If social life is guided by a variety of values, sometimes conflicting, they become visible in the things that people produce, exchange and collect. How is the diversity of values diminished in the heterogeneity of the subject matter in order to give it a social consistency? How does the materiality of an object give rise to several forms of recovery? These questions open a field of study to the intersection of the anthropology of the arts and material culture. Based on field surveys on all continents, this collective book develops a joint reflection in the framework of the Branly Pay Museum, opening it to other spaces where things are stored and exhibited with different values. The materials analysed in these studies may be used for the manufacture of objects of appearances (houses, trimmings, statues), as a result of organic degradation (remnants of humans or birds) or appear in technological infrastructure (cinema session). By including them in cultural biographies in which values are transformed, the study of these materials makes it possible to follow the genesis of values which their exposure in a museum may cause to be seen as contradictory. By looking back to their origin, it outlines possible future ones.