shall stay Basavanna, 12th century AD Indian philosopher and poet ‘Things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay’. Much contemporary work that seeks to explore the relationships between human society and material culture assumes that the fixity and solidity of material culture provides a stability and continuity to social life. Be- cause material things endure, they help to tie society together through time. The argument in this volume is that material things do indeed tie people together, but at the same time mate- rials are unruly and difficult to manage. Things fall apart. The human dependence on things is productive, but it also draws humans more fully into a dependence on and care for things that is entrapping. The idea that movement and instability are at the core of human experience is also pres- ent in Western thought. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes published his ‘Leviathan’. The core of his -ar gument about how society should best be governed is motion. Drives, appetites, aversions are all motions within us that are caused by the actions of external objects (Leviathan Chapter 6) that are themselves continually in motion. Society needs to find mechanisms of government to promote and manage this motion. Today we are more fully aware of the ways in which mat- ter is made of sub-atomic particles that are in continual motion. Modern scientists and philos- ophers describe the fundamental uncertainty and relationality of the physical and biological worlds. For example, John Dupré in his book ‘The disorder of things’ asserts ‘the extreme diversity of the contents of the world’ (1993, 1) such that it is difficult for science to come up 2 Chapter 1 Introduction 3 with discrete categories or species. Things such as biological species keep changing. ‘An as- sumption that dates back at least to Aristotle is that organisms can be unambiguously sorted into discrete, non-overlapping kinds on the basis of gross morphological properties. Since the theory of evolution undermined the belief in the fixity of species this position has become increasingly difficult to defend, and has indeed been almost universally rejected’ (ibid., 54). It is this unstable messiness that is at the heart of the idea of entanglement. Things are unruly (or at least they appear so to us). We try and manage, and categorize and order them. We try to use them to create enduring structures. But these efforts are continually under- mined. So we work yet harder, and enlist yet more things, to help us manage them. There is a continual dialectical tension between our dependence on things, our reliance on their various affordances, and the constraints and entrapments that the reliance on things entails. We can talk of and study the networks, meshworks, symmetries and engagements between humans and things as so many have done over recent years, but this is to miss the key nodal point about human-thing relations, that they involve asymmetrical tensions and a dialectical co-dependency. Defining entanglement In Chapter 2 in this volume I reprise the theory of entanglement and discuss the four com- ponent forms of dependence and dependency between humans and things (HT), things and humans (TH), things and things (TT), humans and humans (HH). The notion that humans depend on things is of course unremarkable; indeed the concept of Homo faber has a long his- tory in the study of human evolution. Humans have long been identified with tool-making, and the use of tools has been linked to human biological traits such as upright posture and cognitive functions. In the social sciences and humanities there has been for many decades recognition that humans use material culture to symbol, to exchange and to manipulate so- cial relations. Humans are dependent on things in cognitive and psychological development, in terms of power and authority, in terms of identity, perception and being. In this volume, therefore, HT relations are rather taken for granted. It is accepted that human ‘being’, in all its dimensions, is radically dispersed and distributed, and is thus dependent on material things. It is the TH and TT relations that constitute the driving force of the entanglement ac- count. Humans depend on things, but so too do things depend on humans (TH). Certainly this is true of all man-made material culture. Made things depend on human action for their production, use, maintenance and discard. One might argue that ‘natural’ things exist outside this purview. But the opposition of culture and nature is difficult since in many ontologies they are inter-mingled, with ‘nature’ involved in various types of relation with humans (De- scola 1994). Certainly since the Palaeolithic, humans have had impacts on their environments such that the ‘environment’ is always already part of human culture (Roberts 1998). Humans and the ‘environment’ are always already entangled. Humans are not entangled with things in a separate exterior ‘environment’. There is just an overall entanglement in which things have to be managed, cared for, looked after if humans are going to remain dependent on them. 2 Chapter 1 Introduction 3 The things that depend on humans also depend on each other (TT). This is obviously true of human-made things that usually involve other tools in their production, use and dis- card. As will be discussed at length in Chapters 3 and 8, things are involved in ‘chainworks’. Archaeologists are used to describing the sequences of operations that are required to make and use, for example, a cooking pot. But each of these operational sequences or chains is tied into other operational sequences. Thus, the cooking of food on the hearth requires that the making of a pot, the making and firing of a hearth, the obtaining of food to place in the pot, have been scheduled in relation to each other. Each step in the operational sequence has to wait for other steps to be completed. Thus making or using one thing is entangled in the making or using other things. But what of things not made by humans? Human-made things depend on clay to make the pot, or animals to kill and stew in the pot – in other words they depend on the supposedly ‘natural’ world outside entanglements. Biological beings in this environment are entangled in ecological relations, Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’, subject to evo- lutionary processes and processes of death and decay. Humans also depend on non-biological physical things such as clay to make houses or stone to make tools. These materials are subject to the geological, chemical and physical processes of lifting up, erosion, gravity, transforma- tion, deposition, breaking down, wear and tear. Human being is entangled in evolutionary and non-evolutionary processes of things in their relations to each other. Things are tied up or chained to other things,