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In Australia, research resourcing might come from parties dedicated to addressing issues in the public interest, such as smoking cessation and alcohol regulation. The associations researchers have with those parties are regarded in quite different terms than, say, a research relationship that is forged with the tobacco or alcohol industries themselves. Agreeing to work with the latter 'bad' players would indubitably raise the liveliest of suspicions among fellow researchers, while associations with the former 'good' players are often regarded as in the service of good academic citizenship that helps bring about positive changes to the world, something that is often a key moral, as well as funding and publications, driver for researchers. We argue that such polar classification bears anthropological inspection and a radical rethink. The consequences of not so doing risk shutting down areas in which anthropological enquiry is urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To determine how physically active individuals are following total knee replacement (TKR) and how accurately they self‐report their step count adherence compared to objective measure following TKR. Methods: Observational cohort study, nested within the PATHway randomised‐clinical trial. Participants (n = 102) who had recently undergone TKR were recruited for the main trial. Only participant data from the intervention group were used for this study (n = 51). Participants in the intervention group received an activity tracker to monitor their physical activity and fortnightly health‐coaching sessions for 3 months. Adherence was objectively measured as percentage of steps completed divided by the amount prescribed by the health coach. Participants were asked to self‐report their adherence on a 1–10 numerical rating scale during health coaching sessions. Results: Data from 44 participants were available, resulting in a total of 224 paired measurements. Participant step count increased over the first 8 weeks of follow‐up, and plateaued from 8 weeks onwards at approximately 7500 steps/day. About two‐thirds (65.8%) of participants accurately self‐reported their step count adherence up until 12 weeks, the remaining one‐third (34.2%) underestimated their adherence. Paired t‐tests demonstrated statistically significant differences between the paired measurements from weeks 2 to 10. Discussion: Participants were generally active and completed the step goal most occasions. Two‐thirds accurately self‐reported their step goal adherence. Self‐reported measures should be combined with an objective measure of adherence for greater accuracy. A further understanding of how people engage with activity trackers can be used to promote behaviour change in physiotherapy‐led interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst massive economic damage tension between the needs to save lives and save jobs has become the basis of a key political fault-line and a matter of daily on-the-ground management during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article we consider four especially salient changes to work-life wrought by the pandemic: (1) new workplace praxes pertaining to matters of touch; (2) erosion and degrading of the quality of erstwhile intimate relations in certain workplaces; (3) changes to senses of belonging and homeliness in workplaces; (4) and, refl ecting on the particular type of work that we do, how the pandemic (and pandemic lockdown especially) is impacting our pedagogical and research practices. Throughout we reveal how the intimacies experienced within workplaces are being transformed -- not always eroded or degraded, but also sometimes adapted, sustained in new ways (especially via new communications technologies), and even enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we highlight how COVID-19 has transformed, is transforming and may transform into the future human intimacies at several different social levels: between couples, within and between families, between citizens and states, among nations, and between people and their deities. We conclude by highlighting an uncertain future for intimacies that may entail the radical transformation of societies characterised by conversely new and liberating forms of socio-economic organisation or enslavement, especially to new spatio-temporal configurations engendered by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treating fear as a kind of scape risks overlooking its peculiar temporality. Fear is, we argue, only ever established as a motivator, for social change for example, after the occurrences that gave rise to it, hence at some point in the future. This retro-clarity poses problems for the commonplace practice of treating fear as a causal explanation for things. Following this warning, we explain fear's peculiar temporality. Fear is, we argue, only ever constituted at the moment of its commission. Indeed, it is this present-ness of fearful events that accounts for the very things that make them so fearful - their appearance as emergent, chaotic and unexpectedly obtrusive within the normalcy of everyday life and the normal flow of time. Finally, we argue, this calls for reconceptualization of fear within Future Studies, away from a focus on fearful future dystopias towards recognition of how the fearfulness of events arises precisely from their present-ness and un-anticipatability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we highlight how COVID-19 has transformed, is transforming and may transform into the future human intimacies. This, we argue, is an appropriate focus for anthropological investigation particularly. We posit a scaler approach to the anthropological study of the transformation of intimacy in COVID-19, embracing multiple levels from human relations with microbes through to human relations