Paper short abstract:

A smoke(free) anthropology? A good deal of the present anthropological refusal to deal with smoking outside of a public health-aligned commitment to reducing it.

Paper long abstract:

A smoke(free) anthropology?

A good deal of the present anthropological refusal to deal with smoking outside of a public health-aligned commitment to reducing it, has to do with fears over how any research which produces findings critical of public health aims may be pressed into the service of pro-tobacco interests. Thus, anthropological work has largely refused to offer insight beyond a commitment to ending the global tobacco epidemic. My attempt to differently conceptualize smoking and the atmosphere in which it is conducted is one characterized by attendance to the relations between the 'largeness' of the smokefree atmosphere and the minuteness of bodily processes that a smokefree agenda seeks to influence. Here I refer to things like the state's concern with protecting the quality of the air itself and the minute and intimate relations this concern produces, namely with the body of the smoker, and with the air in which she is enveloped as she smokes - and particularly with her breath. I am concerned with our relations to the air, and how they can be explicated to foreground understandings of the air that become dominant, and can be put to political use.