Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Singaporean Indian negotiations and narrativisations of phenomenological experiences of racial marginalisation in public urban space through everyday auditory and olfactory encounters.

Paper long abstract:

Sound and smell have spatial properties that travel across space, crossing certain boundaries, exceeding their sites of production, and penetrating and permeating space (Almagor 1987, Oosterbaan 2009). If the city is made up of encounters (Simmel 1908), smell and sound prefigure encounters, linger after encounters, and even create encounters of their own. This paper explores feelings of comfort and discomfort and modes of inclusion, exclusion, and subject formation (Classen 1992, Inoue 2003, Trnka et al 2013) in public urban space in Singapore through the registers of the olfactory and the auditory.

Both sound and smell have been and continue to be regulated in Singapore by standard British colonial nuisance laws and current postcolonial nation state ordinances in an attempt to maintain order across racial difference in highly plural, densely populated urban space. Singaporean Indians, as a racial minority group, are economically, politically, and socially marginalised historically and structurally (Kathiravelu 2020, PuruShotam 2011). Recognising the capacity of sensorial anthropology and ethnographic methods to reveal the palpability of power relations (Desjarlais and Throop 2011), this paper is interested in how Singaporean Indians experience being made to feel out of place (Douglas 1966), not only by the smells and sounds that are ascribed to them and on the grounds of which they are governed, but also by the smells and sounds that Singaporean Indians themselves encounter in everyday life.

Paper short abstract:

Some vision impaired people learn to navigate through echolocation, or the perception of space through reflected sound. Drawing an interviews with expert echolocators, this paper explores the phenomenological, social, and interactional obstacles to refining this sensory skill and its consequences.

Paper long abstract:

Some vision impaired (VI) people learn to navigate through echolocation, or the perception of space through reflected sound. Laboratory-based research has demonstrated that perceptual acuity can be quite acute, and practical observation reveals that the sensory skills offers many advantages, and yet it is relatively rare among VI individuals. Drawing an interviews with expert echolocators, this paper explores the phenomenological, social, and interactional obstacles to refining this sensory skill as well as the consequences of its development. One of the key obstacles is that VI individuals are disproportionately mainstreamed for much of their education, rather than having extensive contact with many other VI individuals, including those who adopted sensory strategies that are likely inaccessible to sighted individuals. Unlike hearing impaired individuals, who have often developed elaborate Deaf cultures, VI individuals have been disproportionately subjected to concerns about 'blindisms,' or the idea that the specific mannerism of the VI will draw attention and stigma to them. The case of echolocation, its phenomenology and development, both demonstrate the degree to which echolocation is not like hearing, but is in some ways more like vision, and how social disability and disabling affect sensory development for a minority sensory community, like the VI. Taking a neuroanthropological approach to echolocation and its impairment among the VI, this paper discusses how sensory practices develop specific local neurologies of perception.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss how I have used alternative and unconventional research techniques in carrying out my fieldwork as a blind anthropologist. It outlines how my blindness impacted upon my intersubjectivity with my informants and how I have capitalised on this intersubjectivity in my research.

Paper long abstract:

The discipline of anthropology in general is concerned with issues and problems relating to ‘mainstream’ methodological research that mainly relies on visual sense. As a blind anthropologist, in my fieldwork I have used alternative/unconventional methodological sensory research techniques, in contrast to anthropologists with sight, who mostly rely on their vision to acquire and process data and information. As a blind anthropologist, I mostly rely on my senses of hearing, smell and touch. I gather data and information by auditory means to make sense of people and our environment. Some of these auditory means are eavesdropping, understanding peoples’ emotions through the tone of their voices, and understanding the ‘acoustemology’ of spaces. This is because I am highly attuned to the tones of people’s voices and to the ambience of the places I am in. When I did my fieldwork, I was able to capitalise on these senses and abilities as research techniques, but also consider their ethical implications. In short, in the proposed panel I will consider the particular implications of doing anthropology blind.

Paper short abstract:

I explore how nutritionally informed dietary orders, which prohibit my Indian participants with diabetes from eating mangoes (a fruit of sacred, political and gustatory importance) have their origins in the ‘disgust’ viscerally performed and politically instituted by British colonizers in reaction to cultural eating practices.

Paper long abstract:

In Hyderabad, for my interlocutors, who are middle-class employed professionals diagnosed with diabetes, the mango, a fruit of sacred, political and gustatory importance, is prohibited. According to Indian biomedical doctors, they taste ‘too sweet’, despite their glycemic indices being within acceptable limits [1]. Mangoes are thus enacted as dangerous and seductive, capable of tipping blood sugars into imbalance. Why are mangoes dangerous and how does ‘taste’ threaten? In this paper, I explore how nutritionally informed dietary orders, which restrict mango consumption for diabetes, have their origins in a performativity of ‘taste’, instituted by British colonizers in reaction to cultural eating practices. Colonial ‘disgust’ which was viscerally expressed and rhetorically disseminated against mangoes and the ways in which they were eaten — by licking, slurping and using one’s bare hands — helped to establish a sensual comportment of ‘how to eat’, where the definition of ‘taste’, particularly of ‘sweetness’ emerged as seductive and dangerous and liable to moral policing. Despite their dilemmas surrounding dietary restrictions, my participants continue to eat mangoes as they embody an expansive notion of ‘taste’; an immeasurability in the ‘how to eat’ that is tied to seasonality, memory, joy and pleasure (Warin and Dennis 2005). Through their practices, they demonstrate the power of situating ‘taste’ beyond the physical sensorium, in pushing against the subjectification processes elicited by colonial disgust and normative dietary agendas.

[1] At or below 55 on a scale of 100, which is below the threshold glycaemic index that would cause a blood sugar spike.

Warin, M. and Dennis, S. (2005) ‘Threads of memory: Reproducing the cypress tree through sensual consumption’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(1–2), pp. 159–170. doi: 10.1080/07256860500074367.