with deities. Furthermore, we offer examples of the overlaps between the ways in which intimate relationships at small and large scales are conceptualised, especially metaphorically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as foundational the well-established anthropological idea that material things can be determinative of expectations and practice, the authors advance the notion that packets are constitutive of smoking in the era of smokefree legislation. Adorned with warnings, graphic messaging and particular colouration, they say that packets do not simply respond to the 'problem' of smoking; they are actively involved in remaking it anew, in, with and for the smokefree context, in which smoking is purposefully denormalized. Focusing in the main on the graphic images that 'plain' packets bear, they track and trace this constitutional force via sensory means, attending particularly to a reworking of the role presently accorded to vision in the Australian government's public health 'view' that assumes a stark separation between the cigarette packet and the respondent smoker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory paper, we contemplate both a variety of anthropological approaches to smoke and how analyses of smoke - as object, material, phenomenon, practice, or political fact - might contribute to anthropological knowledge. We consider these questions in and through the themes cross-cutting this collection, including: the sensuous aspects of smoke (especially in the olfactory, visual and haptic relations it occasions, entails and denies); the politics of smoke (in particular regard to climate change, public health, and Indigenous knowledge); smoke’s temporal dimensions (from the human mastery of fire via industrial chimneys to vaping e-cigarettes); and its ritual functions (encapsulating transition par excellence, curing ills, placating spirits, and marking time). We conclude by pondering smoke’s inherent capacity to escape the bounds we might set for it, including the imposition of highly politicised spatial, temporal, and intellectual constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout my 15-years-long exploration of tobacco smoking in Australia, I have analysed the practice and the legislation pertaining to it using sensory tools. Ten years distant from the beginning of my engagement with smoking, I can appreciate that a striking feature of the sensory analyses I have made is what they reveal of violence. Included here is (not only) the violence done to the smoker’s own body - by the biotechnology of cigarettes themselves, and by the state; the violence she does to non-smoking others with her dangerous exhalations; and a kind of violence conducted against a critical anthropology by, precisely, a veraciously interventionist form of medical anthropology. In what follows I reveal some of these violences. In this paper, I use key examples that have featured in my published work before to make the related points that (a) sensory analyses are good for thinking about and revealing powerful relations and (b) that it really matters what kind of sensory analysis we do; some kinds, I suggest, might actually work to shore up the powerful conditions under which a topic, an issue or a problem has emerged. Others might lay those conditions bare and make plain their violent operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might new materialist perspectives bring to our understanding of smoking pleasure? In this paper, I draw on this thinking to sketch out an alternative, non-unitary smoker who is at the mercy of the whims of the breeze - a yielding I will argue is key to smoking pleasure. With these intentions in mind, rather than thinking of what the biotechnology of cigarettes accomplishes in terms of the chemical delivery of pleasure, or adding to the multiply of social and cultural reasons anthropologists have tendered to account for it, I approach smoking pleasure in and through the medium of the smoky air. This approach permits examination of how nonhuman and human agents, like cigarettes, lungs, hands and other things form momentary and contingent relation in the air, as well as the role of the air itself in 'enwinding' the smoker. When smoking pleasure is explored from such a perspective, the smoker can be recast as part of a complex of relations that she does not fully control, rather than the agentic centre or principal arrayer of the nonhuman world. The pleasures of smoking, and the smoker herself, I argue, are emergent and come into being precisely in these relations: 'the smoker' originates, terminates, and is defined in and with elements, rather than being surely and certainly attached to a particular smoker subjectivity. Chief among the complex of things and elements that make the smoker and her pleasure is the air itself - and it is the air itself that is my primary informant in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well recognised that antipsychotic treatments impact the whole body, not just the target area of the brain. For people with refractory schizophrenia on clozapine, the gold standard antipsychotic treatment in England and Australia, the separation of mental and physical regimes of health is particularly pronounced, resulting in multiple, compartmentalised treatment registers. Clinicians often focus on the mental health aspects of clozapine use, using physical indicators to determine whether treatment can continue. Our observations of 59 participants in England and Australia over 18 months revealed that patients did not observe this hierarchisation of mental treatments and physical outcomes. Patients often actively engaged in the management of their bodily symptoms, leading us to advance the figure of the active, rather than passive, patient. In our paper, we do not take the position that the facility for active management is a special one utilised