Few words have travelled through the social sciences and humanities as successfully in the past decade as “entanglement.” Humans are entangled with technologies, organisms with environments, bodies with discourses, matter with meaning, colonizers with colonized populations, and disciplines with one another. This article asks how this vocabulary arose, what it accomplishes, and why it became so attractive. The genealogy is more complicated than a simple derivation from Karen Barad: entanglement had already appeared as a metaphor for colonial and historical interconnection before Barad's agential realism turned it into a general ontology in which matter and meaning, nature and culture, and observer and observed do not pre-exist their relations. The article argues that most entanglement discourse constitutes a second-order repair of what Living Value Theory calls a SWIPE, a split world with incommensurably paired epistemologies: the separation is rejected propositionally while being retained architecturally. Ian Hodder's Entangled supplies the article's central case, because Hodder does not merely gesture at entanglement but tries to operationalize it archaeologically, defining it as the sum of every possible dependency between humans and things. This makes the concept's explanatory emptiness unusually visible. The alternative proposed is neither renewed dualism nor a more comprehensive relational ontology, but analysis that begins before the inherited cut and asks not what is connected but what becomes recursively relevant.
Introduction: Everyone Is Entangled Now
Bodies are entangled with discourse. Humans with technologies. Species with environments. Knowledge with power. Colonial histories with one another. Researchers with their fields. Matter with meaning. Culture with nature. Machines with organisms. Pasts with presents. The formulation recurs so often across so many literatures that the recurrence itself becomes the phenomenon worth explaining.
Ask what is actually learned from being told that two things are entangled. The claim might mean causal interaction, historical involvement, mutual dependence, constitutive relation, feedback, material constraint, coproduction, inseparability, shared history, recursive responsiveness, or simply that a situation is complicated. Each of these is a different empirical claim, with different evidence bearing on it, and a term capable of meaning any of them specifies, in practice, very little. This article is not primarily an exercise in lexical policing, however. It asks a historical question: why did entanglement become necessary?
Contemporary theory typically presents the term as an ontological advance. Earlier thinking, on this account, falsely separated things; a newer and more sophisticated theory reveals that they were entangled all along. The sequence can be reversed. The theoretical surprise may have been manufactured by the earlier separation rather than corrected by the later discovery. If human beings had never been conceptually removed from material forming, why should their technological mediation appear as cyborg hybridity? If symbolic activity and material process had never been allocated to different ontological domains and different sciences, why should their inseparability require an ontology of matter-meaning entanglement? If human living had never been extracted from ecology in the first place, why would human-environment relations need a portmanteau like natureculture to be taken seriously?
A SWIPE, in the vocabulary this series has developed, is a distinction that becomes simultaneously ontological and epistemological: its two sides are assigned different kinds of reality, different legitimate methods of knowing, and, having been autonomized in this way, a relation between them that never actually disappeared now has to be reestablished as a special theoretical achievement (Ecks 2026a). A first-order repair accepts most of this architecture and tries to reconnect the separated sides: mediation, interaction, embodiment, feedback, translation, coproduction. A second-order repair goes further and denies that the two sides were ever independently constituted, while continuing to organize the entire analysis around exactly those two sides (Ecks 2026d). Entanglement is the characteristic vocabulary of the second kind of repair, and this article's central claim is that its extraordinary success across anthropology, archaeology, science and technology studies, feminist theory, and new materialism is itself diagnostic of how deeply that architecture survives its own rejection.
Two things distinguish this argument from an ordinary complaint about jargon. First, it is not addressed to entanglement's sloppier, more diluted uses alone; it is addressed most directly at the concept's most careful and best-argued deployments, because those are the cases in which the underlying structure is easiest to see once it is pointed out. Second, it does not conclude that the phenomena entanglement gestures toward are unreal, or that the scholars who use the term have failed to notice something obvious. Karen Barad's critique of entities presumed to exist before their relations is a substantial philosophical position, not an error correctable by a reminder that dualism is false. The claim advanced here is considerably harder to dismiss than that: not that these theories failed to notice dualism was false, but that their anti-dualism remains intellectually parasitic on the dualism it rejects, needing the prior separation to remain legible as the thing being overcome.
The question, by the end of this article, is no longer whether everything is connected. It is why social theory first disconnected the world so thoroughly that connection could later be announced as a discovery.
I. How "Entanglement" Became Theory
The word's respectability begins somewhere quite different from anthropology. In 1935, responding to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, Erwin Schrödinger introduced entanglement, Verschränkung in his German, to name a precise and counterintuitive feature of quantum systems: two systems that have interacted can enter a joint state that cannot be represented by assigning each system an independent state of its own. Schrödinger regarded this as characteristic of quantum mechanics as such, not an incidental curiosity. Quantum entanglement is not a loose synonym for complexity or interconnection; it is a technically specified physical phenomenon, one that contemporary quantum information science treats as a measurable and exploitable resource. This technical precision is part of what later gave the word, once it began travelling, an unusual amount of borrowed prestige. The present argument does not adjudicate the interpretation of quantum mechanics. It tracks how a technically specified concept becomes progressively more metaphorical as it crosses into social theory.
