Introduction: Vital waste,or the body extended

Abstract

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.

The body integral?

A newborn comes into the world out of a pregnant body. It is an integral bodily entity, which already has a certain social status, depending on dominant ideas and beliefs of the group it belongs to. Next, the placenta comes into the world, full and in one piece—if all goes right. Whose body does it belong to? The newborn or her birthing mother? What is its status? Is it an organ, a part to be cherished, respected, and used for the benefits of the newborn, her kin and community, or is it excreta to be labelled as biohazard and immediately disposed of? Could it remain undetermined and be left behind as it is, and if so, where exactly and for how long?

Consider also organ transplantation, an exceptional yet increasingly common medical intervention of the last four decades. Experiencing a heart removal and replacement, in addition to multiple health problems stemming from graft-versus-host reaction and immune depression, the French patient-philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy reflected upon his two hearts’ trajectories and bodily boundaries (Nancy, 2002; Perpich, 2005). Is his “own” or “old” heart a foreigner, being worn out, stiff, rusted, and giving up? Is his new heart a stranger, an intruder, that will be rejected by an immune system? Does it belong to the body and whose body is it? Did his ailing body disintegrate after the surgery? Then, in other times, leaving body parts behind is crucial for the making of the self: framed as a hallmark of masculinity, Adam's apple, which is removed in facial feminization surgeries, is a thyroid cartilage that embodies a discord between integrity, self, and belonging (Plemons, 2017: 39–42, 109–111). Has the body ever been integral? ¹

Contemplating these questions about the integrity of the body leads to a well-known tension between embodiment, disembodiment, and disintegration. ² How do they relate to an understanding of life, particularly considering its “molecularization” in the twentieth century with the rise of genetics and the extension of identity to the cellular level (Rose, 2001: 14–16; TallBear, 2013)? Consequently, another set of questions about disintegrated bodily parts or bodily materials emerges: how and up to what moment do these substances preserve connections to the body of origin? In terms of time and space, bodily boundaries can be construed in a number of ways, leading to analytical frames such as afterlives or more-than-a-body personhood, with the issue of embodiment fundamental for an understanding of the individual or collective self (Busby, 1997; Bynum, 1995b; Conklin, 1995; Conklin and Morgan, 1996; Strathern, 1988, 2018; Walton and İlengiz, 2022). However, regardless of where bodily boundaries are drawn, there is a certain convention concerning inside and outside matters of the body that is not new to either history or anthropology. Early scholarly discussions focused on contagious magic—the manipulation of bodies, bodily parts, or substances and things that have been in touch with or in proximity to each other (Frazer, 1890; Mauss and Hubert, 1902/2001; Rivers, 1924/2001). While the pars pro toto bodily magic has been considered intrinsically pre-modern, recent studies demonstrate that neither it, nor magic per se, is foreign to postindustrial modernity and market economies both in metropolitan and postcolonial settings (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999; Lindquist, 2000; Moeran and de Waal Malefyt, 2018). Moreover, bodily synecdoches have been analyzed as central to numerous vernacular systems of thought and representations. Collectors of human remains exemplify this, as do celebrity cults: consider the enthusiasm for obtaining hotel sheets that were used by members of The Beatles band (Berman, 2007; Hooper, 2014; Huffer and Graham, 2023; Lastovicka and Miller, 2012). But does this understanding extend beyond specific persons or groups, and does it hold true to the substances originating from bodies deemed foreign, anonymous, nonconspecific, or dead? How do these substances enter social worlds and become, say, usable materials? Do these materials still belong to the body “of origin,” extend it, and retain certain connections to it, or are these materials fully detached and disintegrated to the point of oblivion?

Substances being excreted, removed, or cut from the body are multiple. In addition to the placenta or the replaceable heart, they include excrement, or external membranes such as skin and internal like intestines. They also include organs and tissues, not only hearts, but also livers or corneas, “edited” parts like fat or epicanthal folds, or complete bodily remains such as corpses or carcasses, in addition to a variety of biological materials such as semen, tears, eggs, or sorted-out embryos (Franklin, 2006; Morgan and Michaels, 1999; Rapp, 1999). ³ If we understand substances to be material entities of enduring properties, in spite of changes in form, place, or use, then bodily substances are materials originating from the body that continue to hold bodily properties. In their discussions of kinship, anthropologists have already acknowledged the role that the body, its humors and substances play in exogamy rules, social imagination, and the substantiation of ties between people and environment (Sapir, 1977; Herdt, 1984; Buckley and Gottlieb, 1988; Goldman and Ballard, 1998; Héritier, 2000; Bamford, 2007; Chao, 2022: 77–94).

