Social Analysis

This introduction puts forward capture as an anthropological analytic. Idioms of capture already pervade anthropological descriptions, analyses, and methods. We start by questioning the widespread equivalence between capture and predation, showing that neither of these terms should be read as rifts in sociality but rather as continuations of the social by other means. The significance of the diverse socialities of capture is clarified in relation to previous works that demonstrate how capture folds over and into itself, entrapping not just the prey, but also the captors. By bringing this idea to bear on ethnographic analyses of capture, we argue that capture is frequently deployed as a generic term—a catchword—that simultaneously defines the work of the generic itself as a mode of capture or containment. Lastly, what sets capture apart from notions such as network or entanglement is its recursive potential as a verb and metonym for ethnographic inquiry and representation.

‘Bride capture’ is not something contemporary anthropologists like to talk about. It is, in fact, rather an embarrassment. Starting from my own distress as I was (unwittingly) taken along on an expedition to capture a bride, this article asks why it is that our anthropological tools are quite so blunt when we move onto the shifting grounds of what we could call stable or even institutionalized forms of capture: predatory relations that aim at the creation of lasting social ties and that make kinship's ‘mutuality of being’ appear as parasitism and predation. Much of this is due to implicit assumptions of reciprocity, which have long been unjustly associated with Mauss. These assumptions have created blind spots in anthropological analysis that bride capture might help bring into focus.

In Turkey, people who look for valuables in undocumented archaeological sites and ruins are typically known as ‘treasure-hunters’. These treasure-hunters hope to find vast hoards that can potentially lift them out of economic precarity. Such treasures, however, are seldom unguarded. Many tell tales of traps lying in wait at treasure sites. The trap narrative hinges on anticipating a moment of capture, which can be sidestepped only by cultivating a cunning and vigilant self, capable of outwitting a hostile spectral intentionality. These ideas often reflect attitudes that treasure-hunters have toward material constraints in the everyday. By focusing on trap narratives, this article explores how vernacular imaginaries of the past resonate with experiences of the present and concerns for the future.

Engineers and similar knowledge workers hold high socio-political status in liberal, settler-colonial, and extractivist Australia. Although ‘carbon capture and storage’ (CCS) has uncertain future relevance for global emissions reduction, newcomers still reach out for desired roles in CCS knowledge work. Drawing on ethnographic study in Eastern Australia, this article centers on expert personhood during the pursuit of professionalism. I argue that two scales of ‘entrapment’ occur for CCS knowledge workers, recursively combining into ‘people capture’ by the industry: Mutuality and complicity emerge between corporate projects and aspirational engineers, who are assigned to build forceful representations (“eyewash”) for wider audiences. When positions of institutionally affirmed expertise are seen as contingent upon the reproduction of specific narratives, knowledge workers are captured into complicity by their own aspirations for self-making.

This article investigates queer socializing among elderly working-class queer men in Shanghai through two ethnographic examples. The first concerns the men's parodic redeployment of socialist revolutionary repertoire. By framing it as ‘just for fun’, the men precluded a politics of resistance, but this frame sometimes exceeded itself when play became a critique of the state. The second example focuses on how the ‘just for fun’ frame constrains the men's outlook on queer friendship, which was perceived as volatile and relegated as nothing—just play. However, communal activities such as commensality create a subjunctive world where this constraint could be potentially transgressed. I argue that the ‘just for fun’ frame operates as a form of self-entrapment, deliberately placing constraints on the men's queerness. This article challenges the tendency in queer scholarship, including queer anthropology, to politicize and idealize queer play.

Cuenca, Ecuador, is a city that captivates very different people, from popular entrepreneurs to North American expats, in large part due to the UNESCO-designated heritage architecture of the old town and associated promises of authenticity, belonging, and success. Beyond established, often reductionist assessments of this kind of context in terms of tourist simulacra and gentrification, I explore the city as a more complex ecology of multi-directional, contingent capture. This ecology, I argue, is shaped by the iconic, in its double sense of city emblems and semiotic signs. Icons capture people and their diverse investments—from attention and affect to money and life projects—while also offering them the possibility of creative appropriation to redirect the trap.

Jafar Panahi's film Taxi is emblematic of how Iranian filmmakers find creative ways to undermine government-imposed regulations. As a socio-political critique that effectively suspends our doubts regarding the film's degree of improvisation and authenticity, Taxi recursively replicates its content in its own form by luring the Iranian government into demonstrating what the film merely sets out to communicate. In doing so, the film exemplifies a form of creativity within constraints that captures and exceeds those very constraints. By discussing Taxi in analogy to ethnographic practice, this article argues that the captivating qualities of ethnography derive from the narrative trope of captor-turned-captive. Here, incomplete entrapments of the field are used as a device for turning ethnographer and reader into entrapped.

The language of capture is everywhere, from accumulation by dispossession to carbon capture, from the capture of attention to the capture of subatomic particles. Capture, it would seem, has become capitalism's technology of self-detection. In this article I take a broader look at capture by placing it in a wider comparative and anthropological canvas. Specifically, I make a case for thinking of capture as part of an axis of transformation whose unstable other is ‘regeneration’. Capture and regeneration, I shall argue, work as axial technologies, not unlike how the relation between gifts and commodities has been conceptualized as an axis organizing exchange theory.