The “social imaginary” has been critiqued for its overly deterministic qualities and resemblance to concepts of culture. Our article interrogates the materiality of the indeterminate at a time of heightened global uncertainty. Furthering a rapid response, material methodology in anthropology, we examine objects, animals, and infrastructures that disrupt and reinscribe border imaginaries in differential and unexpected ways in Sør-Varanger, on the Norwegian border with Russia, one month after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, amid emerging international sanctions and national border closures. We show how everyday engagements with various “materials"—souvenirs and monuments, surveyed and commodified species, industrial and transport infrastructures—foster a sense of uncertainty around the (im)permeability of an East-West border. The array of effects that they have on the imagination is unevenly and at times randomly shaped by their materiality. However, these differential effects are also patterned in their indeterminacy, as the scale and temporality of the materials’ movements affect their potential to transform border imaginaries. We thus rethink the material imaginary as simultaneously indeterminate and patterned in dialogue with scalar and temporal dimensions of mobility.
This article explores the enduring presence and shifting meanings of outdated media and communication technologies (MCTs) in everyday life. Based on 30 in-depth interviews conducted in Istanbul, it examines how individuals retain objects such as Walkmans, vinyl records, and early mobile phones - devices no longer widely used, yet still materially and emotionally significant. Rather than approaching these items as nostalgic collectibles, the study reframes retention as a materially mediated practice through which attachment, memory, and critique are enacted. Bringing material culture studies, science and technology studies, and domestication theory into conversation, the article argues that outdated MCTs act as mediators of identity and memory and enable alternative engagements with time, value, and media. Istanbul's urban ecology - marked by repair networks, second-hand circulation, and layered temporalities - further supports these practices. The article contributes to debates on materiality by showing how old devices persist as materially active participants in everyday urban life - culturally re-signified and affectively charged artefacts rather than passive remnants of past use.
This study examines how material objects sustain family relationships in contexts of displacement and disruption, focusing on two women in Sweden whose parents and grandparents fled Estonia during the Second World War. I investigate how materiality intertwines with memory and imagination, demonstrating that objects-even when their origins are unclear or initially unknown-possess mnemonic and imaginative qualities that help materialize stories and memories, fostering intergenerational continuity and belonging. The case study reveals that such adopted objects act as active agents of memory, enabling individuals to reconstruct disrupted family histories, affirm identity, and sustain continuity through imaginative and affective engagement. I propose that distinguishing between inherited and adopted objects provides a valuable lens for understanding how memory, identity, and materiality intersect in contexts marked by displacement, loss, and disruption. This study highlights that continuity and belonging are not only preserved through what is handed down but also actively constructed through engagement with material culture. My findings challenge the assumption that only inherited family objects can sustain kinship ties and memory, showing that adopted objects play a central role in reconstructing pasts and maintaining belonging across generations in contexts of disruption and dislocation.
Environmental disasters deeply affect communities, leaving both physical and emotional scars. For survivors, these 'traces' of the material world that was lost can help to appease the absence of the ordinariness of their familiar everyday lives. This paper, based on ethnographic research in North-Eastern Japan after the 2011 tsunami, explores how salvaged objects and surviving spaces and landscapes can help disaster-affected populations make sense of their new realities. The paper identifies three performative strategies employed by survivors to engage with this material absence of their ordinary lives: reconstruction, integration, and untouching; further showing how salvaged objects and altered landscapes play a central role in rebuilding identity, memory, and new trajectories into the future. By examining how survivors interact with 'traces' of material absence, the paper contributes to the growing field of post-disaster material culture, highlighting the agentic power of absence to make sense of their experiences, while empowering their coping with loss and reimagination of new futures.
This article offers the politics of longing as a new conceptual lens through which to view calls for the restitution of museum artefacts collected through colonial looting and plunder. Three perspectives frame this longing: that of the 'host' country, that of the 'home' country or source community, and that of the object itself. Empirically, the article is original in applying the politics of longing to selected documentary and fiction films that have depicted calls for African restitution. This contribution is significant in moving beyond oft-repeated arguments around universal museums, legal acquisition and keeping collections safe to consider the broader post-colonial context in which these arguments are couched. The medium of film effectively evokes the politics of longing through various narrative and visual techniques. What emerges is a shared desire to depict featured artefacts as out of place and a need to acknowledge the emotional and cultural ties binding people to their heritage.
