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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Though regional Indigenous concepts of nonhuman personhood have always known that bears are people, traditional Western museum specimen collections reify differences between humans and bears that embodied experiences contradict. The interspecies material blurriness of bone and flesh makes specimen preparation an interesting site of sensory decolonization of museum collections. This paper uses ethnographic engagement with the skeleton preparation process at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska, to evidence how engagement with animal bones can produce cross-species self-recognition. Through analysis of Lee Post's skeleton preparation methodology, notebooks and experiences from 2001–2003 summer education programs, and the author's personal experiences, this paper provides ethnographic description of the impact of specimen preparation on embodied “zoomimetic” awareness. The history of Western anatomy and medicine contextualizes how animal interiors delineate anxiety over human relationships to nature. Bears’ physical similarities to humans lend uncanniness to settler-bear interactions, which extends to their material bodies. Reference specimens in museums create expert objects that textualize the subtle differences between bears and humans, and the processing of animal bones through cleaning, boiling, and chemical soaking, serve to “overmine” bone to reveal these differences. Volunteer students of the Pratt's “Summer Adventure Program” experienced recognition of similarities between a black bear and their own bodies, enhanced by the haptic attention of drawing and the identification of pathological indices of the individual life experiences of “Wiley” the bear. The production of the bear skeleton specimen as a clear, detailed material which would maintain traditional Western museum boundary between species instead creates opportunity to subvert anthropocentrism and recognize shared interiors and individuality of bearkind.