Introduction

Abstract

Orchestrated moments of destruction, cycles of appearance and vanishing, and other material losses recur across time and societies and scales of human action in ways that are pervasive, deeply social, and not anti-materialistic. Our goal with this special issue is to draw attention to the tools, narratives, and settings that people need to exploit ephemerality not just as a social practice but as a material one. We argue that rather than always seeking to objectify things, people undo form to achieve their social effect through working amid an unbounded flow of materiality. Consuming, vanishing, sacrificing, and fashioning all work as techniques of interacting, processes that enhance communities not by committing them to fixed cultural property but by linking people as agents or channels of shared substances. Ephemeral practice, however, is not the negative of objectification, but rather a related set of actions that have special significance for intersubjective experience, negotiating relationships, and the pacing of human interaction.