Senses and Citizenships

Embodying Political Life

Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, Julie Park, Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, Julie Park

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136690594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1Introduction

Senses and Citizenships

Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park

Be it flag-waving partisans or mothers birthing the next generation of military conscripts, Olympic athletes competing in the name of their country or volunteers constructing public works, the corporeality of citizenship is everywhere around us. Indeed, it has become a scholarly truism that conceptualizations of “the body of the nation” are often embedded in the activities, comportments, and experiential realities of the actual bodies of a nation's populace. The fact that citizenship is not just a matter of rights and duties, as defined by the state, but also has a corporeal existence has similarly been well demonstrated. And wherever there are living, sensate bodies, the senses are a naturally arising component of physical—and in this case, political— life. Or are they? Are the senses simply an expression of the inescapable corporeality of human political endeavor? Or can there be something inherently social—and more to the point, political—in how our senses themselves are constituted and, in turn, used in constituting the political?

In this book, we argue that aspects of political life, including some of the most fundamental enactments of citizenship, rest not only upon our senses but on their perceived naturalization. Building upon scholarly interest in various aspects of embodied citizenship, we suggest that the sensorial aspects of citizenship are an essential but as yet underanalyzed facet of political power, collective ideologies, and citizen subjectivities.

In taking up the task of examining relationships between the senses and citizenships, our starting point is the interplay between our embodied sensing of the world and our emotional and conceptual means of “making sense” of it. Such sensory-conceptual entanglements, we argue, contribute to a complex that we gloss as “sensory citizenship.” By “sensory citizenship,” we mean the points at which sensory being mediates and is mediated by state and other forms of citizenship, thereby constituting an intricate dialectic between lived experience, ideological formations, and political forces within which normative ideologies naturalize particular forms of belonging.

As scholars since Merleau-Ponty have demonstrated, the first instant of perception lies within, rather than outside, the body. According to Merleau-Ponty, lived experience is “located in the ‘mid-point’ between mind and body, or subject and object . . . [and thus] perception is based on [the practices of] looking, listening and touching as acquired, habit-based forms of conduct . . . , not an inner representation of the outer world, but . . . practical bodily involvement . . . that concerns the whole sensing body” (quoted in Haldrup, Koefoed, and Simonsen 2006, 177).

Michael Taussig (1993) describes such sensory knowing in terms of a medley of interpenetrating and overlapping sensory “zones” that inescapably link our bodily knowing to our perceptions of the world. The senses, then, mediate our sense of the world, “continually linking bodily experience to thought and to action” (Feld 2005, 181). Of particular importance to us is the interlinking of the three nodes of sensation, conception, and action, and their vulnerability to transformation via normative ideologies. Such ideological manipulation can occur at any of these points and herein lies the significance of the senses: as embodied beings, we do not merely taste our food, see bodies around us, hear sounds, or observe the dimensions of our environment. Rather, these things readily submit to perception as, for example, distinctive food-ways, somatic norms, appropriate soundscapes, spatial hygiene, and so on. They can become, in other words, perceptual epistemologies and normative cultural phenomena. They segue into understandings of the nature of the world and ways of being in it. Such understandings are, themselves, often the means and products of states and other forces directed at creating or legitimating particular kinds of citizenry.

Crucial to this is the fact that the making of citizens, citizenry, and citizenship is an inherently political and constant process masquerading as inevitable, stable, natural entities consisting of the right persons in the right spaces. As the literature on nationalism has long observed, the inclusiveness implicit in notions of a spatially fixed nation-state composed of linguistically, historically, culturally, and phenotypically related member citizens, relies on the exclusion of other, noncitizens. The making of citizens, then, is a matter of twinned inclusion and rejection. We suggest that the grounds for this mutual definition—of citizen and foreigner, us and them—frequently (and repeatedly) returns to modes of sensory knowledge and being by means of which the body becomes central to naturalizing and consolidating the nation as the normative basis of the state.

Such an approach lends itself to more comprehensive analyses of feelings of inclusion as well as exclusion, marginalization, and other modes of differentiation. Ethnocentrism, racism, xenophobia, and chauvinism, for example, are widely viewed as forms of mental or cognitive prejudice and thereby amenable to reasoned refutation or persuasion. The assumption is that if people can perceive the accuracy or falsity of their ideas about others, then they can somehow shed their irrational attitudes and control their inappropriate emotions. Yet the intensity of these emotions and attitudes persists despite all efforts to explain, reason, persuade, or refute; indeed, people can find themselves caught in distressingly dissonant states of being, torn between personal commitments to inclusion of and feelings of invasion by the same group (Wise 2010). By locating the source of such sentiments in the senses and the very ways in which we perceive (view, smell, touch, etc.) others, we can better understand the seeming “irrefutability” of what appear to be our most basic perceptions of the world around us (cf. Haldrup, Koefoed, and Simonsen 2006).

