Beyond Entanglement

This keynote discusses how human-animal relationships can be studied as entanglements to understand more of the situatedness of human and animal bodies and lives. It provides a selection of thinking tools from critical posthumanist feminism and new materialism which should prove useful for studying more-than-human worldmaking through archaeology. These tools can be used to study how humanity and animality are produced, how to recognise animal agentiality, and to highlight challenges on the way. Key issues are identified in concepts such as taxonomies, hybridity, othering and killability. Examples are drawn from recently published research on human-animal relations in archaeology on rock art, depositions, sacrifices, burial practices and more. The paper also tests how speculative methods can be a way of approaching more-than-human exposedness, situatedness and agentiality. It makes an argument that while it is important to study the entanglement of bodies as material-semiotic phenomena, it is of equal importance to also address questions on inequalities and injustices, and who carries the burden in particular situated entanglements and thereby move beyond the study of entanglement on its own.