The notion of “entanglement” has become a productive analytical tool for social historians. “Entanglement” recognizes that categories used to delineate sets of things frequently create artificial boundaries that require interrogation. It acknowledges that human agency is a condition of interdependency, one which operates within and between social groups possessing different sorts of power. David Maxwell, following Tony Ballantyne’s Entanglements of Empire (2014), deftly deploys the notion to examine the “plural interaction, recursion, transcultural and cross-cultural engagement, interaction with science and social border crossing” (12) in colonial Katanga, amongst Luba, colonial officials, and missionaries of various nationalities and confessions. In doing so, he shows how the Luba people were intertwined in religious revival, in the establishment of Pentecostal churches, and in the formation of knowledge—and its international exchange—of themselves as a people. The span of topics is impressive and necessary in order to examine the extent and nature of entanglement. It...
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