A similar, but distinct, effort to elucidate such dynamics is proposed in recent works on the emotional life of the state. Ghassan Hage, for example, highlights hope, care, and worry as emotional practices in state–citizen interrelationships, suggesting that “societies are mechanisms for the distribution of hope, and that the kind of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates among its citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distribute hope” (2003, 3). In analyzing these dynamics, Hage addresses how a “paranoid nationalist imaginary” (2003, 3) comes about and examines its very tangible ideological and material effects.

Sara Ahmed also explores state–citizen attachments through the rubric of emotions, arguing that they “work to align individuals with collectives . . . through the very intensity of their attachments” and, in the contexts of nations, “to align the imagined subject with rights and the imagined nation with ground” (2004, 26). Such emotional responses are not created de novo in each individual's direct encounters with others. Rather, they are shaped by the cultural sedimentations of histories of contact and sentiment which contextualize those encounters (2004, 31).

Crucially, Ahmed suggests that emotions are simultaneously sensory. Hatred, for example, is a “visceral” state in which one's body feels engulfed by a sensation and sentiment that mediates the “relationship between the psychic and the social, and between individual and collective” (2004, 27). As Ahmed further notes, this is not to say that “emotions are the same thing as sensations, but that the very intensity of perception often means an instant slide from one to the other. Hence, while sensation and emotion are irreducible, they cannot simply be separated at the level of lived experience” (2004, 30). Further to this, Ahmed indicates,

to be touched a certain way, or to be moved a certain way by an encounter with another, may involve a reading, not only of the encounter but of the other that is encountered as having certain characteristics. If we feel another hurts us, then we may attribute that feeling to the other, such that the other is read as the impression of the negative. In other words, the “It hurts” becomes, “You hurt me,” which might become, “You are hurtful,” or even “I hate you” [for hurting me]. These affective responses are readings that not only create the borders between selves and others, but also “give” others meaning and value in the very moment of apparent separation. (Ahmed 2004, 30; emphasis added)

We agree with Ahmed that lived experience often entails a slipperiness between sentiments and senses; the emotional pain of a love affair abruptly ended can be a physically intense experience as can the joy of an unexpectedly happy reunion. It is important to note, however, that at other moments, our affective states may indeed be experienced as states of mind (a fleeting feeling of melancholy, for instance), rather than as embodied enactments of sentiment. The senses, in contrast, are always centered in the body's interaction with the world.

More importantly, our capacities to see, touch, smell—in short, to sense—are popularly understood as sources of more or less objectively gathered information about the world (cf. Wierzbicka 2010). Only exceptionally have we recognized our capacities to “make sense” of the world around us as imbued with political meaning and, in turn, perceived of our senses as part of the very processes that constitute political life (e.g., Foucault 1973 [1963]; Bourdieu 1984 [1979]; Classen 1993; Rancière 2004). For these reasons, we suggest that the specifically sensorial aspects of citizenship are in need of similar attention.

In the pages that follow, we analyze citizenship across a range of historical and cross-cultural sites, addressing issues such as: How does sensory experience convey the emotional, conceptual sense that some people are self-evidently “us” and not “them”? What is the range of sensory experiences that constitute feelings of belonging to a nation or other societal form? How do states evoke particular emotions, actions, and behaviors through citizens’ sensory experiences; and how do people come to sense in inarticulable ways the rightness or wrongness of specific social interactions? In what ways do our knowledge of the world, our sense(s) of being particular kinds of citizens, and the modes of action that seem most sensible to us come to be mutually constituted?

THE VISCERALITY OF UNITY AND DIFFERENCE

Our central point is that the work of differentiation is not only expressed through discursive and juridical demarcations of rights, boundaries, and conflicting personhoods: indeed, the viscerality of feelings of cultural distance conjoins corporeality, sentiment, practice, and the senses, intensifying deeply embodied ideas. This, in turn, lends a sense of moral weight to claims of rights and inclusion. Further, ideological justifications of political forms and relationships often draw upon or create sensory models to legitimate belonging and exclusion. Settler societies, for example, typically imagine indigenous others as sensorially alien, be they Maori cannibals, vicious or stoic Native Americans, filthy Aborigines, or stinking Latin American Indians. Such forms of sensory differentiation and discrimination are akin to class-based othering based on smell and decency (in terms of clothing, language, or hygiene) and the differentiation of women predicated on constructions of visible difference and putative “natural” pungency (Classen 1993, 86–87). Comparable themes increasingly pervade older state societies as “the empire comes home” and rising numbers of international and intercontinental migrants seek admission to privileged societies, provoking or apparently justifying felt senses of difference that seemingly emanate not from cognitive categories but from the very nature of the world. Analogous issues are reflected in diverse kinds of reactions to and accounts of cultural-political others, such as Tongans’ outrage over the overtly sexual behavior of foreign women sporting bikinis on the beach; public memories of the Holocaust that are integral to the founding and continuation of the State of Israel; or the depth of communitas inspired among Hindu devotees who, in the context of a religiously nationalist state, collectively experience both pain and its joyful transcendence in completing a physically arduous pilgrimage (Daniel 1984). Such examples suggest the centrality of the senses in the making of self and other while betraying the confusion of behaviors and bodily-being that occupy key sites in claims and contestations about rights to citizenship in the nation-state.

