Introduction: Vital waste, or the body extended

This special issue, Vital Waste , tackles the trajectories and perceptions of substances originating from human and animal bodies that were excreted, expelled, cut, removed, and/or used, in a period and contexts ranging from Medieval Iran to contemporary South India. We approach the substances in question through the lenses of history of science and technology in addition to anthropology, re-examining the conceptual frameworks of “afterlives,” and “signs of life,” and analyzing the meaning of life in bodily substances. Five articles demonstrate how different communities created, explored, and evaluated materials as both related to the “body integral” and disintegrated from it. Such ex-corporated substances, they show, are potent and stay active enough to mobilize human and nonhuman actors to act, often with a tendency to reduce proximity and move them away. This approach offers a new understanding of bodily waste as a vital material which preserves traces of life and whose connections with the body of origin either disturb or are highly desirable. This vitality contained within bodily materials is our focus. Traces or signs of life constitute potencies, both material and emotional, which are life-lasting and have to be framed as a value or a threat. Ultimately, the contributions that make up this special issue complicate our understanding of both waste and bodily boundaries.