Following Françoise Héritier and other scholars of the substances/relationships nexus, we examine how such materials ground/relate to kinship and other kinds of bonds. We ask: Is there anything about bodily substances that makes them different from other materials? What seems to be particular to these substances is that, in contemporary times, their mere use is the exception, as we tend to think of them as waste—a category for things commonly considered to lack value or potential. They are hence “bodily waste” (Anwar, 2014; Eriksen and Schober, 2017), a category that, unlike “organic waste” or “human waste,” we preliminarily use to refer to both human and animal bodily substances. In cases of symbolically important or sacred bodily remnants such as religious or secular relics, an organic matter left behind can present a problem or a challenge to the moral order. There are certain ways to deal with this problem: the substance can either be passed along in favor of affective belonging (cemeteries and graves), or somehow renegotiated (holy relics and uncorrupted bodies), on the condition that its materiality is not too provocative (Fontein, 2011; Greene, 2010; Keane, 2014).

Yet in fact, throughout time and across different contexts, the understanding, value, and potential uses of such substances, in addition to their legal status and recognized chances of becoming commodified, have all been in flux. ⁴ New sorts of bodily substances, like removed/transplanted organs, stored embryos, or stem cells, which biomedicine and technoscience have brought about during recent decades, have an equally troubling status. As our collection demonstrates, animal or human excrement was used as manure for the fields, fish skins were used as the basis for glue-making and knowledge production, and cattle intestinal membranes were used for making ritual drums. Finding value and use in such bodily substances is the result of complicated relationships between matter and meaning, or put differently, between material potentialities and their apprehension.

The waste-value pendulum

Late-modern Western assumptions about bodily substances tend to separate materials into two categories, namely valuable materials and waste. The latter kind, with its legal implications, is to be reported to officials, or immediately discarded as outraging public decency (McHale, 2000; Hawkins, 2006: 45–70). ⁵ Yet, as anthropologist Joshua Reno (2015) incisively notes, “beginning with acts of disposal can establish a false equivalence between the kinds of things that are disposed” (p. 559); the fact that different things are thrown away, does not mean that they are all the same thing and are discarded for the same reasons. Historicizing these substances, along with elucidating the logic behind labelling them as “waste” or “valuable,” helps to unpack their less-than-straightforward biographies as well as describe relationships between materials and their categorization that go beyond dichotomies.

First, in regard to the phrase “bodily waste,” the Eurocentric and modern term “waste” will be problematized. Since an era of Enlightenment, the embodied vocabulary of extraction and excretion has influenced economic concepts of resources and throwaways (Duden, 1987; Heynen et al., 2006; Koschorke, 2008; Kuriyama, 2020; Strasser, 1999; Vigarello, 1988). The common scholarly understanding of waste materials (within discard studies, for example) is one that is deeply linked to capitalist economies, their scale, and the superfluity they produce (Eriksen and Schober, 2017: 284; Gidwani and Reddy, 2011; Mbembé, 2004). Waste is often framed as a problem of industrial and gradually global capitalism—its direct result, in fact, and the assumption underlying such understanding of waste is that it did not exist prior to capitalism and the “resourcefulness” it produces. ⁶ However, as a product of capitalist thinking that is rooted in the paradigm of profit and productivity, the value-versus-waste dichotomy conceals as much as it explains. ⁷ For instance, it streamlines both pendulum-type relationships and circular economies, which tend to be hidden from plain sight. ⁸ Moreover, this dichotomy leaves out other possible means of dealing with and mobilizing these materials, which are not only highly malleable, like any material, but also particularly unstable entities that change their meaning and binding over time, within context, and for specific audiences. Furthermore, the capitalist reading of the issue is not consistent: for instance, the same matter considered biowaste in the clinical setting can be reframed as property in the case of purloining or as an alleged theft (Dworkin and Kennedy, 1993; Grubb, 1998; McHale, 2000). Finally, what lands in a hospital container for biomedical waste might hold different social and symbolic meanings to doctors, nurses, patients, and kin. Vice versa, professional arenas of science and medicine may revalue unwanted bodily parts and can turn them into highly specific commodities whose functioning is accompanied by a host of ethical and legal concerns (Lock, 2002; Sharp, 2000). This gives a new reading to a notion of possession, problematizing the claims of both the market and magic concerning the ownership of the body and its matter. ⁹

