Anthropological Entrapments

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.