This seminar is part of the long tradition of the anthropology of material culture and in the renewed framework of studies on the relationship to non-humans. We will focus on objects and things, material productions and human remains, works and utensils, remains and images. The distanced view that we will adopt will consist not only in making objects speak for the societies in which they are produced, used and valorised, but also in describing as scrupulously as possible the stakes and the social and historical conditions of this production, use and valorisation. It is objects and things as complex social facts that will hold our attention, as they are always caught in a tangle of individual interests and collective stakes, at the heart of conflicts of appropriation and interweaving of narratives. The objective of this seminar will be to address a set of case studies, with the participation of invited guests, cases selected from the history of the human and social sciences as well as from current events, and to decipher the major notions and transversal concepts of this field of research by drawing up a panorama of the literature specialised in anthropology, sociology, archaeology and history. The themes of memory, heritage and museums will be central to our subject. The relationship to objects and composite entities has undergone major changes in recent years, which should be analysed without losing sight of their anchoring in a long history.