only by these patients. We seek instead to draw attention to what is currently overlooked as an ordinary capacity to enact some sort of control over life, even under ostensibly confined and confining circumstances. We argue that clozapine-treated schizophrenia patients utilise the clinical dichotomy between mental and physical domains of health to rework what health means to them. This permits patients to actively manage their own phenomenological 'life projects' (Rapport, I am Dynamite: an Alternative Anthropology of Power, Routledge, London 2003), and forces us to reconsider the notion of clinical giveness of what health means. This making of one's own meanings of health may be critical to the maintenance of a sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how people with chronic illnesses respond to absences of continuity and coordination of care. Little work has been done on how the ill person might mitigate flaws in a less than optimal system. Our qualitative research, carried out among 91 participants in Australia, reveals that people with chronic illnesses create strategies to facilitate the management of their care. These strategies included efforts to improve communication between themselves and their health care practitioners; keeping personal up-to-date medication lists; and generating their own specific management plans. While we do not submit that it is patients' responsibility to attend to gaps in the health system, our data suggests that chronically ill people can, in and through such strategies, exert a measure of agency over their own care; making it effectively more continuous and coordinated. Participants crafted strategies according to the particular social and bodily rhythms that their ongoing illnesses had lent to their lives. Our analysis advances the view that the ill body itself is capable of enfolding the health system into the rhythms of illness - rather than the ill body always fitting into the overarching structural tempo. This entails an agent-centric view of time in illness experience. A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be found at: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine what an analytic of touch offers for theorizing the impact of thirdhand smoke. Drawing on “scientific” claims about the danger of touching/being touched by objects permeated with thirdhand smoke and on online discussions about the exposure of infants to thirdhand smoke, I argue that touch permits insights unavailable to us in other analytically pursued sensory registers. It is smell that initially alerts people to the presence of thirdhand smoke and indicates that a bodily boundary has been crossed. But the fact that thirdhand smoke can shape shift to become sited on/in/as the sofa, the dry wall, or the familial skin—anything that thirdhand smoke has touched—means that relations of thirdhand smoke are haptic as well as odiferous. What could an analysis founded in touch tell us about the exclusionary familial and political relations that are forming up around thirdhand tobacco smoke? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current anthropological investigations of smoking offer limited insights into the practice, as they fail to account for how smokers and smoke itself draw things together that are assumed or desired to be kept apart. One of the qualities of smoke is its capacity to link disparate temporalities, spaces, and persons, whether or not connections between them are desirable. Smokers, themselves, too, draw together things as ostensibly different as cautionary public health information about smoking with its potentialities. The capability of smoke and smokers to connect disparate things tends to be overlooked in prevailing presentday anthropological analyses. This occurs when anthropologists align with public health approaches that privilege cessation agendas, rather than taking an independent approach that is anthropologically curious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the twentieth century, packaging was a carefully cultivated element of the appeal of the cigarette. However, the tobacco industry's control over cigarette packaging has been steadily eroded through legislation that aims to rebrand the packet from a desirable to a dangerous commodity—epitomized in Australia's introduction of plain packaging in 2012. Evident in both the enactment of cigarette packaging legislation and industry efforts to overturn it is the assumption that packets do things—i.e. that they have a critical role to play in either promoting or discouraging the habit. Drawing on 175 ethnographic interviews conducted with people smoking in public spaces in Vancouver, Canada; Canberra, Australia; Liverpool, England; and San Francisco, USA, we produce a ‘thick description’ of smokers' engagements with cigarette packets. We illustrate that despite the very different types of cigarette packaging legislation in place in the four countries, there are marked similarities in the ways smokers engage with their packets. In particular, they are not treated as a purely visual sign; instead, a primary means through which one's own cigarette packet is apprehended is by touch rather than by sight. Smokers perceive cigarette packets largely through the operations of their hands—through their ‘handiness’. Thus, our study findings problematize the assumption that how smokers engage with packets when asked to do so on a purely intellectual or aesthetic level reflects how they engage with packets as they are enfolded into their everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how the explication of the air has figured environments, places, politics and the constitution of 'the public' in the era of smokefree. I argue in this paper that an especial imaginary of the air, one that recalls and revitalises much earlier notions of the air as bearer of miasmatic pollution, and even earlier