Embedded Files
Sensory Contact Zones in the City (Cambridge U.P., under contract)
This book analyses soundscapes and smellscapes in city life across a range of locales in the Asian region and beyond. It considers sonic-olfactive encounters as meeting points or contact zones where sensory transgressions surface and are contested, negotiated and governed in a plurality of ways. The study builds upon a gamut of data including media reports, noise/smell ordinances, public/ministerial speeches, among others, in unveiling how sounds and noises in everyday life carry social meanings and influence different configurations of socialities across historical and contemporary contexts. Conceptually anchored upon the proposed notion of sensory contact zones developed from extant works on such zones that constitute unequal relations and differentiation (Haraway 2008; Linke 2006; Pratt 1992), Sensory Contact Zones in the City explores how social actors relate to one another in sensory contexts of inequalities and hierarchies. The concept foregrounds subject inter-constitution vis-à-vis their sensory relations to each other, in the context of co-presence, interaction, practices and understandings underlined by uneven power relations in city living.
Bracketed Belonging addresses how nations and their governance of security determine social constellations and shape socio-political and legal assertions of belonging and allegiance. The study examines the contours and limits of belonging that underlie the complex social contract between mobile migrants and nations in the context of a global military-security market. These core themes are analysed through the case of Nepali Gurkhas and their families as military and paramilitary migrants. Recruited to serve in the military or police force, Gurkhas are trained in jungle warfare skills that other police groups do not possess. There is thus the professional link to military training and the formation of a unique paramilitary police force with the backdrop of colonialism. In these contexts, this book offers fresh perspectives on studying global security, migration and diasporic lives. It sets a new agenda by analytically bridging empire, military and security maneuvers, and migratory pathways and options. In doing so, Bracketed Belonging serves as a novel contribution to current scholarship on migration and transnationalism, and on police and security studies.
Bracketed Belonging addresses how nations and their governance of security determine social constellations and shape socio-political and legal assertions of belonging and allegiance. The study examines the contours and limits of belonging that underlie the complex social contract between mobile migrants and nations in the context of a global military-security market. These core themes are analysed through the case of Nepali Gurkhas and their families as military and paramilitary migrants. Recruited to serve in the military or police force, Gurkhas are trained in jungle warfare skills that other police groups do not possess. There is thus the professional link to military training and the formation of a unique paramilitary police force with the backdrop of colonialism. In these contexts, this book offers fresh perspectives on studying global security, migration and diasporic lives. It sets a new agenda by analytically bridging empire, military and security maneuvers, and migratory pathways and options. In doing so, Bracketed Belonging serves as a novel contribution to current scholarship on migration and transnationalism, and on police and security studies.
Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia analyses how sensory cultures in Asia frame social order and disorder. The study presents a new agenda to explore different ways through which the senses transpire across a variety of historical and cultural contexts. The book deploys anthropological approaches and other interdisciplinary lines of inquiry in conceptually renewing extant sensory scholarship. In doing so, this interrogation takes on theoretical, comparative and contextual commitments as key inquiries in articulating the social life of the senses in/of Asia. Sensory Anthropology discusses a wide-ranging gamut of examples running from rasa (taste) in pre-colonial India and Indonesia, children and sensory discipline within the monastic orders of the Edo period of Japan, to sound expressives among the Semai in Peninsular Malaysia, the sensory soteriology of Tibetan Buddhism, and sensory warscapes of WWII. By offering rich ethnographic perspectives on inter- and intra-regional sense relations, the book engages with a variety of sensory models, and moves beyond narrower sensory regimes bounded by group, nation or temporality. A pioneering exploration of the senses in and out of Asia, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in social and cultural anthropology.
Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia analyses how sensory cultures in Asia frame social order and disorder. The study presents a new agenda to explore different ways through which the senses transpire across a variety of historical and cultural contexts. The book deploys anthropological approaches and other interdisciplinary lines of inquiry in conceptually renewing extant sensory scholarship. In doing so, this interrogation takes on theoretical, comparative and contextual commitments as key inquiries in articulating the social life of the senses in/of Asia. Sensory Anthropology discusses a wide-ranging gamut of examples running from rasa (taste) in pre-colonial India and Indonesia, children and sensory discipline within the monastic orders of the Edo period of Japan, to sound expressives among the Semai in Peninsular Malaysia, the sensory soteriology of Tibetan Buddhism, and sensory warscapes of WWII. By offering rich ethnographic perspectives on inter- and intra-regional sense relations, the book engages with a variety of sensory models, and moves beyond narrower sensory regimes bounded by group, nation or temporality. A pioneering exploration of the senses in and out of Asia, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in social and cultural anthropology.
My earlier books on sensory studies and migration and transnationalism include Remembering the Samsui Women (UBC Press, 2014), Scents and Scent-sibilities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and edited volumes on Coastal Urbanities (Brill, 2022), Senses in Cities (Routledge, 2017), and Everyday Life in Asia (Ashgate, 2010).
My earlier books on sensory studies and migration and transnationalism include Remembering the Samsui Women (UBC Press, 2014), Scents and Scent-sibilities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and edited volumes on Coastal Urbanities (Brill, 2022), Senses in Cities (Routledge, 2017), and Everyday Life in Asia (Ashgate, 2010).
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse