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.