Senses and Citizenships Embodying Political Life [Hardcover]

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 Lifeexamines 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.

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 NewclCE