This flexibility and contingency also put bodily matter at odds with the well-received notion of “waste regime,” because of its emphasis on institutional scaffolding as a means for explaining perceptions and management of waste under a specific political or economic formation (Gille, 2007; Martínez and Beilmann, 2020; see also: Berg, 2024). The analysis of bodily substances’ trajectories across time, space, and social context reveals a more nuanced and flexible relationship between material, power, and society.

Overall, the discussion about any waste material often departs from its indeterminate status which provokes both tensions and generative capacities (Thompson, 2017 [1979]; Reno, 2009; Werrett, 2019). To what extent does bodily waste share these traits? What sets removed or cut-out bodily substances apart from other kinds of “waste”? It might be argued that bodily substances are different from other kinds of waste in the manner by which they are created or in their instability. They might be an intended result of an action, at times similar to “harvesting,” “procurement,” or “extractivism,” and at other times to gift-giving of a very exclusive type, which recipients frame as a “gift of life,” or an inescapable and at times uncontrollable result of a bodily process that is part and parcel of its lively existence. ¹⁰ A medical operation, blood donation, or a visit to the hairdresser represents the first kind and drooling or a visit to the toilet the second.

Existing perspectives on waste lens are not sufficient for explaining the multiple connections between bodies and their various leftovers, whether material or emotional. “Bodily waste” substances analyzed in this collection are far from waste in the sense of waste as something that contains no value. Instead, they emerge as highly potent materials that generate action and affect among those engaged (or avoiding an engagement) with them. As the various contributions demonstrate, people are anything but indifferent, oblivious, or neutral towards bodily waste materials. Phenomenology has theorized affective responses as “the means by which the human mind apprehends certain qualities in the world,” especially those related to (dis)value, such as fear or disgust triggered by bodily presence or activity (Kolnai et al., 2004: 5–9). Extracted from the body, substances such as blood, urine, membranes, spit, hair, or bones evoke strong emotions, often causing a problem and/or creating a need to move them away, in which case different social groups solve such problems in their own manner. While disgust is often discussed as a principal emotional reaction to bodily substances, and to material evidence of processes of rot and decay (Greene, 2010; Hitzer, 2020; Livingston, 2008; Kolnai et al., 2004: 50–54), it changes in degree or is absent in cases where such materials gain value for a particular community or are in use (Bachórz, 2016; Millar, 2018; Kannan, this issue). Different levels of engagement with, work with, and evaluation of bodily materials correlate with a spectrum of feelings and sensibilities, complicating the understanding of (bodily) waste as a more general problem, beyond the capitalist system.

Furthermore, the theoretical framework of discard studies is also not fully adequate for understanding bodily substances as a particular type of refuse, since it primarily centres on social systems of waste, their political, environmental and moral messages, and the concept of wasting (Furniss, 2021; Gille, 2007; Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022; Millar, 2018), rather than on the qualities and specific traits of wasted substances. Yet, the materiality of these substances matters. It conditions humans, animals, and other actors (Miller, 2005: 5–6) and shapes substances’ potential careers. It can disturb, provoke certain patterns of attention, or result in stewardship and care. It may also fade out of focus (Lau, 2023; Thompson, 2017 [1979]: 41–45).