Karen Barad did not introduce entanglement into the social sciences. Nicholas Thomas's Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (1991) used the term historically and anthropologically well before Barad's work became widely read: colonial exchange did not involve pristine Western and Pacific cultures encountering one another as self-contained wholes, but populations that became, in Thomas's phrase, mutually and often unequally implicated in one another's histories through the circulation of objects. A related genealogy runs through postcolonial and transnational history. Shalini Randeria was writing of entangled modernities and entangled histories by the turn of the millennium, challenging the disciplinary division that assigned modern societies to sociology and non-Western societies to anthropology, and Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann's histoire croisée situated entangled history alongside connected and shared history as an alternative to older comparative approaches. Sarah Nuttall's Entanglement extended the vocabulary to post-apartheid South Africa, describing forms of proximity, mutuality, and inherited confrontation that a purely classificatory politics of racial difference could not capture. None of these usages required a claim about the fundamental ontology of reality. Entangled functioned as a historical and relational metaphor, directing attention toward mutual constitution, asymmetrical involvement, and the inadequacy of analytically sealed societies.
Donna Haraway is an important transitional figure even though entanglement was not initially her own master term. Her 1985 cyborg manifesto worked instead with cyborg, hybrid, and boundary transgression, announcing breakdowns between human and animal, organism and machine, natural and artificial. By The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) she was writing of naturecultures and of partners that do not pre-exist their relating. The grammar that would define later entanglement theory was already fully formed: reject the independent existence of the poles, celebrate their co-constitution, treat the collapse of an inherited boundary as itself the theoretical payoff.
Barad made the decisive further move. Her agential realism, developed from the mid-1990s and consolidated in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), replaced interaction, which presupposes already constituted entities, with intra-action, in which relata emerge through relation rather than preceding it. Matter and meaning, nature and culture, subject and object, observer and observed are redescribed as effects of what Barad calls agential cuts rather than primordial divisions. Barad did not invent social-scientific entanglement. She transformed it from a useful metaphor for historical involvement into a candidate ontology of everything, and it is this escalation, from entanglement as a description of specific relations to entanglement as the basic furniture of reality, that made the term available for the explosive diffusion that followed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's 2010 collection New Materialisms gave the resulting movement an institutional name and a shared reading list, and by the middle of the decade the vocabulary of entanglement, intra-action, and vibrant matter was circulating well beyond feminist science studies, into archaeology, geography, international relations, and medical humanities.
II. Four Different Things Called "Entanglement"
Before the term can be criticized responsibly, its heterogeneous uses need separating, because one reason entanglement became so portable is that the same word performs several distinct theoretical jobs without announcing which one it is performing on a given occasion.
Historical entanglement, in the sense used by Thomas, Randeria, and Nuttall, names histories that cannot be adequately narrated separately. It is usually empirically tractable and could often be replaced by more precise terms: involvement, exchange, mutual constitution, imperial connection. Dependency entanglement, the sense central to Hodder's archaeology and examined at length below, names the reciprocal dependence of humans on things, things on humans, and things on other things, generating constraints, maintenance burdens, and path dependency. This too is empirically tractable, in that specific dependencies can be identified, weighed, and tested against evidence. Ontological entanglement, the specifically Baradian sense, is considerably stronger than either: to be entangled here is not merely to stand in a strong relation to something else, but to lack independent existence prior to the relation altogether. And a fourth, increasingly common usage in secondary literature amounts to little more than theoretically prestigious complexity: race, gender, embodiment, technology, and space are said to be deeply entangled, where the claim translates, on inspection, into the observation that several relevant things are happening at once.
These four senses are not interchangeable, and the trouble begins when a text moves between them without acknowledging the shift. A historically entangled colonial relation does not share the logical structure of a quantum-mechanical entangled state. A village's dependence on its irrigation infrastructure is not the same kind of phenomenon as a non-factorizable joint state. A claim that discourse and bodily practice cannot be understood independently does not acquire the mathematical structure of quantum systems merely because both are called entanglement. The semantic elasticity is not a minor imprecision to be tidied up in a footnote. It is close to the source of the word's appeal: entanglement can sound simultaneously intuitive, since everyone knows what a tangled cord looks like, and technically profound, since quantum entanglement supplies a halo of counterintuitive scientific authority, and the metaphor moves easily and silently between the two registers. A word capable of meaning everything from colonial trade to quantum nonseparability travels as well as it does precisely because it specifies as little as it does.
