Dennis D. Waskul

The Aroma of Recollection: Olfaction, Nostalgia, and the Shaping of the Sensuous Self

ABSTRACT This study examines olfactory perception and nostalgic memories focusing on sense acts and the sensuous self as a dialectic of ritual sensations and sense-making rituals. Our data are drawn from a convenience sample of twenty-three participants who reflected on their olfactory experiences through the use of research journals. Our analysis illustrates how olfactory perceptions and memories are necessarily produced by active “idealizing activity” that is emergent in sensuous rituals that help maintain self continuity over time. Our focus on olfaction—at the expense of a more multisensory approach focusing on, say, taste and olfaction—contributes to a very small body of sociological (but also a larger body of anthropological) literature on this important but much neglected medium of perception.

Ekstasis and the internet: liminality and computer-mediated communication:

Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct significance to advancing understandings of the internet. The internet is a natural environment for liminality and ekstasis, a place where self and society must be made to exist in a process where both are translated into the conventions of the medium. Some people actively toy with these representations while others do not. However, in the final analysis these communicative dynamics are rooted in the liminal characteristics of the medium - not the motivations and intents of internet users themselves. Approaching the internet in this way stands in stark contrast to other latent conceptual orientations that are largely concerned with moral dynamics.

Making Sense of the Weather: Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast

Drawing on ethnographic data collected throughout British Columbia’s coastal regions, in this article, the authors examine people’s experiences of ordinary weather. Data show how people experience weather multisensorially and how the weather plays a central role in the way individuals and collectives define sense of place. Experiences of weather, the authors argue, are a reflexive and active form of dwelling. A focus on skillful embodied practices and dwelling highlights how weathering is a process through which people make and remake places and shape their sense of self. The authors conceptualize the practice of weathering as a form of somatic work and explain how through somatic work places and weather emerge within a performative ecology of movements.

Sound Acts: Elocution, Somatic Work, and the Performance of Sonic Alignment

Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music performances, residential neighborhoods, and more. An important material property of sound acts, elocution, is identified, conceptualized, and examined. Elocutionary sound acts are also examined as social dramas, insofar as they constitute a crisis-ensuing breach of what the authors refer to as the somatic order. The maintenance of, or alignment on, the rules prevalent within a defined somatic order is also examined and discussed. As a whole, the sensuous performative dynamics that sound acts and somatic alignment entail can be referred to as instances of somatic work.

Performing Taste at Wine Festivals: A Somatic Layered Account of Material Culture

Sensuous scholarship refers to research about the human senses, through the senses, and for the senses. Sensuous scholarship asks us to recognize the meaningfulness of our somatic experience of the world, to understand the skilful activities through which we actively make and remake the world through our senses, and to develop evocative strategies of representation— to write sensuously. In this article, the authors reflect on one particular genre of sensuous scholarship, which they refer to as the somatic layered account. The authors draw upon participant observation data collected at wine festivals at seven sites scattered across western British Columbia and Southern California. The authors examine how people express taste sensations and preferences to others, as well as what role wine’s material properties play in these social dramas. In formulating and developing the concepts of somatic accounts, taste vocabularies, and somatic joint acts, the authors contribute to a growing understanding of the social aspects of the senses and of sensations, as well as how people perceive the material world—and the sense of taste in particular—in active and reflexive ways.

My Boyfriend Loves it When I Come Home from this Class': Pedagogy, Titillation, and New Media Technologies

Most classroom uses of new media technologies lack a pedagogy, aesthetic, or both. Performance methods offer a pedagogy; sensual learning offers an aesthetic. Combined, the two comprise a powerful teaching strategy and one that is especially well suited to the use of explicit media in sexualities courses. This article offers some ideas about pedagogy and aesthetics, and, grounded in 35 student evaluations, explores the potential uses of new media technologies and sexually explicit media as a teaching tool.

Camp staffing: The construction, maintenance, and dissolution of roles and identities at a summer camp

This study analyzes junctures in the experiences of a summer camp staff from the perspective of structural interactionist theory, emphasizing the process by which staff construct and maintain a wilderness community, social roles, and identities. Data were collected by means of three qualitative methods: open‐ended surveys, in‐depth interviews, and participant observation. Findings indicate that staff brought varied expectations to camp yet constructed normative channels of interaction during the first week. Initial patterns of interaction sediment into concrete roles that are internalized as camp identities. From the removed and isolated local social world of the wilderness community, participants created social roles and identities that allowed for ephemeral identity transformations. When the wilderness community dissolved, staff members initially reported readjustment difficulties but ultimately returned to preestablished identities in the outside world. These findings are relevant to understandings of ...

Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight Over Sexual Rights (Book Review)

How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight Over Sexual Rights

How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the