This special issue follows those like Tim Ingold, who hold that the extensive and rich scholarship on materiality has a tendency to ignore materials themselves (Ingold, 2007). Daniel Miller similarly voices the limitations of a strictly social approach to materialities (Miller, 2005). Among many implications of Miller's theory for the social sciences, the relationship between materiality and immateriality is of particular importance since it tackles a problem of representation and production of signs from yet another—material—angle. Disciplines such as paleontology, forensics, or psychoanalysis read behind material traces for absent clues, hidden presence, or underlying causes. ¹¹ These disciplines deal with manifestations of either an extinct animal or a crime scene or a trauma-ridden episode, all of which may be uncovered or reconstructed following clues, traces, and signs.

The search for clues was famously developed as a research method by the microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg as a means to uncover historical subjectivities from the archive (Ginzburg, 1979). The efforts to bring to light histories of underrepresented and subaltern people, and read the archive “against the grain,” has since prevailed and extended from the history of art and religious studies to the hybrid and the nonhuman. Building on Donna Haraway's material-semiotic, historian Etienne Benson then took cues from ethology and suggested tracing animals by cross-disciplinary means in order to write their histories (Benson, 2011). ¹² Environmental humanities scholar Thom van Dooren similarly adopts the notion of trails when studying snails’ means of spatially conveying information to others of their kind (van Dooren, 2021). Developing this semiotic approach further, anthropologist Joshua Reno (2014) takes inspiration from nonhuman communication methods and suggests approaching waste materials through the signs of life they contain and preserve, as animals leave them behind. Since any communication proceeds through an exchange of signs, regardless whether they have been produced intentionally or not, Reno's “new theory of waste” escapes the problem of intentionality which haunted material-turn scholars with their refusal to prioritize the social.

Clues, traces, trails, and signs of life are integral to both human and nonhuman bodily substances as they move along the waste-value spectrum and are hence central to the analyses in this volume. However, in his innovative approach to waste Reno does not elaborate in much detail about what those signs of life might be and whether there is anything special about the messages being dispatched by the different things left behind. The possibility of conveying information and therefore of communicating is a function and not an intrinsic property according to this perspective. Anything might form a clue to be noticed and expediently interpreted as a presence of, or proximity to someone, be they beneficial, indifferent, or dangerous. For instance, in her book on global mushroom-hunting, anthropologist Anna Tsing discusses both traces of fungal lives and the trash which Southeast Asian mushroom-pickers leave in the Oregon forest. While their fellows consider it an index of a mined-out patch and switch to another route, foresters interpret it as an ecological and moral nuisance which “mars the forest” (Tsing, 2015: 241–248). In this ethnography, the material referent stays the same but activates different patterns of attention and communicates different messages to opposite groups. Does the message conveyed somehow depend on the live materiality of the sign?

In our collection, we speculate on and empirically explore what life can mean in the case of bodily substances expelled, given away, left behind, or used elsewhere. The existing scholarship on waste chooses to discuss life–waste relationships in a number of ways. Some researchers zoom in on questions of productivity, economic potential, and the neoliberal quest for capital along the lines of both traditional sociology and studies of the Anthropocene. Others construe life as liveliness or material agency, or a sign of co-presence (Bell, 2019; Bennett, 2010). With the aforementioned assumption about the particularity of bodily substances in comparison to other things thrown away or left behind, we suggest an alternative reading of their livingness which keeps their bodies of origin in focus. We interpret this livingness as a spatiotemporal bodily continuity, or extension, examining degrees of livingness inherent to these substances: what remains and what is lost over time and across distance and how that shapes the value attributed to them.

By so doing, our collection connects to and elaborates on the ongoing conversation about vitality, whether this means considering life as a process—or metabolism (Landecker, 2013), giving attention to animism, or examining the multiplicity of ways and cosmologies within which life is understood. In focusing on bodily waste and searching for life's longevity as it is encapsulated within bodily materials, the collection contributes to Perig Pitrou's ongoing exploration of the difference between the formation of life and its maintenance (Pitrou, 2014, 2017). Moving away from the creation of life we extend the scholarship on vitality by putting an emphasis on processes and materials through which life continues, ends, and dissolves. With this emphasis on life's continuities and ends, we pay attention to forms of life that exist outside of the body (Landecker, 2007: 3–4) in addition to the understanding and material aspects of decay and death (Bloch, 1998; Bynum, 1995a; Hamlin, 2005; Parry and Bloch, 1982). Late modern philosophers and social thinkers, who were fascinated by such entanglements of life and death, comprehended them as the “surplus of life” or “overloadedness of vitality”; bodily substances indecently broke the boundaries, wallowed, or leaked, but also afforded a postmortem productivity (Kolnai et al., 2004: 54–56, 72–80; Hamlin, 2005: 13–21).

