This article sheds light on the meaning and world-making capacities of objects by examining both the material composition and social entanglements of traps in Ecuador's Napo Province. Drawing on fieldwork, we explore how objects are co-constituted alongside human and non-human entities, acquiring person-like qualities. We demonstrate that traps are not merely tools for capture or killing but also ingenious, cunning strategies for navigating disadvantaged positions and disrupting others’ relationships with their environments. However, unlike hunting, trapping affords prey new forms of agency. We define trapping as an interaction mediated by a modified environment composed of “false” signs. Traps are not preassembled tools but emerge through dynamic interactions, co-constructing the field of research itself.
Taking Cape Coast Castle as a case, this article asks how material remains sustain decolonial memory while unsettling the institutional arrangements that make it possible. Drawing on guided tours, local conversations, material observation, and institutional discussions, it shows how slavery memory is translated into controlled discomfort: powerful, recognizable, yet ordered enough to remain visitable and comfortable. The article argues that material remains are simultaneously docile and unruly: dampness, residues, corrosion, salt, microbial growth, and climatic weathering give emotional scripts sensory density, while the same traces become material noise when they demand cleaning, repair, conservation, funding, and responsibility. Digital heritage intensifies this tension as decolonial efforts to relieve material burdens risk reproducing coloniality through technological and donor dependency. Decolonization is therefore not the overcoming of pain, but a costly, unsettling, and unresolved struggle to live with material noise.
This article draws on ethnographic research with weavers and fishermen in Sardinia to explore emergent modalities of entrapment. Following fish traps from a Berlin museum collection to the bottom of the lagoon, and contrasting nasse traps made from plant material with synthetic ghost traps submerged in the Gulf of Oristano, I consider how synthetic materials exercise an indiscriminate, chronic agency that extends beyond single objects and designs. Combining material ecology with a critique of fossil capitalism, I develop the concept of carceral entrapment, or a modality of world-making that produces persistent harm beyond human control, in which the durability of plastics dissolves the dramatic nexus that Alfred Gell saw as constitutive of traps. Instead, carceral entrapment operates across scales and through ecological, economic, and corporeal relations, and generates enduring, unpredictable, and pervasive forms of harm. An anthropology of traps, I argue, must attend to these complex agentic relations and their uneven distributions.
Engaging with care theories and perspectives arising from repair studies, this article proposes material care as a conceptual possibility to think with and to interpret material relations leading to overconsumption and wasting. We bring theoretical ideas on material care into conversation with empirical material from Finland, a country in which discarding is made easy with functioning waste management infrastructures. We use the material to gain understanding of what material care means in practice for people in their everyday life. With selected insights from the material gathered through object-centred dialogues, we reflect on care ethics in action, showing how material objects themselves influence people's choices on care and how avoiding care is part of the ethical considerations. We also discuss affective and embodied relations with things and meaning-making and creativity as crucial elements of material care. Our finding is that people do care about their things even though consumerism suggests otherwise, and we propose that this is because material care is significant to people's wellbeing in ways that are rarely addressed in present policy frameworks. The value of thinking with material care lies in the alternative visions for sustainability that it allows to nurture.
This article proposes a method for analysing recurring geometric relationships in Chalcolithic Botai material culture in northern Kazakhstan. Ornamented artefacts, dwelling architecture and settlement layout are examined without assuming a single symbolic code or historical continuity. The methodology integrates ethnogeometry, Material Engagement Theory, the enactive signification hypothesis and Peircean and material semiotics. Analysis proceeds through four levels of inference, from observable material features to culturally specific interpretations. Results show that comparable geometric relationships are materialised differently through production, object orientation, bodily interaction, movement and spatial organisation. The unit of comparison is not a motif but a geometric relationship arising within a specific material practice. Formal similarity alone cannot establish ritual or cosmological meaning. Comparative cases from Sakha culture and Çatalhöyük are used asymmetrically to distinguish evidence-based conclusions from speculation. The article therefore treats geometric ornament as a form of embodied material knowledge while defining explicit evidential limits for archaeological interpretation.
