Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

by Ian Hodder

A powerful and innovative argument that explores the complexity of the human relationship with material things, demonstrating how humans and societies are entrapped into the maintenance and sustaining of material worlds

*Argues that the interrelationship of humans and things is a defining characteristic of human history and culture
*Offers a nuanced argument that values the physical processes of things without succumbing to materialism
*Discusses historical and modern examples, using evolutionary theory to show how long-standing entanglements are irreversible and increase in scale and complexity over time
*Integrates aspects of a diverse array of contemporary theories in archaeology and related natural and biological sciences
*Provides a critical review of many of the key contemporary perspectives from materiality, material culture studies and phenomenology to evolutionary theory, behavioral archaeology, cognitive archaeology, human behavioral ecology, Actor Network Theory and complexity theory

Genres: Archaeology, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Academic, Theory

264 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 2012

About the author

Ian Hodder is Dunleavie Family Professor of Archaeology at Stanford University. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has received numerous awards for his accomplishments, including the Oscar Montelius Medal from the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Fyssen International Prize, and the Gold Medal by the Archaeological Institute of America, along with honorary doctorates from the Bristol and Leiden Universities. Hodder is the author of numerous books, including Symbols in Action (Cambridge, 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1982), and Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012).

Reviews

[Marduk · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a difficult read - it gets really abstract occasionally and refers to literature I'm not entirely familiar with.

But the idea is worth it. I'll give here the main gist, which is just one aspect of the book.

The book shows how things affect each other. Some people have thought there's just human agency and passive materials to be molded into houses and tools. Others have thought everything is determined only by the material conditions, thinking human psychology, social and historical conditions have nothing to do with anything. Well this book says it all needs combining to get the full picture.

To begin understanding, lets talk about the Neolithic revolution.

15k years ago, everyone was hunter-gathering. Life was simple: the food grows on stuff and runs around, so just pick or shoot and you get your fill. Turns out this is the most energy efficient behavior - low cost, high return. You get to choose the best food to focus on. And humans love it. Wild animals are admired. Killing them is prestigious.

The diet breadth model states that as long as possible, you keep doing just that.

But therein lies the implication - at some point, your favourite food may not be as plentiful, for whatever reason. So when the most energy efficient path is unavailable, you do the second best. You increase the BREATH of your DIET. You start chasing the smaller awkward cross-eyed looking stuff - squirrels and rabbits and whatnot and climbing into deeper bushes for those berries you never cared for. Things you previously ignored.

You're now spending more energy and getting less bang for buck in return.

That's when you think, what if next time I saw my favourite food waltzing or growing around, I just kept it in the village? Let it feed and breed and grow and just skim off the top? That way I could ensure I always have the best dish around and stop bothering with the cross-eyed stuff and weird berries. Back to good times, right?

Not that simple.

You now have a bunch of WILD ANIMALS to manage. First, someone has to always keep an eye on them - shepherding. Then you have to protect it from predators. You probably need a bunch of fences. The male animals start competing, you need to regularly kill them to keep it to a minimum. You also have to take special care for the breeding alpha. Then you have to move em around from graze to graze or they starve. Pregnant ones need a special diet. So instead of doing what YOU want, you're stuck to conforming to what the ANIMAL needs.

And that's all assuming you started with the right species - cattle, sheep, pigs and goats. Turns out people started with frigging gazelles. That didn't stick for long.

All of that takes a lot of energy. So you need to maximize the return. That means more intensive cooking. Gotta spend time splitting bones into small bits to get all that marrow. Gotta boil and cook it for longer to get all the fat into your gut. Need new cooking methods for that. Now people have to sit and mold pots. Pots need fire resistance, so you need to dig deep for mineralized clay. Someone's got to make tools for that. Need to organize labor better. Animal husbandry entails a LOT of work.

Plants are easier, right? Well...