The principal contention of this paper is that an ethnographic interview based on the mutual discussion of specific images or things can produce entirely different results from the more conventional interview based solely on language. The main example that will be presented comes from the ethnographic work that Craig Ryder conducted with political influencers in Sri Lanka. This example takes us to the vanguard of what is possible, because it involved data visualisations that included the interviewee's social media activities. This example is then generalised to other cases where the presence of visual and material forms within the interview contexts radically changes the results of those interviews, sometimes producing almost the opposite insights to conventional interviews based merely on questions and answers. The paper concludes by showing how augmentation makes three significant contributions: it grounds the interview, it displaces dominant discourses and it creates a more collaborative relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee.
This article explores a new line of discussion within an archaeology of the future, aiming to develop a forward-looking perspective on how technological transformations may reshape our understandings of materiality and humanness. Contemporary technologies are generating entities that not only interact with and respond to human stimuli but may soon display increasing degrees of autonomy, subjectivity, and even self-awareness-giving rise to new forms of being and unprecedented human-nonhuman entanglements. These developments invite reflection on how ideas long associated with non-Western cosmologies-such as the continuity between humans and nonhumans-are reemerging within the modern Western project itself, through technocultural processes that both reproduce and unsettle its epistemological foundations. Drawing on selected science fiction films as speculative devices, the article envisions possible futures in which these entanglements take form, prompting a reexamination of the epistemological and ontological foundations that underlie archaeological practice. Ultimately, it argues that archaeology-through its sustained engagement with material traces and with the long-term coevolution of humans and nonhumans-is uniquely positioned to contribute to contemporary debates on materiality and the human.
The practice of writing biographies for museum-collected instruments lies at the intersection of the history of scientific instrument and anthropological object biography studies. Current practitioners often downplay object agency, resulting in either impoverished instrument histories or human-centered narratives. Given that the concept of agency primarily focuses on the social significance of objects, often overlooking the functioning of typical technical objects such as scientific instruments, and considering that object biographies initially did not address the agency of objects but rather how objects acquire person-like individuality, this paper proposes a more instrument-centered narrative framework based on Gilbert Simondon's account of technical individuals. Within this genuine "instrument biography," instruments, like and alongside humans, continually adapt to and shape their milieus according to their unique existential conditions, thereby actively instructing the development of scientific practices and material cultures.
Across urban landscapes shaped by austerity, redevelopment, and dispossession, trees play key roles in practices of resistance, embodying continuity, rootedness, and contested attachments between people and place. Drawing on ethnographic research in working-class housing estates in West London and Belfast, this paper examines how trees operate as material and symbolic anchors for residents confronting displacement amid prolonged economic decline in the UK. Despite distinct historical trajectories, both sites reveal how residents mobilise trees and practices of care to claim spaces otherwise targeted for extraction and erasure. In West London, Mayanka explores a council estate where residents plant and nurture trees to challenge official claims of 'uninhabitability' used to legitimise demolition and emptiness. In Belfast, Anna examines a 'fairy tree' - a culturally significant hawthorn that has withstood redevelopment pressures - alongside more contentious practices of place-making, including the burning of wooden pallets in Twelfth of July bonfires. Together, these cases foreground how care for trees is neither politically neutral nor uniformly benign, but embedded within antagonistic social relations shaped by class and colonial histories. Written in the shadow of the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the paper engages with scholarship on olive trees as sites of resistance to settler colonial violence, using this comparative lens to unsettle liberal paradigms of care that render it apolitical. Focusing on the material qualities of trees - their durability, flammability, rootedness, and vulnerability - we analyse how care can operate as a form of refusal, attachment, and contestation within, rather than outside, capitalist relations. By attending to practices that may involve harm, recklessness, or violence, we challenge romanticised accounts of care and urban nature, presenting them instead as contested terrains of material struggle, political antagonism, and uneven survival.
