Analysing Smokefree: Notes on Senses, Smoke and Violence

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Smoke
• violence
• touch
• senses
• smokefree

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Connor describes the unspecificity of touch this way:

touch seems to have no unique channel or identifying frequency-band. Vision, for example, responds almost exclusively to the luminous portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum, hearing almost exclusively to oscillations of air-pressure at much lower frequencies. Touch has no such exclusive frequency, being definable no more precisely than the sense of things being in contact, of things coming up against us. Thus thermoception, the sense of traction, the sense of gravity or equilibrium, and even coenaesthesia, the sense of mine-ness or me-ness that is supposed to adhere to all my sense perceptions, have all been represented as modalities of touch. (2011, np)

2 Full details of this case are available on the Tobacco Free Arizona website, at https://tobaccofreeaz.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/those-with-cancer-in-family-history-must-avoid-smokers/.

3 For full details, visit https://tobaccofreeaz.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/those-with-cancer-in-family-history-must-avoid-smokers/.