Reciprocally, such literal and physical viscerality can nurture powerful senses of unity. The tales of a beloved food shared by a particular group, a smell that evokes “home,” or the rhythms of a national anthem conjuring a sense of shared belonging, reassure through taste, remembered smell, or sound that here is something that binds us in fellow feeling. But as we noted above, such inclusive practices are simultaneously exclusionary. Making the body central in the naturalization and consolidation of the nation as the normative basis of the state, visibilities that easily mark the body of who is or is not one of us—for example, the presumptive whiteness of many states or of the “European” suprastate (Linke, this volume) that mark dark skins as out of place—come to imply irrefutable difference. In tandem with such visual modes of exclusion are the auditory practices and experiences of incomprehensible accents, alien odors, and disgust evoked by exotic or minority sexual practices, all of which discriminate and assign differential value to those with contending claims to the body politic. In such ways, the senses engage citizenship across many modes of perception and bodily being. Operating at multiple levels—from socializing children into hygienic practices, moralities, and postures in the family home to the discursive efficacy of the media or the policies and strategies of states—they permeate and create perceptions of insiders and outsiders and of the proper and improper conduct of citizens and others.

The purpose of this book is to examine these issues by interrogating the place of the sensorial within processes of creating and maintaining citizens and citizenries. We begin by taking a closer look at scholarly understandings of citizenship and the place of the body in the constitution and enactment of citizen subjectivities, followed by an examination of the senses and their centrality in the processes of constituting knowledge and collective belonging.

Citizenship

Citizenship has been variously defined as the epitome of being human, if one follows Aristotle's reasoning (see below); as a set of rights and obligations defined by one's relationship to the state; and as a sense of inclusion into larger social and political communities. There have been so many definitions, and such variance between them, that one could compare the case of citizenship to Seton-Watson's observation of his efforts to theorize nationalism that “I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised, yet the phenomenon has existed and exists” (1977, 5, quoted in Anderson 1991, 3). Indeed, citizenship threatens the same conceptual elusiveness and reflects similar intersections of scholarly and political interests.

By way of orienting our analysis, we find useful Cris Shore's observation that beyond issues of rights and responsibilities lie

two basic anthropological points [which] are often overlooked in debates about . . . citizenship. First, . . . citizenship is a classificatory device; a way of ordering people in terms of boundaries of inclusion (“insiders”) and exclusion (“aliens”). . . . In this respect, citizenship is an identity-marker that simultaneously “brands” the population that is to be governed whilst reminding individuals of their nationality and the state to which they belong. Second, citizenship therefore functions as an agent of consciousness. It is an ideological construct that not only defines individuals in terms of a particular rationality and set of norms but, more importantly, seeks to infiltrate their subjectivi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Senses and Citizenships
• 2 Visibly Black: Phenotype and Cosmopolitan Aspirations on Simbo, Western Solomon Islands
• 3 Blood, Toil, and Tears: Rhetorics of Pain and Suffering in African American and Indo-Fijian Citizenship Claims
• 4 Movement in Time: Choreographies of Confinement in an Inpatient Ward
• 5 Modern Citizens, Modern Food: Taste and the Rise of the Moroccan Citizen-Consumer
• 6 Smelling the Difference: The Senses in Ethnic Conflict in West Kalimantan, Indonesia
• 7 Gender, Nationalism, and Sound: Outgrowing “Mother India”
• 8 Embodied Perception and the Invention of the Citizen: Javanese Dance in the Indonesian State
• 9 Off the Edge of Europe: Border Regimes, Visual Culture, and the Politics of Race
• 10 Seeing Health like a Colonial State: Pacific Island Assistant Physicians, Sight, and Nascent Biomedical Citizenship in the New Hebrides
• 11 Painful Exclusion: Hepatitis C in the New Zealand Hemophilia Community
• 12 Sensory Nostalgia, Moral Sensibilities, and the Effort to Belong in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia
• 13 The Look: An Afterword
• Contributors
• Index