Domesticated plants lose the ability to disperse their seed. That means instead of simply picking or shaking at the ears and collecting the seed that falls off wild plants - you have to cut or pull all the plants out, get them to your camp and just beat them with big sticks - thrashing. Then you have to throw the whole broken mess around until the wind separates the seed from the chaff and other waste - winnowing. And after that PE session is just when the real work begins.

Just as with animals, you're spending more time and energy and so need to maximize bang for buck. You need to grind down the seeds to allow your enzymes to do a better work. That means pestles and mortars and grindstones. Again, someone has to carve them. All that time spent working leaves you less time for wild plants. So as your diet is increasingly onesided, to compensate, you need to get your food into smaller and smaller grains and for that you need bigger and bigger stones - QUERN stones. Google it. Someone has to sit down and chizzle an entire boulder for that. You're not picking it up and moving anymore. Fortunately with all that laboring you're doing, you wouldn't even think about it.

You're now permanently into settled life.

You now need actual buildings where you spend all that time cooking, grinding, crafting, storaging. So now you're digging for much more clay, shaping bricks, propping and maintaining walls. They keep falling apart. Wooden beams for support, but then trees run out. Need bigger bricks, need more mineralized clay, need to dig deeper, need labor management, need better tools, need to plaster the walls regularly for moisture.

Grinding, propping, beating, herding, cooking, all that labor needs laborers - more and more children.

It used to be so much simpler when you just had to throw spears at food...

So you're running faster and faster only to stay in one place. But you're actually falling behind. Skeletal remains start showing signs of stress, deficiencies. People become weaker.

So why even BOTHER? Why didn't people just turn around? As you can see, it was impossible. To build smaller houses would mean less cooking, crafting, would mean less tools, fences, would mean less output from animals, plants, would mean more starvation with a bigger population.

It is a spiderweb of INTERLOCKING connections and DEPENDENCIES, moving hand in hand, thoroughly ENTANGLED.

The author compares it to riding a bike - only the continued momentum holds it up. And just like the rider and bike depend on each other to stay up, so has the domestication syndrome made the plants and animals utterly dependent on human babysitting. And humans in turn have grown utterly dependent on their affording of increased productivty per land unit. It's a double bind.

But it's not just plants and animals. The exact same goes for tools, bricks, houses, everything. It all entails this double bind.

Every time people run into a problem, the fix exerts a cost. The calculation is always this - is it costlier to exert a little more effort, or to overhaul the entire system surrounding it? The former is almost always cheaper.

It's a greedy algorithm - only the locally optimal solutions are sought. Globally, the costs keep compounding. Indefinitely.

Can anything increase indefinitely? That's the question.

I would say the book mirrors Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. While Tainter's book is easier to read, the goals of the books are different. Hoddler's goal isn't simply to show the increasing dependence and complexity, but to actually start incorporating all of the various things that were previously ignored into determining which things affect each other. As we've seen, chemistry, physics, anthropology, carpentry, etc. all play a role. But what I've left out of this review was Hoddler's touching on the social, religious, symbolic, which also fit into this process. And also some systems theory.

Honestly this review doesn't do much justice. There's a lot more to it.

[Wendelle]

This book is a thought project of the preeminent archaeologist in charge of the Catalhoyuk excavation, dedicated to his young son Kyle. It consists of reflections on things that urge a hermeneutic approach of looking at things, instead of just an objectivist approach. This means that we should start looking at things anew, not viewing them as objects-by-themselves but by situating them in their local milieu and reflecting upon the histories, worldwide infrastructures, trade of materials, and user psychologies revealed by the things' assembly, maintenance, ownership and exchange, and connectivity with other things. Thus, we have to think of things in terms of flows and changes instead of static, isolated materialities.

