Simone Dennis

Smoking causes creative responses: on state antismoking policy and resilient habits

This article is framed by the complexities associated with exploring a morally positioned and emotive practice – the practice of smoking cigarettes. Smoking is bound up with a multiply of issues and positions, including (but not limited to) the role of the state in the regulation of bodies and their practices and in the moral positioning of those practices, and the rights of the individual. It is also bound up with particular understandings of bodies and their relations with other bodies. In antismoking advertisements, smoking practice is firmly situated within frames of corporeal boundedness and individuality, and particular emotions and moral positions are drawn upon to locate the smoking body relative to other (non-smoking) bodies, and to the practice of smoking itself. Based on fine-grained ethnographic research, and moving away from moral and dualistic positionings of the practice, I take up a phenomenological perspective to explore the profound experiences of sociality, corporeal connection and rupture, and the wide range of emotional experiences that are central to practices of smoking. I also draw attention to the ways in which public policy and action regarding smoking might be understood, acted upon, resisted and altered, in ways that make it meaningful in the lived experiences of smokers. Many of the responses that smokers make to state policy and action are not those intended by policy makers, and demonstrate both the creativity of the responses, and the dangers of assuming too much about how people will behave.

Threads of Memory: Reproducing the Cypress Tree through Sensual Consumption

This paper is concerned with the ways in which a group of Persian women, who have all fled Iran in the last two decades, give meaning to place and memory through the everyday practices of cooking and embroidery. While there are many different localised arts of patterning and flavour, we focus here on the recurring pattern of bota (the Cypress tree). In particular, we examine how the bota motif links both the making of domestic sweets and cloths, and is central in recalling and remaking a sense of place. The Cypress tree symbolises life: the continuation of life in place, and the continuation of place in life. In creating and consuming the bota motif, through eating, laying tablecloths, wrapping towels, sitting on cushions and drawing curtains, embodied experiences of landscape and relationships are reproduced. The embroidery items entail and occasion sensual engagement in and of themselves, and also serve as backgrounds for specific sensual engagements, including, for example, as tablecloths upon which food will be served. Engagement with the bota pattern cannot be characterised along strictly divided sensual dimensions. Rather, we argue that the senses are intertwined in a synaesthetic knot in which memory is embodied and reproduced.

Towards a Critical Anthropology of Smoking: Exploring the Consequences of Tobacco Control:

The World Health Organization warned today that countries will need to be much more aggressive in their attempts to stamp out smoking if they are to counter the tobacco industrys marketing techniques (WHO, 2008).

A Qualitative Content Analysis of Cigarette Health Warning Labels in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States

The legislation of health warning labels on cigarette packaging is a major focus for tobacco control internationally and is a key component of the World Health Organizations Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This population-level intervention is broadly supported as a vital measure for warning people about the health consequences of smoking. However, some components of this approach warrant close critical inspection. Through a qualitative content analysis of the imagery used on health warning labels from 4 countries, we consider how this imagery depicts people that smoke. By critically analyzing this aspect of the visual culture of tobacco control, we argue that this imagery has the potential for unintended consequences, and obscures the social and embodied contexts in which smoking is experienced.

Telling silences: unspeakable trauma and the unremarkable practices of everyday life

This analysis focuses on epistemological and methodological issues that arise when working with exiled communities. In particular, we investigate the complex dynamics of ethnographic negotiation between ourselves as social anthropologists and a group of Persian women migrants in Australia. This diasporic group, who are predominantly Bahá’í, share not only a common historical identity, in which religious law was unfavorable to women, but also profound experiences of suffering and alienation following their exile from the Islamic Revolution. As with many ‘refugee narratives’, stories of suffering and trauma for Bahá’í are tightly bound up in ‘bodies of knowledge’, both in the performance of embodied memories of persecution and in the intimate knowledge that Islamic authorities collected about them and their families. In engaging with an ethnography of violence our dilemma was how to negotiate these powerful and emotively charged processes of elicitation without resorting to psychological, psychiatric or indeed anthropological understandings of ‘opening up’. The intertwined theoretical and methodological approach we take in this chapter allows us to examine the ways in which traumatic memories are enfolded and transformed into mundane and creative practices of ordinary life, thus diverting from understandings of memory and embodiment that rest on social constructivism. The chapter begins with an ethnographic encounter that points directly to the difficulties of attempting to elicit or construct narratives with migrant Iranian women. Ethnographic techniques of inquiry (such as recording family relationships, tracing movements and enquiring about practices of faith) alerted us to the fine lines between our research methodology and past experiences of threatening surveillance. Not willing to reproduce these disempowering and traumatic relations, and redirected by the women’s telling silences, we became attuned to an embodied style and modality of memory-making and to the specific, gendered situations in which trauma is remembered, forgotten and reremembered. We began to understand how trauma was individually and collectively embodied and performed in the unremarkable practices of everyday lives, through ordinary, domestic and creative practices. Examining the embod-

