Overview

The modern bathroom is an ingenious compilation of locked doors, smooth porcelain, 4-ply tissue and antibacterial hand soap, but despite this miracle of indoor plumbing, we still can’t bear the thought that anyone else should know that our bodies produce waste. Why must we live by the rules of this intense scatological embarrassment? In Spectacles of Waste, leading historian of medicine Warwick Anderson reveals how human excrement has always complicated humanity’s attempts to become modern. From wastewater epidemiology and sewage snooping to fecal transplants and excremental art, he argues that our insistence on separating ourselves from our bodily waste has fundamentally shaped our philosophies, social theories, literature and art—even the emergence of high-tech science as we understand it today. Written with verve and aplomb, Anderson’s expert analysis reveals how in recent years, humanity has doubled down on abstracting and datafying our most abject waste, and unconsciously underlined its biopolitical signature across our lives.

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9781509557400

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Reviews

"""The reader of the surprisingly delicate Spectacles of Waste might wonder if Warwick Anderson is awfully concerned with elimination. She would be both right and wrong. Right in that Anderson deftly and exhaustively traces the scholarly disciplines, populations, and practices devoted to the contaminations, infrastructural accommodations , “latrinoscenes,” and “promiscuous defecations” (as U.S colonials in the Philippines delicately put it) surrounding what our bodies excrete (and why we need to know about gut culture, in more than one sense).   Indeed, this compelling volume is a testimony to degree to which the repugnant shapes our lives. The book is exemplary of what ethnographic history can be, as it draws unexpected connections, scales of vision, a sensorium that reveals networks of fear and fascination, hookworm moving through the gut as “cure” rather than pathogen, “foreign” microbes vastly more prevalent than the body’s own.  Our reader would be wrong in that the scatological is not really the point of this impressive and meticulous work devoted less to elimination than to is the myths about purity and pollution that we live. Anderson’s absorbing account makes sense of why we have an explosion of “stool banks”, why the current research on noxious excretions may represent a bionomic bonanza, and why the scatological may be the gold standard of our health."" Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor, The New School for Social Research, author of Interior Frontiers ""A stirring account of excremental politics. Deeply researched and cleverly written, Anderson shows, by examining our deepest fecal fears and obsessions, that our strained attempts to distance ourselves from our waste is what makes us modern. From environmental pollution to self-serving shit psychoanalysis and the twenty-first century gut microbiome, this short book is a tour de force."" Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston, author of The Filth Disease ""Spectacles of Waste is funny and smart. As Anderson explains, the book puts the “anal” back in analysis and the “colon” back in colonialism. The romp through theory and literature alone makes the book worth reading. We can never be modern, Anderson argues, because we are always already deep in shit."" Anna Tsing, co-author of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene ""A tour de force that puts shit at the heart of contemporary debates about what it means to be human. Warwick Anderson shows us how crucial “excremental imaginings” are to the messy business of power, giving us an intimate and original perspective on modern biopolitics and its extrusions. Profound, witty, and utterly compelling."" Robert Peckham, University of Hong Kong, author of Fear: An Alternative History of the World"

Author Information

Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics at the University of Sydney. In 2023, he was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science.

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