Critics inside relational theory itself have begun to notice the resulting inflation. Ignasi Torrent's recent critique of what he calls entanglement fetishism in international relations objects to an increasingly totalizing picture of the world as relational wholeness, and asks whether such theories leave any room for refusal, withdrawal, or a genuinely non-generative encounter (Torrent 2025). A concept whose defenders are beginning to worry about its capacity to describe absence or non-relation as well as it describes relation is a concept whose semantic reach has plausibly outrun its explanatory content.
There is a further consequence worth naming directly. Because the same term slides among connection, dependence, constitution, complexity, inseparability, causality, and mere co-presence, arguments built on radically different empirical commitments can sound as though they participate in one advanced, unified ontology. A historian tracing how colonial administrators and colonized populations shaped one another's institutions, an archaeologist tracing how a Neolithic village depended on its clay sources, and a physicist describing a non-factorizable joint quantum state can all reach for the identical word, and a reader moving between their texts is invited to feel that all three have discovered the same underlying structure of reality. They have not. What they share is a term, not a finding. This is precisely how a fashionable vocabulary accumulates authority faster than it accumulates content: each new use borrows credibility from the most rigorous prior use, quantum entanglement's mathematical precision, without being required to meet anything like the same standard of specification.
III. Entanglement as Second-Order SWIPE Repair
The intellectual history divides cleanly into three generations, and setting them out in sequence is what makes the underlying continuity visible.
The first generation accepted the shores. Mind and body, nature and culture, matter and meaning, human and nonhuman were treated as given, separately constituted domains, and the theoretical task was to explain how they interact: how mind affects body, how culture modifies biology, how meaning attaches to matter. The second generation, dissatisfied with bare interaction, built bridges: psychosomatic, biopsychosocial, embodiment, mediation, translation, incorporation, interface, hybrid. The two shores remained fully in view, but theory became increasingly sophisticated at crossing between them. The third generation declared the bridge unnecessary, because the shores, on this newer view, had never been independent to begin with. Matter and meaning are already entangled. Nature and culture are already natureculture. Human and machine were never pure. Interaction is replaced by intra-action.
All three generations, including the one that believed it had finally escaped the other two, continued to organize theoretical attention around the same shores.
The distinction that matters here is between propositional and architectural dependence. Barad does not secretly believe that matter and meaning are separate; her entire apparatus of intra-action was constructed to prevent exactly that reading. Haraway does not secretly believe that organism and machine are pure types awaiting contamination. This would be too weak a criticism, easily and correctly answered. The harder question is why matter and meaning, nature and culture, human and nonhuman, observer and observed retain enough inherited privilege to supply the basic vocabulary of an ontology after their independent existence has already been denied. They reject the SWIPE propositionally. They remain dependent upon it architecturally: their theoretical objects acquire significance through the very categories whose independent existence the theory denies.
The medical humanities supply a clean institutional example of the same move. Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, writing on behalf of an explicitly entangled medical humanities, reject the older language of integration precisely because integration imagines biomedical science and the humanities as separately constituted fields subsequently brought together, and propose entanglement instead on the grounds that the practices, objects, and concerns of medicine and the humanities were never separate to begin with (Fitzgerald and Callard 2016). The criticism of integration is exactly right. But the proposed solution remains organized around the very jurisdictions being criticized: science and the humanities become an entanglement rather than an integration, and the disciplinary SWIPE has moved from the ontology of the object under study into the grammar of interdisciplinarity itself, still doing the work of deciding what an adequately entangled medical humanities has to talk about.
A counterfactual test makes the point operational. Would the phenomenon in question still look theoretically remarkable if the original SWIPE had never been made? A person using a hammer, wearing spectacles, or living with a pacemaker is not remarkable if material forming is treated from the outset as constitutive of human life rather than as a later addition to it. Social factors affecting physiology are not remarkable without a prior society/body separation to violate. Organisms modifying environments that then modify the organisms in turn are not remarkable without a prior organism/environment autonomization. Material inscriptions carrying symbolic significance are not remarkable without a prior matter/meaning allocation. In each case, what supposedly gets discovered by the entanglement claim is simply what would have been true all along under a description that never generated the separation in the first place.
One further point should be made carefully, because it is easy to overstate. An ordinary tangle is recognizable as a tangle only because its strands remain distinguishable; this does not prove that Baradian entanglement secretly presupposes classical separability, and that stronger philosophical claim is not needed here. The more modest and defensible point is historical and semantic rather than metaphysical: the social-theoretical force of entanglement comes from negating a historically salient expectation of separability. Nobody needs a theory announcing that gravity and Tuesday are entangled, because nobody ever built gravity and Tuesday into an epistemic partition in the first place. Matter and meaning sound profound when declared entangled because matter and meaning already carry a history of separation behind them. Entanglement therefore carries the genealogy of the SWIPE inside its apparent overcoming of it.
