Material objects are a complex topic. Research shows that they function as active agents and witnesses of history, embodying identities, ideologies, and social worlds while connecting people across time and space. However, objects can create a sense of breathlessness tensions of absence, disconnection, and shifting value, evoke loss or exclusion, disrupt memory and intimacy, and be a reflection of broader social transformations through practices of sorting, discarding, or concealing within domestic and public life. Research also shows that material objects shape respiration and environmental interactions, as seen in everyday items like chip bags, inhalers, and climate-conscious designs, which can socially engineer life in ways that sustain some while denying others and highlight both the harms of industrial residues and possibilities for intervention. At the same time, objects can serve highly individualized purposes, such as simple ritual tools that cultivate connections beyond the physical body while producing tangible bodily benefits through repeated practice.

Anthropologists’ focus must be to continue to improve human-object relationships by studying how material objects shape social, emotional, and environmental outcomes, connecting individual experiences with broader historical and ecological processes, and vice versa. We can guide ethical design and use, preserve sociocultural knowledge, and represent marginalized perspectives. That is, anthropology must be inclusive in ways beyond mere research and it is only by cultivating reflexive practice and interdisciplinary collaboration that anthropologists may help communities recognize the impacts of production, consumption, and disposal. This would promote socially just, meaningful, and sustainable interactions with objects, technologies, and the environments in which we live and circulate.