[David Jinkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a frustrating book. The good: Hodder makes a number of surprising, provocative, and powerful arguments about how technology changes over time, why some technologies seem to stick to societies once they are invented, and why there is a directionality to technological change. The bad: The prose is really, really bad. Here is a typical paragraph:

Directionality, at the most general of levels, is produced by a bias or imbalance in the ways humans go to and from things. I discussed the dual aspect of human relationships with things in Chapter 2. Humans go to and from things. If they went equally to and from things then it might be expected that there would indeed be no directionality in entanglements. But in fact humans can never escape things. I argued in Chapter 2 that human thought, feeling, existence depend on things. Human being is awakened in thingness, and so an immaterial human is a contradiction in terms.

The whole book is made up of this sort of dense, repetitive writing. Not since reading 19th century German philosophy have I encountered so many unnecessary neologisms like ``thingness''. It isn't on display here, but Hodder frequently flips between first and third person: ``The sides of the hole we dig for ourselves are unstable...They need to shore up the hole with planks and beams...''

It's too bad Hodder didn't have a better editor, because underneath that ugly woven scrap rug of writing, there are a couple of golden dust bunnies. I'll describe a couple of them here. People invent new technologies to solve problems they face. The problems depend on the current set of technologies they have, as well as their cultural and social organization. Since new technologies then change the way people relate to each other, they cause different problems that need to be solved. A new technology is not an advance, it is horizontal drift. Because of this drift, societies in different places and times can have different ways of getting by.

So why do societies tend to get more and more complex? Hodder makes an analogy with evolution. There is no teleological direction to evolution, and yet organisms were less complex a billion years ago than they are now. The reason that societies get more complex, he argues, is that it is difficult to return to earlier forms of social structure. Once there are cities of a millions of people, it would be difficult for society to become hunter-gatherers again -- even if everyone agreed that the life of a hunter-gatherer was preferable. The same number of people would never be able to support themselves without intensive agriculture.

These ideas are exciting to me, and call into question the entire idea of historical progress in technology. Hodder clearly has a deep understanding of the archeology literature, and the book is salted with examples from his own work at Catal Hoyuk. In sum, Hodder is an expert with a lot of provocative and interesting insights. I'm not sure that he was the right person to write them down.

[Perri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hodder brings out some interesting theoretical insights in the entangled and sometimes overdetermined relationships between things, people, and other things. Although his treatment of other sources is sometimes cursory and his own writing style is often obfuscatingly colloquial, it's worth a read.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like jello in my head. It made sense while I was reading it, but I couldn't tell you what it was about.

[Alexander Jolley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author argues that human society is inseparable from the objects and things within that society. You cannot have one without the other, because humans map themselves onto the objects, and objects are determined by human constraints, like biology.

The author is aiming to approach materiality in a different framework, arguing that past concepts of materiality, such as Brown's [[Thing Theory|Thing Theory]], are too reliant on what the objects can do for humans. Hodder rejects the idea that objects and human society are in any way separated. Hodder asks us to consider how objects can indicate certain technological advancements and tell us about that society's capabilities. Consider a grand piano; this object can only exist in a society that has progressed to a certain point. Thus, the objects themselves are a direct reflection of that society, and should not be considered separate. Hodder describes this dependence on society for objects, the objects' dependence on humans for existence, as _entanglement_. These are webs of interconnected relationships that shape culture and history.

The author outlines the concept of object dependence in humanity. Materialists, like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, have argued that objects can only exist in particular forms in cultural contexts. Furthermore, and quoting Darwin, the author outlines a parallel that human biology shapes the objects we construct and interact with, creating a harmonious balance and intertwined existence. It is like the chicken and the egg question: what came first? Human biology, or the physical world around us? The author invites us not to view it in this dichotomy. Our entanglements become more complex and can exist through time as human society and culture develop in tandem with objects. If we take the objects away from a modern human, do they still persist as a modern human? Our culture and historical definitions are shaped by our objects.