The counterfactual test also explains why second-order repair is so much harder to argue with than first-order repair, and why this article's criticism has to be aimed differently than a simple charge of dualism. Tell a Baradian reader that matter and meaning were wrongly separated, and the answer comes immediately: precisely, that is the entire point of intra-action. Tell a Harawayan reader that organism and machine are not pure categories, and the answer is the same: that is what the cyborg was always meant to show. The obvious criticism has already been anticipated and absorbed. The question this article is asking is not whether the relation between two terms has been adequately described. It is whether those two terms should still be defining the space of the problem at all, once their independent existence has already been denied. That question survives the standard defense, because the standard defense answers a different, easier objection than the one being raised here.
IV. Haraway and Barad: Making Ordinary Mediation Spectacular
Two concentrated cases make the second-order structure visible without requiring a survey of the entire new materialist literature.
Take spectacles, a hammer, a prosthesis, a pacemaker, a phone, an artificial hip. None of these ordinary technological mediations requires the hybridization of two ontological realms unless human and machine were already the starting ontology. Humans have coordinated themselves through materials for as long as anything recognizably human has existed; tool use long precedes even the modern human species, and multimaterial forming is not a late addition to an otherwise self-sufficient organism. The cyborg becomes transgressive only against a backdrop that has already made organism and machine into opposed categories. It requires the SWIPE as the stage on which its transgression becomes spectacular: the cyborg turns ordinary mediation into ontological drama.
Natureculture performs a related operation almost diagrammatically. The portmanteau eliminates the slash between nature and culture while leaving both categories fully legible inside the compound word. Nature and culture survive; only the punctuation marking their separation is removed. The joining registers as a joining, and therefore as a theoretical event, only because a reader already recognizes which syllables used to be two separate words. Denying separability in this way is not the same as establishing why nature and culture deserved continued joint ontological privilege as the pair around which the analysis is organized, rather than, say, viscosity and obligation, or temperature and kinship.
Barad's own title states the underlying operation almost too plainly: an entanglement of matter and meaning. Why matter and why meaning, out of the enormous range of things a theory of everything might have chosen as its two protagonists? Both are gigantic, heterogeneous bundles. Matter, on the loosest reading, spans stones, hormones, buildings, particles, chairs, and pathogens. Meaning spans spoken words, memory, ritual, legal classification, expectation, and intention. Declaring these two megacategories entangled does not decompose either bundle into anything more tractable; it preserves both, intact, at a higher level of theoretical abstraction. The SWIPE moves, across the sequence, from matter separated by a slash from meaning, to matter and meaning in productive interaction, to a single compound, matter-meaning entanglement. At every stage of that sequence, matter and meaning still own the conceptual field. Post-dualist theory of this kind repeatedly mistakes the empirical failure of a bad classification for the discovery of a surprising ontology.
There is also a scale problem behind the title, worth noting even though it is not this article's central concern. Barad's agential realism is built from a serious engagement with quantum mechanics, but the ontology is then extended well beyond the subatomic systems in which nonseparability was originally established, toward institutions, bodies, and histories. Rasmus Jaksland's recent philosophical reconstruction of the argument makes the difficulty explicit: ordinary Newtonian approximation works extremely well at everyday scales, which raises a real question about how directly a quantum-derived ontology should be expected to travel upward (Jaksland 2024). Granting Barad's own interpretation of quantum mechanics entirely, the further step, from a claim about subatomic systems to a general vocabulary for institutions, bodies, and histories, still has to be argued rather than assumed. It is at exactly this step that entanglement stops being a technical result and becomes something closer to a permission slip, an instruction not to separate what previous theory separated, issued with the borrowed authority of physics behind it.
Formally stated, more temperately than the cyborg or natureculture examples invite: neither figure establishes why the pair it dissolves deserved continued ontological privilege once dissolved. Denying that nature and culture, or matter and meaning, were ever separate is compatible with an entirely different response to the same evidence, namely that neither pair should have been organizing the inquiry in the first place. Haraway and Barad choose instead to keep the pair and change its logical status, from separated to entangled. That choice is intelligible as an act of rhetorical inheritance: both figures were developed as interventions against specific, historically dominant separations, and staging the intervention as a reunion of the very terms that tradition had kept apart is a powerful way to be heard within that tradition. But the choice has a cost that this article has been tracking throughout. The more completely a theory takes the SWIPE for granted as the error from which it must escape, the more spectacular the ordinary world looks when the SWIPE fails. Hybrids look monstrous only to an observer who expected purity. Entanglement looks surprising only to an observer who expected separation. None of this makes the underlying empirical observations, that culture is materially embodied, that matter is never simply inert, any less real. It means only that the sense of theoretical astonishment attached to them belongs to the classification being violated, not to the world being described.
