Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair

This special section, coordinated by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober, should not be seen as residual in the discipline, but treating matters of substantive importance such as the connection between human activity and the increasing production of waste, what characterises place‐making, and the dialectic relation between cleanness and social order. Yet this themed section might serve to explore the always complicated question of how to move further for the scholarship on waste too. The four articles gathered here share an emphasis on the materiality of waste and how it is part of a social entanglement. They show the diversity of current discard studies, a field characterised by a critical examination of what is systematically left out and devalued.