TY - JOUR
T1 - Analysing Smokefree
T2 - Notes on Senses, Smoke and Violence
AU - Dennis, Simone
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia.
PY - 2018/4/3
Y1 - 2018/4/3
N2 - Throughout my 15-years-long exploration of tobacco smoking in Australia, I have analysed the practice and the legislation pertaining to it using sensory tools. Ten years distant from the beginning of my engagement with smoking, I can appreciate that a striking feature of the sensory analyses I have made is what they reveal of violence. Included here is (not only) the violence done to the smoker’s own body–by the biotechnology of cigarettes themselves, and by the state; the violence she does to non-smoking others with her dangerous exhalations; and a kind of violence conducted against a critical anthropology by, precisely, a veraciously interventionist form of medical anthropology. In what follows I reveal some of these violences. In this paper, I use key examples that have featured in my published work before to make the related points that (a) sensory analyses are good for thinking about and revealing powerful relations and (b) that it really matters what kind of sensory analysis we do; some kinds, I suggest, might actually work to shore up the powerful conditions under which a topic, an issue or a problem has emerged. Others might lay those conditions bare and make plain their violent operations.
AB - Throughout my 15-years-long exploration of tobacco smoking in Australia, I have analysed the practice and the legislation pertaining to it using sensory tools. Ten years distant from the beginning of my engagement with smoking, I can appreciate that a striking feature of the sensory analyses I have made is what they reveal of violence. Included here is (not only) the violence done to the smoker’s own body–by the biotechnology of cigarettes themselves, and by the state; the violence she does to non-smoking others with her dangerous exhalations; and a kind of violence conducted against a critical anthropology by, precisely, a veraciously interventionist form of medical anthropology. In what follows I reveal some of these violences. In this paper, I use key examples that have featured in my published work before to make the related points that (a) sensory analyses are good for thinking about and revealing powerful relations and (b) that it really matters what kind of sensory analysis we do; some kinds, I suggest, might actually work to shore up the powerful conditions under which a topic, an issue or a problem has emerged. Others might lay those conditions bare and make plain their violent operations.
KW - Smoke
KW - senses
KW - smokefree
KW - touch
KW - violence
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85044654006&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00664677.2018.1423039
DO - 10.1080/00664677.2018.1423039
M3 - Article
SN - 0066-4677
VL - 28
SP - 171
EP - 182
JO - Anthropological Forum
JF - Anthropological Forum
IS - 2
ER -