V. Ian Hodder's Entangled: The Jargon Becomes a Research Programme
Barad ontologizes entanglement. Ian Hodder, in Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012), operationalizes it, and the shift from metaphysics to method is what makes his book the more useful case for this article's purposes: where Barad's version is too metaphysically large to test, Hodder's is concrete enough to be stress-tested directly.
Hodder is explicit that entanglement is designed as disciplinary repair work. Archaeology, he argues, needs to draw the humanities and social sciences together with physics, chemistry, biology, and archaeometry, and entanglement is offered as one of the terms that, in his words, "join the many others that try to bridge the divide between materialism and social construction" (Hodder 2012, p.95). The project explicitly begins from a prior division, a human-centered, socially oriented tradition on one side and a thing-centered, materially oriented tradition on the other, and seeks to integrate them. This is close to ideal evidence for a SWIPE-repair reading: the bridge is not an incidental figure of speech but the stated architecture of the project.
Hodder then supplies a formula, laid out at the start of his chapter on entanglement: humans depend on things (HT), things depend on other things (TT), things depend on humans (TH), and, added as an obvious further point, humans depend on humans (HH). Entanglement, on this definition, is simply the sum: Entanglement = (HT) + (TT) + (TH) + (HH). The defining feature, Hodder writes, is that humans get caught in "a double bind, depending on things that depend on humans" (Hodder 2012, p.88), so that dependence, which is often productive and enabling, sits in continual tension with dependency, which is often constraining and limiting.
The formula deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed, because taking it seriously produces the article's most devastating question about it. Once every possible relation among humans and things, human to thing, thing to thing, thing to human, human to human, has been folded into the definition of entanglement, what remains for entanglement to explain? The logical universe of possible relations among two categories has been exhausted by construction. Everything is entanglement by definition, which does not make the underlying dependencies uninteresting, but does make the master term analytically redundant unless some further criterion specifies which dependencies matter, when, to whom, and through what mechanism.
Hodder's most valuable contribution is not entanglement as such but dependence and dependency, and it is worth being generous about this before returning to the critique. Things require maintenance. Walls fall down. Crops need tending. Technological solutions generate new obligations. Humans become locked into systems they themselves built and must keep rebuilding. Hodder's account of the double bind, humans depending on things that themselves depend on continued human care, is a genuine analytical achievement, and his vocabulary for it, dependence, dependency, constraint, tautness, investment, sunk cost, entrapment, is doing real work throughout the book. The more precise Hodder becomes about any specific case, the less work the word entanglement itself has left to do; the actual explanatory content sits in the more specific vocabulary of maintenance, sequence, and constraint that dependence supplies, not in the summary term that names their totality.
A further internal difficulty follows directly from Hodder's own admissions. He begins by dividing the analytical universe into humans and things, then explicitly acknowledges, in his opening chapter, that humans are themselves things: "temporary bundles of matter, energy and information" that happen, like every other entity, to be "highly connected, and not inert" (Hodder 2012, p.9). He nonetheless insists that humans must be treated as a particular kind of thing so that human dependence on things can be studied at all. This creates a genuine dilemma rather than a merely rhetorical one. If humans are things, then HT, TH, and HH all become special cases of TT, and the fourfold formula collapses into a single term. If things means specifically nonhuman things, then human/thing remains the primary categorical divide the theory was supposed to have moved beyond. Entanglement does not resolve this problem so much as oscillate across it, needing human/thing symmetry to license its central claim about universal dependence while needing human/thing asymmetry to make the formula's four terms distinct in the first place.
The category thing, meanwhile, becomes close to unlimited. Hodder applies the word, across the opening chapter alone, to clouds, pianos, thoughts, clocks, sounds, bodies, molecules, institutions, and ball games (Hodder 2012, p.7). This inclusiveness is theoretically revealing rather than merely loose usage: thing has become so capacious that it no longer differentiates material artifact from organism, event, institution, symbol, or passing cognition. The attempt to escape a subject/object SWIPE by declaring everything a thing produces another overburdened master category in its place, one asked to carry nearly everything that a narrower vocabulary would have had to distinguish. Everything becomes thing-like precisely so that everything can become entangled, which is classificatory inflation rather than ontological liberation.
None of this is offered as a hostile reading of a careless book. Hodder is unusually candid about the difficulty, at one point conceding that a thing's boundaries are established relative to a particular use or question rather than given in advance, which is close to the position this article eventually defends. The trouble is not that Hodder fails to notice the problem. It is that noticing the problem and continuing to build the entire analytic on a formula that presupposes a settled boundary between humans and things are not the same achievement, and the book does the second while gesturing at the first. A concept can survive being provisional. It has more difficulty surviving being both provisional and load-bearing at once, asked to define the four terms of a formula while simultaneously being acknowledged as too unstable to define them cleanly.
