Paper short abstract:

Sensory anthropology has been criticised for its inability to get at power. These criticisms overlook how sensory analyses permit insights into power relations as they work in subtle, everyday ways - often beyond self-conscious attention.

Paper long abstract:

Sensory anthropology has been criticised for its inability to examine power. These overlook how sensory analyses permit insights into power relations as they work in subtle ways - often beyond self-conscious-attention. The experience of eating might, for instance, be analysed in 'pre-swallowing' terms, as anthropologists have tended to do, where all foods come culturally prefigured. It might be analysed in post-swallowing terms, as nutritionists do, in which the effects of food on the body are traced in accordance with and as contributors to expert discourse on health. An analysis of tasting itself might centrally involve the tongue and the mouth in experiencing food replete with power; it is the mouth and tongue, and the experience of taste itself, that bears healthy food, Tasteful food, class food, super food, into the body, and thus it is centrally involved in the delivery of discourse on trans-fat, the evils of sugar, the dangers of salt, directly into bodies. As tasted thing and tasting mechanisms become indistinguishable, the consumer eats more than just the sugar-reduced treat, drawing discourse into the body - that's what it means to eat when the government comes to the table. Sensory experiences bear the understated, yet forceful forms of power exerted by 'big players' into everyday lives, and sensory experience forms the grounds for informing resistance to them. In this paper, I consider how the body is intimately governed, and the pitfalls of approaches to the senses that overlook the impact of intimacy and the resistance it brooks.