Much like Alice Would's (2021) study of the remnants of life and processes of decay in animal skins within the natural history museum, our investigation of bodily remains and substances reveals that these are far from lifeless. The vitality contained within bodily materials is hence our focus and unlike the existing semiotics literature this collection considers life-signs left behind as bringing human and nonhuman bodies together. In this regard, centring on vitality may, on the one hand, help to overcome the gap between human-related bodily substances and other varieties and, on the other, to theorize bodily assemblages, grasping the multiplicity of actors involved in the production of liveliness, fungi, bacteria, and ferments included.

This perspective prompts us to see bodily excreta, effluvia, exuviae, and leftovers as certain extensions of the body, both living or dead. They form vital projections, which preserve and possibly result from a degree of livingness even in decay and corruption, or perhaps especially in them. Consequently, bodily substances appear as reservoirs of lasting life rather than afterlives, both embodied and disembodied, which conditions their ambiguous status and the versatility of their properties and potentialities. ¹³ Furthermore, since bodily synecdoches register along a continuum, different human and animal actors—due to a cultural logic, ecological disposition, or serendipity—have a choice of whether to pay attention to, communicate with, or act upon these synecdoches. In the case of human beings we could hypothesize that what makes bodily substances especially noticeable, and hence conducive to reaction, is sedentarization: this process putcertain types of mobility to rest and at the same time gave rise to new ones, such as the mobilization of bodily products away from settlements. However, human and animal members of pastoralist societies, following certain techniques, skills, or habits, also care for substances left behind (Davydov, 2014; Peemot, 2022; Rethmann, 2000), so the need or urge to move bodily substances might be the result of other processes. Certain substances become more or less perceptible, or invoke action, depending on how their potentialities resonate within a specific setting or framework.

We can hypothesize that bodily materials become waste when they pose a problem because their potentialities do not allow for an alternative reading, relationship, or intervention. Scale can also factor into translating bodily substances into waste: in both industrial capitalism and urbanization the scale of production and overcrowding have created “mass waste,” the quantity and lasting life of which posed a threat to Western and colonial hygienic modernity. It is not accidental that in the early stages of capitalism, markets, slaughterhouses, and farms stirred up more anxieties than factories or new technologies. But these relationships are not a matter-of-course: because emerging as a problem means that these substances also gain attention. Their problematization may well be productive and open ground for creative evaluations of material possibilities. ¹⁴

Contributions

Focusing on different bodily substances, contributions to this collection deal with lasting-life components of materials—their vitality—and shed light upon their scintillating connections to the body of origin. These connections, they show, develop different potentialities of the matter in question that are conceptualized in disparate terms. The five articles illustrate together how bodily substances move flexibly within the spectrum of waste and value, and how such movements are indicative of the unstable, ever-changing, and life-holding potential of these materials.

The well-known case of humoural bodies in Eurasian medical thought is our starting point. Due to an established association, or sympathy between macrocosm and sensible entities—plants, minerals, animals, and humans—the widely accepted system of humoralism organized specific patterns of attention around material bodies. Apprehending bodily properties as combinations of hot/cold and dry/moist qualia, shaped the understanding of their projections and expenditures, whether spontaneously or when provoked (Geck et al., 2017; Horden and Hsu, 2013; Kuriyama, 2008). Aside from the epistemic dilemmas of mechanism-versus-vitalism or a “fear of humors” (Kuriyama, 2008), a persistent perception of these lasting qualities has been at play for centuries in cultures far from each other. To contribute to the discussion of multiple legacies of humoralism the present collection includes two essays, one by Riaz Howey on political uses of manures in Mongol Iran and another by Simon Werrett on the technological and intellectual history of animal glues in early modern Europe. While an essential heat made both corpses of quadruped animals and their manures the best for medieval Persian naturalists, the intrinsic coldness of fish or aged animals rendered their body parts an indispensable component for adhesives circulated in English books of secrets. Despite the very different contexts, both cases exemplify a stubborn vitality of substances—human and animal dung and fish skins, respectively—which were believed to retain specific properties of living bodies (warm, burning, acid, salty, phlegmatic) regardless of being inside or outside of them.