VI. Tanglegrams and the Problem of Everything Being Connected
Hodder's most original methodological contribution is the tanglegram, a diagram in which arrows trace dependence relations among the elements of an archaeological system, and testing the concept against his own best evidence, the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, shows exactly where entanglement's analytical usefulness runs out.
The diagrams are genuinely valuable in a narrow, concrete sense. Clay depends on extraction. Plaster depends on materials and labor. White plaster soils and needs replastering. Houses connect food production, burial, memory, animals, and labor. Tracing these dependencies converts what would otherwise be a rhetorical claim about interconnection into a set of specific, falsifiable relations, each defensible or contestable on its own archaeological evidence.
But Hodder's own account of building the Çatalhöyük tanglegram concedes the concept's central weakness. Tracing the dependencies of clay alone, he reports, means that "a very large part of the whole social and material system gets drawn in," and, more starkly, that at Çatalhöyük "everything very quickly gets drawn in" (Hodder 2012, p.183). This is not a triumph for the concept. It is a demonstration of its basic analytical problem. Given enough arrows, traced far enough, everything connects to everything, and the decisive question stops being what is entangled and becomes why this arrow was drawn rather than the ten thousand other arrows that could equally have been traced, at what scale, across what duration, for what question, and from whose position.
Hodder is honest about this limitation, which is to his credit and to the argument's advantage. His diagrams, he acknowledges, "cannot claim to be exhaustive," since a complete mapping of an open system "would be infinitely more complex," and elsewhere he notes that the drawing of any particular set of entanglements depends on the analyst's goal and perspective. Once goal and perspective determine which threads get traced, entanglement itself supplies no criterion for relevance. The archaeologist supplies the relevance, using judgment that the concept of entanglement neither generates nor constrains. Entanglement describes possible connectivity. Analysis requires relevant connectivity, and the distinction between the two is precisely what the master concept cannot itself provide.
Hodder also notes the affinity between his tanglegrams and formal network analysis, and floats quantitative network modeling as a natural next step. This concession is more damaging to the concept than it may appear. Once nodes, links, direction, centrality, cost, and sequence have all been specified, as network analysis requires, entanglement contributes little beyond the image of being caught up, an evocative gloss placed over a dependency-network analysis that does its actual explanatory work through more specific, borrowed vocabulary.
The spatial version of the same problem appears when Hodder maps entanglements across the settlement rather than through a single material like clay. Houses with elaborate burials, houses linked by shared decorative motifs, houses grouped by radial zone, and houses grouped by terrace each generate their own network across Çatalhöyük, and the resulting networks overlap without coinciding: a house central to one mapping can be peripheral to another. Hodder reads this, plausibly, as a form of social storage, a redundant and overlapping mosaic of possible claims that a household could draw on in hard times, and the reading is a genuine empirical contribution to understanding the settlement's long-term stability. But the same result can be read, just as legitimately, as confirmation that entanglement supplies no single map of the settlement at all, only as many maps as there are questions to ask of it. Multiply the criterion for drawing a line and the entanglement multiplies correspondingly; the object does not have one degree of connectedness waiting to be discovered; it has as many as there are reasons to look for one.
The book's concluding defense compounds the problem. Hodder acknowledges, near the end, unresolved tensions around human-human relations, the treatment of power, the relation between objectivity and situated perspective, and even the definition of thing itself, and then observes that entanglement remains "a useful concept if it admits to the messiness, indeterminacy and relationality of social life" (Hodder 2012, p.218). This is rhetorically elegant and methodologically dangerous in equal measure. A concept cannot simultaneously be what explains complexity and be protected from precise specification by an appeal to that same complexity. When incompleteness becomes evidence for the concept rather than a limitation on it, the concept becomes very difficult to fail, which is not the same as being confirmed.
VII. What Entanglement Prevents Us from Distinguishing
Generalizing from Hodder back to the wider literature, entanglement talk costs discrimination in five specific and recurring ways.
It can obscure the type of relation involved. A wall constrains differently from a friend. A pathogen affects differently from a legal classification. A promise mediates differently from a temperature drop. Calling all of these entangled registers their co-presence in a situation while sacrificing exactly the differences that any explanation of that situation requires.
It can obscure directionality. An employer and a worker may be entangled in Hodder's dependency sense, but a worker typically depends on a wage far more immediately than an employer depends on any one worker; a colonized population and an imperial administration are entangled in Thomas's historical sense, while power between them remains violently asymmetric. Generic relational vocabulary flattens exactly the asymmetries that a historically responsible analysis needs to expose. Hodder himself eventually turns to unequal concentrations of dependence and power, late enough in the book that he concedes the topic may have received insufficient earlier treatment.