The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), hosted by the British Museum and financed by the Arcadia Fund, exemplifies initiatives that aim to preserve diverse material knowledges and practices variously threatened with disappearance. Based on insights from six EMKP projects, we critically interrogate such an emphasis on "endangerment," highlighting how endangerment is closely entangled with resilience. Spanning six distinct material knowledges practices (wilk silk textiles; hide and fiber crafts; artificial island-build; felt hats; dry stonemasonry; dyes) in six geographical locations (Burkina Faso, Mongolia, Solomon Islands, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Colombia), the featured EMKP projects highlight how endangerment and resilience are not mutually exclusive. Instead, enmeshed paradoxically through social embedding, endangerment and resilience are intimately intertwined, constituent parts of each other. We propose the notion of "demonstrably sustainable technics" as an analytical category to better account for the endangerment-resilience nexus, to better understand why and how some material practices and knowledges persist despite various threats to their continuity, that of their human and non-human participants and broader socioecological contexts. Simultaneously, "demonstrably sustainable technics" allow for a nuanced understanding of the imbrication of acts of cultural and social erasure paradoxically with the very same traditions of documentation attempting to be overturned or at least confronted by these projects.
This article presents different vignettes on the life of matter and machines among the Yagua people in northwestern Amazonia. Based on an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork, it highlights the potential ubiquity, plurality and complexity of life-forces in matter and machines among the Yagua people. It shows how Yaguan materialisms differ from existing materialisms in anthropology, archaeology and the wider social sciences. The article advocates for an ontologically open attitude towards the life of matter, which is rooted in the belief that we can never be certain about the underlying fabric of our world.
On 1 June 2019 plastic bags were banned in Tanzania. The ban was driven by a global environmentalist narrative that plastic bags harm marine life and livestock; contribute to flooding events; and produce unsightly litter. Five years later, small polyethylene pouches remained integral to daily life for the majority of residents in Tanzania's biggest city, Dar es Salaam. This article introduces 'The Plastic Divide', between urban poor and middle/ruling class, as a way to understand the effects of the plastic bag ban in Tanzania. Although originally emerging from the Global South, blanket moves to ban plastics bring greater harm to the poorest who are most reliant on plastics, least able to access alternatives and yet remain the most adversely affected by plastic pollution. By paying attention to the material specificities of plastics however we can gain insight into how and why they have become resistant to regulation in many contexts.
In 1823, Daguerre and Bouton brought their invention to the UK - the diorama. Huge, back-lit canvases appeared to come 'alive' and offer audiences 'through-views' of the world. Here, I present ethnographic data on how contemporary dioramas at the other end of the scale - the miniature - are made, and how this affords makers 'through-views' of life. I describe how three UK-based practitioners create scaled-down three-dimensional dioramas of home. According to them, the diorama is a genre of miniaturisation that best enables them to narrativise scenes of life emplaced in the home: places where interiority, exteriority, space and time intertwine in complex ways that practitioners deem fundamental to life-making. Life's intricacy is best captured at small scale, they suggest, as shrinking requires retaining and incorporating the macro into the micro. I argue miniaturists form dioramas of the home not only because they come to life for audiences but because this particular process of form-giving also transforms makers themselves - offering bodily catharsis, repair and therapy as they too, come to life.
This study explores local conflicts between the Soviet political dictatorship's abstract historical narrative (chronopolitics) and the temporal regimes of rural society in a Western Ukrainian region, specifically in the borderland settlements of Transcarpathia. The analysis focuses on an empirical investigation of a single group of settlements, aiming to examine the micro-level power dynamics and symbolic struggles that shaped the transformation, representation, and institutional reproduction of temporal experience between the Soviet state and everyday citizens during the 1960s–1980s. The study examines how open-air skansens and ethnographic room museums—established under central party directives during the Soviet political dictatorship after 1945—shaped a normative conception of time in rural society and influenced the personal and collective memory of local inhabitants.