I really liked this approach to cultural history because it seems self-evident that we are culturally defined by objects. When discussing the similarities and differences between people, a clear and easy distinguisher is the objects and materials that culture uses.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much of the writing about culture (i.e. the arts, literature, etc.) has been divided into two camps: the phenomenologists, who claim that it's all about the "experience," and the semioticians, who say that everything (including our perceptions) is shaped by language, and that we there need to focus on understanding signs. Like most either/or conflicts, neither side has been very willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, they're both right. In the new century, analysts with diverse affiliations (anthropologists, botanists, biologists, museologists, etc.) have begun to consider the human relationship with things (or "stuff") as an alternative way of looking at culture. Sure, Hegel was right, it's about the experience, but what about this stuff here? Sure, it's all language, but is the name of this thing more real than what I have in my hand? There has been some diverse, incredible dense discourse put forward on our human relation to things. Ian Hodder's "Entangled" is a brief, insightful study of how people and their "stuff" gradually become codependent in interwoven ways that Hodder calls "entanglements." Drawing from examples as diverse as the brick-making techniques used at Çatalhöyük to Beethoven and Klimt, he considers how human interaction with things forms the basis of both what call culture and technology, and the concept of "progress," because these entanglements are so complex that they do not permit us to "go back" to previous times. Not exactly "light reading," but as a fresh perspective on how culture works, an extremely valuable book.

[Ruairí Yücel-O'Mahony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I vibed with this one. Hodder manages to put together a way of conceptualizing our reliance on things that feels intuitive, insightful, and useful. As I understand it, things depend by their very nature on humans but also on other things. A clay pot needs to be made, maintained, and taken care of by people but also relies on the clay bed, the firing oven, the stand it sits on, the fireplace it sits in, the idea that we ought to store or cook whatever goes inside it, and the climate around it. Once humans start to live in ways that are more and more reliant on things, we get stuck in a double-bind, because those things still reliant on on other things and on ourselves. It was quite cool to see how this can help us think about our current predicaments but also those of the Neolithic Anatolians at Çatalhöyük with their always falling down walls and their plastered human skulls. It is always depressing to rehearse the point that we can never "go back." Nevertheless, this felt like a great way to put that feeling into words.

Unfortunately, the writing is quintessential Gen-X anthropologist; very full of itself and freely ranging between whatever Hodder happened to be thinking about at the time (ideas on his desk, airports, and 9/11). I am glad I chose to skip most of his gripes with other theorists and his long-winded examples.

[Aykut Karabay · Rating 5 out of 5]

İnsanların ve şeylerin dolanıklığının, birbirini etkileyişinin tarihi ve dolayısıyla arkeolojiyi oluşturduğunu savunan ve örnekleri ile ispatlayan bir çalışma. Şey-şey, şey-insan, insan-insan, insan-şey dolanıklığı ile maddi hayat ve insanın tarih boyunca etkileşim halinde olduğu ortaya konmuş. İnsanın tarih boyunca davranışıyla çevreyi şekillendirmesi ve aynı “dolanıklık” sayesinde çevrenin insanı ve tarihi şekillendirmiş olduğu anlatılıyor. Değişimin yönünü belirleyenin sosyal hayatın maddi koşulları değil, dolanıklıklar olduğunu iddia ediyor. Şeylerin evrimleşme nedenlerinin dolanıklıklar içinde uygun bir yer edinmelerine bağlıyor. Dolanıklık kavramının bütün bilimlerin entegrasyonuna izin verdiğini ve bu sayede var olduğunu gösteriyor.

Tavsiye ederim

[Lette Hass · Rating 3 out of 5]

"As social actors we tend to see things in ego-centered ways, in terms of what they can do for us. We hardly look at them. Our interest are in the effects for us, aesthetic, social, scientific, psychological and so on. But every now and then we actually look at the thing itself, as a whole object, a thing in its own right. We explore its grain, feel its weight, note its color in different lights, marvel at its balance and delicate detail. Of course our interest remains self-serving, and often nostalgic, but there is sometimes a momento of realization that in order to understand the thing we have to look harder, anew, deeper, more fully.."

[Rick Theis · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOT easy ...

