In recent years, we have seen in the social and human sciences a "return to things" - in contrast to a long-standing intellectual tradition that separated subject from object, mind from matter. Hodder begins with a critical overview of relevant theories, from phenomenology and material culture studies to the "extended mind" of cognitive perspectives and Actor-Network Theory, to highlight that all these approaches usually do not reach the things themselves as they maintain a human-centered perspective. He focuses more on the multiple dependencies created by complex relationships between humans and things, as well as their temporality, noting that it is primarily a relationship that drags and traps.

Drawing examples from archaeology (particularly from Neolithic and the domestication of plants and animals), as well as from contemporary everyday life and history, Hodder gradually builds his own theory of entanglement. He leverages ideas and perspectives from behavioral, ecological, and especially evolutionary theories to explore why entanglements tend to increase in scale and complexity, and how they facilitate change, but also, due to the difficulty of reversal and in a non-teleological way, steer towards certain directions. The theory of entanglement insists on the disobedience of things, on how the natural properties of things resist and limit us, while avoiding giving in to outdated determinisms and materialisms and leaving room for contingency and indeterminacy. Hodder considers the idea of entanglement as it allows for a more comprehensive integration of humanities, social, biological, and material sciences in the study of things, primarily as "a bridging concept".