Books
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).