Golden Chocolate Olive Tobacco Packaging Meets the Smoker You Thought You Knew: The Rational Agent and New Cigarette Packaging Legislation in Australia

Claims made about the effectiveness of new Australian plain cigarette packaging legislation reveal key assumptions about the smoker: her/his rationality can be reached by increasingly hardhitting and/or targeted intervention. Abandoning the restrictive frame of the rational smoker returns to an anthropology concerned with understanding how, rather than why, smoking figures in the lives of those who smoke.

Researching Smoking in the New Smokefree: Good Anthropological Reasons for Unsettling the Public Health Grip

Abstract This paper concerns itself with some of the consequences of legislatively supported public health interventions into smoking. These have emerged from the legislative environment of ‘smokefree’ in Australia, and centrally concern the constitution of public space under its operation; the conceptualisation of risk which circulates within it; and the way in which agency may be imagined in public health framings of smoking. I make a critical anthropological analysis of the ways in which risk, agency and a certain kind of public are imagined and brought to bear on smokers in particular ways. The paper is equally an invitation into the social practice of smoking, as it is undertaken by smokers and as I have ethnographically encountered smoking practice since I began work in the area in 2005. Both the critical analysis and the invitation are difficult to make in a context where research on smoking is increasingly expected to contribute to a public health cessation agenda.

Domestic Temporalities: Sensual Patterning in Persian Migratory Landscapes

Abstract When dealing with the moving worlds of migration among the Persian diaspora in Australia, memories cannot simply be removed to dusty attic boxes to be stored as an archive. Rather, this analysis takes the body and its sensory engagement with the world as a central focus, arguing that memories are crafted, tasted, smelt and touched in everyday temporalities. In the kitchens and lounges of Persian migrant women the lived past refuses to become undone from the countless revolutions of food, talk and domestic activity that are central to the patterning of memory. In this paper, we argue that these intimate practices have references beyond their domestic dimensions, for they point to a worldly movement of life writ domestically small. It is via a sensory network that the spatially and temporally disparate worlds of homeland and new homes are remembered and forgotten, and where miniature worlds call out to the movement of migration.

A Touching Analysis Of Thirdhand Smoke, Family, Publics, and Touch

In this article, I examine what an analytic of touch offers for theorizing the impact of thirdhand smoke. Drawing on “scientific” claims about the danger of touching/being touched by objects permeated with thirdhand smoke and on online discussions about the exposure of infants to thirdhand smoke, I argue that touch permits insights unavailable to us in other analytically pursued sensory registers. It is smell that initially alerts people to the presence of thirdhand smoke and indicates that a bodily boundary has been crossed. But the fact that thirdhand smoke can shape shift to become sited on/in/as the sofa, the dry wall, or the familial skin—anything that thirdhand smoke has touched—means that relations of thirdhand smoke are haptic as well as odiferous. What could an analysis founded in touch tell us about the exclusionary familial and political relations that are forming up around thirdhand tobacco smoke?

(Re)making smoking: Of packets and practice

Taking as foundational the well-established anthropological idea that material things can be determinative of expectations and practice, the authors advance the notion that packets are constitutive of smoking in the era of smokefree legislation. Adorned with warnings, graphic messaging and particular colouration, they say that packets do not simply respond to the ‘problem’ of smoking; they are actively involved in remaking it anew, in, with and for the smokefree context, in which smoking is purposefully denormalized. Focusing in the main on the graphic images that ‘plain’ packets bear, they track and trace this constitutional force via sensory means, attending particularly to a reworking of the role presently accorded to vision in the Australian government’s public health ‘view’ that assumes a stark separation between the cigarette packet and the respondent smoker.