For those not professionally trained, or currently involved in anthropology or archeology, but an excellent treatment of human-thing relationships and interactions. I loved this, second book by Ian Hodder that I’ve read, but it will by no means the last of his that I intend to read. I recommend this to anyone who would like to find about trends in thinking in those fields, or who would simply like to expand their own thinking. Really well written, but not “simple” or “easy” to get through.

[Hollis Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entangled was what inspired my undergraduate thesis. It truly captured my relationship with books as I am in love with the knowledge that they provide. In addition it helped me realize why I was so enthralled with libraries, despite the fact that I do not have the ability to take a book off of the shelf on my own.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this book recommended to me and railed at in front of me, but I really enjoyed it. As a student of archaeology, I feel it opened my eyes to the agency of humans and their things. At times the book got a little hypothetical and over my head and I didn't always like the tone, but I found the theory to be valid. Things shape people. Done.

[Searchingthemeaningoflife Greece · Rating 5 out of 5]

[...]Όμως το ενδιαφέρον μας, τελικά, αφορά τους ανθρώπους και την κοινωνία τους. Τα πράγματα υπάρχουν εκεί μόνο σαν φόντο. Κάνουν εφικτή μια συγκεκριμένη μορφή ανθρώπινης κοινωνίας.[...]

[...] Το βλέμμα μετατοπίζεται για να κοιτάξει από πιο κοντά, με μεγαλύτερη προσήλωση, το πράγμα, για να εξετάσει το πώς κοινωνία και πράγμα συνυφαίνονται.[...]

[Birch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cools

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best academic books I've ever read. Clear, charming, broad in scope and vision, with an amazing bibliography.

Hodder, an eminent archaeologist, presents a theory of the connections between humans and things which will become essential for any student of the social sciences. While his goal of "an archaeology of the relationships between humans and things" is to restore a respect for "thingness" outside of human networks, he presents a synthetic theory of those relationships which builds on, but avoids some notable shortcomings, of work in similar as well as widely diverse disciplines, including network theory, actor-network theory, and several flavors of contemporary evolutionary thinking.

Seriously, if you're a social scientist of any flavor, or just want to read academic work at its finest, pick this up right now. You're in for a mind-opening delight.

[Lorisia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful post-processual take on materialism. I would highly recommend this to any archaeology enthusiasts be they amateur or expert. I would even say that this book would be quite accessible to anyone who just wants to look at 'things' a different way.

Hodder brings up some very interesting points and while his theory may not be easily applied directly to archaeological studies it does have an important message- Context is important and context contains the people that made it, the people that used it, the raw material it was made from and so on. This book outlines a new way of looking at the 'things' we live with and use and how they might change us.

Overall, a brillant read that was not too dry. I would highly recommend to just about anyone.
-L

[Bonnie_blu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hodder takes a complex subject and explains it in clear, easy-to-understand prose. However, I must admit that I was surprised that the concept of "thingness" and human entanglements was presented as a new concept in archeology. I thought the concepts presented here were obvious as they applied to archeology and am perplexed as to why archeologists are just now apprehending them. It just goes to show that the sciences, both social and hard, need more open lines of communication. Human society does not exist in one dimension, and neither should disciplines attempting to understand it, whether it be a past or present society.

[Michael Lever · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not particularly clearly written or cogently explained. From reading this and questions put to the author, one gets the feeling that the definition of Entangled is one which is arbitrarily set by Hodder rather than delineated by clear criteria. Other authors have written far more clearly on the topic. Hodder has had the repeat and prodigious capacity to present as groundbreaking, while riding the theoretical coat-tails of his students and junior peers. This work feels much the same.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eh. ... I'm glad I'm not an archaeologist. Still, I'm not sure why this archaeologist brushes aside "Thing Theory" so quickly and attempts to give some form of real or inherent agency or "thingness" to objects.

[Irene Selsvold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hodder writes clear and understandable about a complex topic, and actually also personal, fun and entertaining. A great read!

[Vivian Blaxell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most things about thingness are written by people who have had little to do with things. Hodder's discussion of the vitality of things benefits from his long work with things.