ideas about the physical quality of the air and its relationship to the political state, has shaped how persons and places are formed and subject to inclusion and exclusion as part of the new politics of 'the public'. I draw attention to the ways in which these configurations of persons and places have relied upon the explication of the air itself, and to the consequences of explicating the air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 2009-10,1 conducted ethnographic fieldwork with 31 immunologists, virologists, and neuroscientists working with either rats or mice. I encountered how the conceptual and physical bounds that have traditionally separated nature from culture, specie from specie, human from animal, are crossed, blurred, and reasserted. In this ambiguous zone, a scientific incuriosity about animals themselves persists, in the practice of inquiring into animal bodies and minds to produce insights into human health and its betterment. This privileging of human health bypasses animals themselves in favor of a view of them as human similars and prone objects, wholly available to persons, and affirms the Heideggarian thesis, that science occupies an arrogated position in modernity. Such incurious encounters with animals produced ideas and pronouncements about the close biological and genetic similarities that humans and animals share, that scientists in my study called "biokinship" and "genekinship." These terms indicate both a close relation between animals and persons, but they also present the terms upon which hierarchical relations between humans and animals might be arrayed. Equally present among the scientists with whom I worked was a curiosity about animals themselves. This manifested in understandings and articulations of animals as beings with whom one might make a relationship in which mutually understood communication was possible. Attendant to this curiosity about animals themselves was an awareness scientists in my study had of what these relationships, or what I have called fleshy kinships with rats and mice, might mean for scientific practice, for good science, and for human-animal relatedness in the laboratory. This ambiguous situation calls for analytic attention to biotic materiality and process, but equally for attention to rodents as beings with whom scientists interact on an everyday basis, and with whom they form communicative relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns itself with some of the consequences of legislatively supported public health interventions into smoking. These have emerged from the legislative environment of 'smokefree' in Australia, and centrally concern the constitution of public space under its operation; the conceptualisation of risk which circulates within it; and the way in which agency may be imagined in public health framings of smoking. I make a critical anthropological analysis of the ways in which risk, agency and a certain kind of public are imagined and brought to bear on smokers in particular ways. The paper is equally an invitation into the social practice of smoking, as it is undertaken by smokers and as I have ethnographically encountered smoking practice since I began work in the area in 2005. Both the critical analysis and the invitation are difficult to make in a context where research on smoking is increasingly expected to contribute to a public health cessation agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims made about the effectiveness of new Australian plain cigarette packaging legislation reveal key assumptions about the smoker: her/his rationality can be reached by increasingly hard-hitting and/or targeted intervention. Abandoning the restrictive frame of the rational smoker returns to an anthropology concerned with understanding how, rather than why, smoking figures in the lives of those who smoke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization warned today that countries will need to be much more aggressive in their attempts to stamp out smoking if they are to counter the tobacco industry's marketing techniques (WHO, 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is framed by the complexities associated with exploring a morally positioned and emotive practice - the practice of smoking cigarettes. Smoking is bound up with a multiply of issues and positions, including (but not limited to) the role of the state in the regulation of bodies and their practices and in the moral positioning of those practices, and the rights of the individual. It is also bound up with particular understandings of bodies and their relations with other bodies. In antismoking advertisements, smoking practice is firmly situated within frames of corporeal boundedness and individuality, and particular emotions and moral positions are drawn upon to locate the smoking body relative to other (non-smoking) bodies, and to the practice of smoking itself. Based on fine-grained ethnographic research, and moving away from moral and dualistic positionings of the practice, I take up a phenomenological perspective to explore the profound experiences of sociality, corporeal connection and rupture, and the wide range of emotional experiences that are central to practices of smoking. I also draw attention to the ways in which public policy and action regarding smoking might be understood, acted upon, resisted and altered, in ways that make it meaningful in the lived experiences of smokers. Many of the responses that smokers make to state policy and action are not those intended by policy makers, and demonstrate both the creativity of the responses, and the dangers of assuming too much about how people will behave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christmas Islanders participate together in blood metaphors, drawn from the island's biotic life. These metaphors proceed along specific sensual lines such that, in and