Over the past two decades plastic wastes have escalated from being a nascent concern into a critical environmental emergency. The latest round of negotiations for the global plastic treaty, an initiative envisioned to create a binding international framework to address plastic pollution concluded without a final agreement. Simultaneously involved stakeholders - international foundations, businesses, politicians, and policymakers - have been advocating a circular economy (CE) framework to address the plastic crisis. CE for plastics borrows from generic models of CE that propose keeping materials in circulation at their highest value without really defining what constitutes as value. In this paper, I address the question of value with regard to materials like plastics and highlight the double paradox of having to make plastics - inherently durable materials that are produced to be wasted - valuable again. Drawing on ethnographic research in Telangana and Mumbai, India, I outline the three intersectional strands of value that emerge as plastics are revalued through recycling. In conclusion, I argue for the need to factor in material attributes that creep into afterlives for artificially produced materials like plastics as they travel the junctures between waste and value through their life cycles.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork - including participant observations, interviews, archival research, and netnography - this article traces the material and symbolic trajectories of festival tents. It explores how waste-making intersect with comfort, pleasure, and sociality, but also with postcolonial entanglements and global inequalities. Focusing on micro-moments of 'wasteification', the study examines how tents shift from valued sites of intimacy and identity to ambiguous, discarded matter. This transformation reveals competing and messy logics: some tents are abandoned due to material fatigue, planned obsolescence, or cultural scripts of disposability, while others are salvaged, cherished, and recommodified. By attending to the ontological multiplicity of festival tents, the article contributes to debates on disposability, waste infrastructures, and the politics of material culture. As ephemeral yet materially persistent objects, festival tents illuminate uneven global circuits of production, consumption, and abandonment, emerging as evocative actors in broader discussions on waste, inequality, and material ethics.
Dugout canoes are a means of water transportation for many local communities around the world. In Vietnam's ethnic minority communities, dugout canoes have their own characteristics in terms of materials, size, and design in accordance with intended uses and river topography (e.g. rapids, or underwater rocks). Our study considers prior research on dugout canoes worldwide, including in Vietnam, and focuses on the plung dugout canoe of the Bahnar ethnic group in Kon K'tu village, Kon Tum Province, Central Highlands. Our field study shows that although the number of Bahnar canoes is declining, the remaining ones help preserve and transmit local knowledge and foster close interaction between humans and nature in the current generation. Understanding the cultural content and context of the Bahnar canoe is a first step before taking specific actions to help the community to maintain, transmit, and express their unique cultural values in their canoes.
Containment practices have been largely overlooked as a set of techniques. When they have received attention, it has largely been a matter of seeing containers as spaces. I argue here that a focus on the temporal dimension of containment can generate a more dynamic understanding of containers as artefacts. One key aspect of this reorientation is a recognition that containment invariably is followed by release, whether anticipated or accidental. In other words, there is a duration to containment. In exploring this question of duration, I turn to an ancient case study, looking at the varying durations incorporated into the design and use of Bronze Age ceramic vessels from the island of Crete in the Aegean. The method entails an integrated approach that inserts the body and its gestures between containers and their contents. With a fuller emphasis on duration as a factor in container design and use, archaeology can reanimate the interdependent containment practices of ancient societies.
This article reconsiders the relation between ethnographic accounts and non-human inscriptions by tracing waste as material data. It engages with the dynamism of residual matter at the epistemic level while aiming at expanding the range of possibilities of research on waste. What we call garbography unsettles the predominant meaning-centric understanding of our methods by paying attention to the expressiveness of residual matter as an asemic inscription or graphein of sorts: in its propensity to leak, rot, grow, mould, tarnish, and stink, waste 'writes' by leaving marks. To practice garbography is thus to be involved in exercises of tracing material inscriptions that might not be directly translatable to verbal language. After providing a series of examples from fieldwork in post-industrial settings of Estonia, we conclude that by thinking with traces and approaching waste in the writing, we can better understand non-human socialities and how the organic, the symbolic, and matter are entangled.
This article adopts a material culture approach to clothing to investigate what sustainable practices women already employ when it comes to managing and engaging with clothes. The core elements of Sophie Woodward's concept 'accidental sustainability' are extended here. Practices considered as sustainable in nature are those that allow women's clothing to be retained and its active life extended. Utilising historical data from an Australian context, the everyday clothing practices of women are interrogated through two case studies to show that awareness of ecological implications are not necessary. That is, women often engage with clothing in sustainable ways without realising. As such, I argue that accidentally sustainable clothing practices are informed by material mastery through embodied skills that women develop through experiences with clothing. Overwhelmingly, the cases outlined in this article show that there remain further avenues to explore when it comes to encouraging sustainable clothing consumption amongst the end-user.
