Analysing Smokefree: Notes on Senses, Smoke and Violence

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.