It can obscure recursivity. A wall has causal efficacy; a hammer affords and constrains; a human responds to the hammer; another human can respond, in turn, to how the first human responds. These are not equivalent relational forms, and treating them as such loses a distinction, between nonrecursive mediation, selfrecursive mediation, and interrecursive mediation, that matters enormously for explanation. Hodder's occasional attribution of "primary agency" to things, on the grounds that they undergo material interaction, transformation, and decay (Hodder 2012, p.216), risks exactly this flattening: if ordinary erosion counts as agency, no term remains available for the specifically recursive capacities of living beings. Materials can be genuinely consequential, constituting grounds, affordances, obstacles, and constraints, without being described as agents in the same sense that a person responding to another person's response is.
The stronger question this raises is what theoretical work is actually being protected by extending agency downward to include decay and erosion. One answer is that it symmetrically dignifies the nonhuman, refusing to let humans monopolize efficacy. But dignity of this kind is purchased by emptying the concept it is extended through: an agency that a collapsing wall shares with a grieving relative and a legislature stops distinguishing anything, which is the same difficulty entanglement runs into everywhere else in this article. A wall's efficacy does not need to be called agency to be taken seriously as consequential. It needs a vocabulary, affordance, constraint, causal contribution, that keeps its specific mode of consequence visible rather than assimilating it to a term whose meaning is anchored, everywhere else it is used, in intention and responsiveness.
It can obscure temporality. Different materials decay at different rates; maintenance schedules matter; investments accumulate; dependencies become progressively harder to reverse. This is one of Hodder's real strengths, and none of it needs to be discarded. But entanglement itself does not explain temporal form. Sedimentation, maintenance, recursive opening, closure, irreversibility, and path dependency do the explanatory work, and each survives perfectly well once the summary term naming their totality is removed.
Finally, and most decisively, it can obscure relevance. Infinite relationality is analytically useless on its own terms, since under a sufficiently broad description everything in the universe relates to everything else. Living beings do not engage equally with everything to which they happen to be causally connected. Some disturbances become salient; others remain background. Some relations open recursively into explicit attention; others sediment into unnoticed routine. The fundamental problem an adequate social theory must solve is therefore not connectedness as such but recursive relevance: what becomes consequential, for whom, through what mediation, and why now rather than at some other moment. This is the point at which criticism has to give way to reconstruction.
VIII. Stop Starting with the Strands: A Pre-SWIPE Alternative
The alternative proposed here is emphatically not disentanglement, not a renewed dualism of pure humans and pure things, and not a claim that relations are somehow unreal. It is to stop beginning analysis with the inherited relata at all. This is not unprecedented. Annemarie Mol's ethnography of atherosclerosis does not begin by positing disease and its social context as a pre-given pair and then denying their separateness; it shows instead that a disease enacted differently across different clinical practices only sometimes coheres into something singular enough to be called one object at all (Mol 2002). Multiplicity, on this account, is not the discovery that two prior things were secretly entangled. It is a refusal to grant the object the status of a prior thing in the first place, which is a different and harder achievement than either denying a separation or building a bridge across one.
Living Value Theory's starting proposition is that life is recursive mediation within a mesocosm, the lived field in which reality becomes available to a living being (Ecks 2026d). The primary unit of analysis is living activity itself, not two pre-given domains awaiting reconnection or denial. Within that activity, five mediations are analytically distinguishable and normally co-present: multisensorial embodiment, being-with, multimaterial forming, multiversal dwelling, and multisymbolism. These are not five ontological regions competing for jurisdiction. They are analytic discriminations within one process, and the test of whether this framework has simply built a new classification to replace the old one is whether these distinctions get autonomized into separate worlds, as body and mind were, or remain local, revisable differentiations answering to the question actually being asked.
Hodder's own strongest example, a leaking roof, shows what this redescription changes. A leaking roof is not usefully described as an entanglement of human and thing. The material roof deteriorates; water penetrates; dwelling becomes materially compromised; the inhabitants feel the disturbance before they name it; prior ownership and debt relations constrain which responses are even available; money and tools enable some repairs and foreclose others; symbolic and diagnostic classification identifies what the problem is taken to be; the household may disagree, recursively, about who is responsible for fixing it and how much should be spent; past investment shapes present choice; the repair itself produces new material conditions that will constrain the next disturbance. This is a far richer description than human plus thing equals entangled, and at no point does it require anything to cross an ontological human/thing boundary, because no such boundary was assumed at the outset.
