This issue moves beyond the binary of life and death to explore how the gray areas in between—precarious life, slow death—call into question assumptions about the social in social theory. In these “collateral afterworlds,” where the line between life and death is blurred, the presumed attachments of sociality to life and solitude to death are no longer reliable. The contributors focus on the daily experiences of enduring a difficult present unhinged from any redeeming future, addressing topics such as drug treatment centers in Mexico City, solitary death in Japan, Inuit colonial violence, human regard for animal life in India, and intimacies forged between grievously wounded soldiers. Engaging history, film, ethics, and poetics, the contributors explore the modes of intimacy, obligation, and ethical investment that arise in these spaces.

Contributors. Anne Alison, Naisargi N. Dave, Angela Garcia, Fady Joudah, Julie Livingston, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Solmaz Sharif, Lisa Stevenson, Zoë H. Wool

Zoë H. Wool is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and the author of After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed, also published by Duke University Press.

Julie Livingston is Professor of History and of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic, also published by Duke University Press.