Following Human Hair to Unexpected Places: A Review of Emma Tarlo’s Engtanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair

Abstract

Centering around the trade in human hair, Entanglement follows Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, and Gastón R. Gordillo’s Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, as multi-sited, interdisciplinary ethnographies centered around a thing or category of things. All three have received recent acclaim from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology; both Tarlo’s and Tsing’s books have been awarded the Victor Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Tsing in 2016 and Tarlo in 2017, while Gordillo received an honorable mention. Clearly a popular trend in current ethnographic writing, Tarlo demonstrates the vast potential of such an approach by constructing a nuanced and complex, yet cohesive narrative that traces the commodity pathways of human hair (and sometimes also animal hair) into surprisingly intimate encounters