Senses and Citizenships

What does disgust have to do with citizenship? How might pain and pleasure, movement, taste, sound and smell be configured as aspects of national belonging? Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life examines the intersections between sensory phenomena and national and supra-national forms of belonging, introducing the new concept of sensory citizenship. Expanding upon contemporary understandings of the rights and duties of citizens, the volume presents anthropological investigations of the sensory aspects of participation in collectivities such as face-to-face communities, ethnic groups, nations and transnational entities. Rethinking relationships between ideology, aesthetics, affect and bodily experience, the authors reveal the multiple political effects of the senses. The book demonstrates how various elements of political life, including some of the most fundamental aspects of citizenship, rest not only upon our senses, but on their perceived naturalization. Vivid ethnographic examples of sensory citizenship in Europe, the United States, the Pacific, Asia and the Middle East explore themes such as sight in political constructions; smell and ethnic conflict; pain in the constitution of communities; national soundscapes; taste in national identities; movement, memory and emplacement.

Susanna Trnka is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. Christine Dureau is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. Julie Park is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland.

1. Introduction: Senses and Citizenships Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park 2. Visibly Black: Phenotype and Cosmopolitan Aspirations on Simbo, Western Solomon Islands Christine Dureau 3. Blood, Toil, and Tears: Rhetorics of Pain and Suffering in African American and Indo-Fijian Citizenship Claims Susanna Trnka 4. Movement in Time: Choreographies of Confinement in an In-Patient Ward Sarah Pinto 5. Modern Citizens, Modern Food: Taste and the Rise of the Moroccan Citizen-Consumer Rachel Newcomb 6. Smelling the Difference: The Senses in Ethnic Conflict in West Kalimantan, Indonesia Anika König 7. Gender, Nationalism, and Sound: Outgrowing "Mother India" Gregory D. Booth 8. Embodied Perception and the Invention of the Citizen: Javanese Dance in the Indonesian State Felicia Hughes-Freeland 9. Off the Edge of Europe: Border Regimes, Visual Culture, and the Politics of Race Uli Linke 10. Seeing Health like a Colonial State: Pacific Island Assistant Physicians, Sight, and Nascent Biomedical Citizenship in the New Hebrides Alexandra Widmer 11. Painful Exclusion: Hepatitis C in the New Zealand Hemophilia Community Julie Park 12. Sensory Nostalgia, Moral Sensibilities, and the Effort to Belong in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia C. Jason Throop 13. The Look: An Afterword Robert Desjarlais