From traps to camps: Ghost fishing, plastic materialities and carceral entrapment

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.