"The reader of the surprisingly delicateSpectacles of Wastemight 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 bodys 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. Andersons absorbing account makes sense of why we have an explosion of stool banks, why the current research on noxious excretionsmay 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 ofInterior 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 atour de force."
Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston, author ofThe Filth Disease
"Spectacles of Wasteis 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 ofField 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 ofFear: An Alternative History of the World
