Afterword

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.