An article by Thamarai Selvan Kannan addresses ritual uses and productions of bodily leftovers, unfolding the emergence and maintenance of material hierarchies. Dealing with animals’ entrails, Kannan examines contemporary South-Indian manufacturing of musical instruments with bovine intestines for ritual use. Comparing urban and rural sites of drum production, he demonstrates how (social and monetary) value, class, and gender map onto bodily substances, their nature and their perceived hierarchies.

Both Sinjini Mukherjee's and Indrawan Prabaharyaka's articles focus on ideas and practices of removing and discarding bodily substances. The relation between the qualities of these substances, work with them, and forms of their representation take different shapes. Focusing on early modern Europe, Mukherjee examines the scholarly debates among midwives and physicians concerning the so-called “third stage of labor.” Considering the placenta's removal as a necessary step for a complete and healthy birthing process, the expulsion of this ambiguous substance from the body became a topic for a heated debate among different stakeholders in the birthing room, reflecting changing perceptions of the body and of medical authority. Professional expertise and its relation to proximity and familiarity with bodily substances is similarly at play in the context of the development and spread of the “shit diagram,” as detailed by Prabaharyaka. The diagram is a representational tool that emerged as a means to optimise excrement disposal in Global-South no-sewage circumstances. Prabaharyaka unravels how it is used both for maintaining distance between bodies and their leftovers as well as between different kinds of people and for moving purified and abstracted feces closer to decision-makers.

This special issue emerged from a discussion group and two workshops on “The Waste of the Body,” held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science between 2020 and 2023. The group discussed various other examples spanning time and geographies that demonstrate the lasting-life components of bodily substances and how different disciplines can approach them. These included sheep livers that were repeatedly pulled out from ovine bodies for political decision-making in ancient Babylonia, a topic analyzed by the assyriologist Netanel Anor. He argued that the practice of separating between the part that contains the sacred message from the envelope—the rest of the sheep's body, that is, the separation between bodily waste and finding value in the body—was foundational to the operation of power. Archeologist Sarah Newman showed that precolonial Mesoamerican and early colonial European ideas about the waste came into conflict in New Spain. She illustrated specifically how the colonial encounter resulted in a broadening of the category of waste and its negative meanings, and how the waste of the body emerged as a threat to the body and soul. Sinologist Jörg Henning Hüsemann commented on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western accounts of Chinese agricultural uses of night soil that have been fraught with curiosity and emotion in their construction of hierarchy and otherness. Claudia Hirtenfelder took the perspective of cultural geography to uncover the lives and deaths of urban cattle in late nineteenth-century Canada, and debates around the understanding and management of carcasses vis-a-vis urbanization and shifts in the apprehension of space. Finally, medical anthropologist Olga Yashchenko discussed how biological and legal owners grapple with preserved frozen embryos in contemporary Russia, as these embryos were labelled unfit by medical experts, but were not discarded due to moral, legal, and symbolic frames of reference. Distant as they are, these case studies introduced by members of the discussion group over several years have enriched and complicated our understanding of the extended body.

The five articles in the special issue also examine the kinds of knowledge, especially artisanal and practical, and the sorts of skill necessary for, and that developed as a result of allowing bodily substances to move within the waste-value spectrum. By doing so, they further the conversation on value and materials within the history and anthropology of knowledge. They also all deal with hierarchies of knowledge of, and access to, bodily substances, demonstrating how authority, expertise, and social status are deeply connected to proximity to, work with, and the nature of materials. Together, the contributions to this special issue offer a nuanced, context-specific analysis of how materials gain and lose meaning and detail the role of their properties in this process. Bodily substances of different kinds, in various circumstances, and in different positions on the waste-value spectrum similarly maintain a connection to their body of origin—they demonstrate the longevity of materials’ vitality. These particular examples of vital waste offer an opportunity to develop a sharper analysis of the relationship between materials, life, and meaning.