through participation in this shared sensual citizenship, the identity category 'Christmas Islanders' is yielded. Pan-islandic sensory citizenship is based on participation in a highly visual and rhythmic auditory Christmas Island sensorium and other specifically ethnic relationships to the Island proceed primarily along the sensory lines of taste. Participation in particular sensory registers of island life is key in locating Christmas Islanders precisely as such, and is equally important in creating and maintaining 'senses' of ethnic difference between them. At the same time as local people participate together in pan-islandic metaphors, some ethnic groups have made sensory connections with the island that are not made by others. These connections are instrumental in locating islanders of particular ethnic membership as 'native' (over local), or as damaging to pan-islandic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is framed by the cultural politics of nationhood in contemporary Australia and particularly by the ways in which the nation has sought to produce borders that have manifested themselves as altered cartographic boundaries and exclusion zones. The paper itself is concerned with life on Christmas Island, and is focused on the ways in which multiethnic Christmas Island locals use blood metaphors drawn from the Island's native Christmas Island red crabs and alien, predatory yellow ants, to articulate patterns of human movement and migration into island space. The metaphors reveal coalescences between the body of the self, the other, nature, and the island place. I explore these coalescences to present a picture of migration and movement from the perspective of those who live within the migration exclusion zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an ethnographic negotiation between the authors as social anthropologists and Bahá'í Persian women in Australia, noting the traumatic memories involved in the experiences of these women. It is said that such memory is a form of tacit or bodily knowledge. Also addressed psychological aspects of questioning in the use of genealogies for anthropological inquiry, the experiences of religious minorities in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the role of everyday experiences in cultural practices of memory.

This paper is concerned with the ways in which a group of Persian women, who have all fled Iran in the last two decades, give meaning to place and memory through the everyday practices of cooking and embroidery. While there are many different localised arts of patterning and flavour, we focus here on the recurring pattern of bota (the Cypress tree). In particular, we examine how the bota motif links both the making of domestic sweets and cloths, and is central in recalling and remaking a sense of place. The Cypress tree symbolises life: the continuation of life in place, and the continuation of place in life. In creating and consuming the bota motif, through eating, laying tablecloths, wrapping towels, sitting on cushions and drawing curtains, embodied experiences of landscape and relationships are reproduced. The embroidery items entail and occasion sensual engagement in and of themselves, and also serve as backgrounds for specific sensual engagements, including, for example, as tablecloths upon which food will be served. Engagement with the bota pattern cannot be characterised along strictly divided sensual dimensions. Rather, we argue that the senses are intertwined in a synaesthetic knot in which memory is embodied and reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates models of intentional action and probability on the ground that they ignore the possibility or the certainty of uncertainty. It devotes theoretical attention to the notion of uncertainty in and through rich ethnographic material and by drawing attention to the idea that intentionality and resultant action are enduring even in postmodernity. Furthermore, this article shows that anthropology must continue to reflect the conditions of the people and circumstances it studies.

The legislation of health warning labels on cigarette packaging is a major focus for tobacco control internationally and is a key component of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This population-level intervention is broadly supported as a vital measure for warning people about the health consequences of smoking. However, some components of this approach warrant close critical inspection. Through a qualitative content analysis of the imagery used on health warning labels from 4 countries, we consider how this imagery depicts people that smoke. By critically analyzing this aspect of the visual culture of tobacco control, we argue that this imagery has the potential for unintended consequences, and obscures the social and embodied contexts in which smoking is experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a result of the way in which the design of a fi rst-year anthropology course attempted to undo stern structural hierarchies between students and teachers. Instead, the participants regarded one another as fellow anthropologists undertaking ethnographic research on the university context. This article examines the intimate relations that came available to participants when the course moved from in-person to Zoom format. Participants moved into homes to document the unfurling COVID-19 crisis, (back) into intimate familial relations. But this was not the only intimacy with which participants had to grapple anthropologically. The lecture materials, too, connected themselves to things and experiences in immediacy as they arrived into homes through laptop screens. The screens themselves off ered up new insights into the lives of others -- something newly minted anthropologists had to account for as they completed the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]