The same redescription applies to Çatalhöyük without discarding any of Hodder's empirical achievement. Clay sourcing, plastering, sooting, replastering, food storage, memory, house construction, animal management, and labor remain exactly as important as Hodder shows them to be. What changes is the question asked of each episode: what mediations are operating; what dependencies actually constrain the action in question; which relations are recursively opened into explicit attention and which sediment into routine; what temporalities are at work; what causal mechanisms are doing the work; what becomes institutionally stabilized; and, decisively, which of the innumerable possible links are relevant to the specific process being explained. The resulting methodological principle is straightforward to state and hard to follow with real discipline: do not map all possible connections; specify the relations that become relevant to the process under explanation.
Being explicit about what survives this critique matters, because it strengthens rather than weakens the case against the master concept. Hodder's archaeology of maintenance, his attention to differential decay, his account of sunk cost and path dependence, his documentation of sequencing and irreversibility, and above all his empirical reconstruction of Çatalhöyük itself, all survive the removal of entanglement as an organizing category. What does not survive is the claim that these findings become more intelligible once placed under the ontological master term that supposedly unifies them. The ethnography and archaeology survive the destruction of the jargon extraordinarily well.
The same discipline applies outside archaeology. Matter and meaning do not need to be entangled because neither needs to function as a primary ontological domain in the first place. A medication is materially specific, but its efficacy and use involve multisensorial effect, symbolic diagnosis, relations of trust, institutional classification, built infrastructure, and temporally sedimented routine, all at once and without any of these needing to be sorted first into a matter column and a meaning column before their mutual relevance can be affirmed. A diagnosis is symbolic, but symbols are produced, stored, heard, read, and acted upon through material and embodied processes that were never absent from them. The observation that symbolic and material mediations are mutually consequential does not require an ontology of matter-meaning entanglement. It requires a sufficiently discriminating description of what is actually happening, which is a more modest ambition than a general ontology but a considerably more tractable one.
Conclusion: The World Was Never Waiting to Be Entangled
The genealogy is more interesting, and more instructive, than a simple story about Karen Barad. Schrödinger introduced entanglement into quantum mechanics in 1935 to name a precise feature of quantum systems. Social scientists adopted the ordinary metaphor independently and decades later: Thomas in 1991, Randeria and a wider postcolonial historiography by the turn of the millennium. Haraway developed the adjacent vocabulary of cyborgs, hybrids, and natureculture from the 1980s onward. Barad then transformed the landscape by making quantum-derived nonseparability the basis of a comprehensive ontology, and new materialism, posthumanism, and archaeology carried the resulting vocabulary rapidly across disciplinary boundaries through the following decade. Hodder turned entanglement into an archaeological research programme, complete with a formula, and in doing so made unusually visible a problem that stays hidden in more purely philosophical treatments: once every possible relation between two categories has been folded into a concept's definition, the concept has been rendered true by construction and empty by the same stroke.
None of this licenses the conclusion that everything written under this vocabulary is worthless. The recurring empirical discoveries, colonial mutual implication, archaeological dependency, matter's refusal to be merely passive, are frequently excellent, and this article has no interest in discarding them. What needs abandoning is the assumption that their importance consists in showing that previously separated ontological domains are actually interconnected. Hodder's own book makes the point better than any external critique could: he wants to bridge human-centered and thing-centered approaches, calls entanglement a bridge explicitly, defines the concept as every logically possible dependency between humans and things, and watches his own tanglegrams expand until almost everything at Çatalhöyük is drawn in. At that point the decisive question is no longer what is entangled, since almost anything can be. The questions that remain are what matters, to whom, through what mediation, with what directionality, at what time, through what causal process, and with what recursive consequences.
The first generation accepted the shores. The second built bridges between them. The third announced that the shores had always been entangled. The task this article proposes is to stop starting with the shores. The world does not need social theory to keep telling it that everything is entangled. It needs concepts capable of explaining why, among the innumerable relations any given thing stands in, some particular relation becomes consequential for living now.
Selected References
Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Coole, D. and Frost, S., eds., 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Fitzgerald, D. and Callard, F., 2016. Entangling the medical humanities. In: A. Whitehead, A. Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, and J. Richards, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Haraway, D.J., 1985. A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80, pp.65–108.
Haraway, D.J., 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Hodder, I., 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jaksland, R., 2024. Naturalized, fundamental, and feminist metaphysics all at once: the case of Barad's agential realism. Hypatia, 39(2), pp.363–384.
Mol, A., 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Randeria, S., 2002. Entangled histories of uneven modernities: civil society, caste solidarities and legal pluralism in post-colonial India. In: Y. Elkana et al., eds. Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness. Frankfurt: Campus.
Schrödinger, E., 1935. Discussion of probability relations between separated systems. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 31, pp.555–563.
Thomas, N., 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Werner, M. and Zimmermann, B., 2006. Beyond comparison: histoire croisée and the challenge of reflexivity. History and Theory, 45(1), pp.30–50.