 I'd like to start by acknowledging and celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay my respects to the elders of the none-all people past and present. I acknowledge their continuing contribution to this place and to this institution. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Ann Evans, I'm the Associate Dean of Research in the College of Arts and Social Sciences and I welcome you to this professorial lecture. The CAS inaugural professorial lecture series is an opportunity for us as a community to welcome and celebrate new professorial appointments to our college. Today we celebrate the promotion of Professor Simone Dennis from the School of Archeology and Anthropology in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts. It's with pleasure today that we've joined forces with the ANU Gender Institute as this is the first event in their series on the inspiring women of ANU. And the Gender Institute have a newsletter which you can sign up for here if I'm sure most of us are already signed up for that newsletter. Simone completed her PhD at the University of Adelaide and has held positions at Adelaide University of Southern Queensland and at the ANU. Her research interests coalesce around embodiment, the sense and power. She's written on how the politics of nationhood in contemporary Australia have played out for Christmas Island's multi-ethnic populations. She's spent time with Persian women migrants who have fled Iran in the past two decades and she's conducted research in the techno scientific spaces of major Australian research laboratories in which mice and rats feature as animal models for human disease research. Simone is best known for her work that's contained in her fourth book which looks closely at how the air itself is central to ushering in legislative changes that impact more than just smoking and that affect us all. She's just about to embark on a major funded project on alcohol use but she says she will probably draw the line at guns. Simone embodies the values of the ANU in research excellence, risk taking and collegiality. Please join me in welcoming Professor Dennis. Thank you very much and thanks everyone for coming. I had written a long piece of thank yous at the start of my paper but it started to sound like I was accepting an Academy Award so please consider yourself thanked and I will do that properly later on but I would like to start off by asking you please to lower your expectations of this professorial lecture because it's still not clear to me that I actually should be a professor. After all it was only Frank Bongiorno's sage advice that I shouldn't wear a fascinator and take real time bets as to the outcome of my interview just because it was going to be held on Melbourne Cup Day. So without that advice I may very well not be standing before you today. Also in the day of my interview I attempted to walk in through the outdoor of the Menzies Library where my interview took place. I managed to turn that around I think by suggesting to people who witnessed the event, namely the Dean, that this was an example of real leadership. I was not being a follower and trailing behind all those conventional thinkers who went in the indoor that's what I mean when I say please lower your expectations. So what I'm going to try and do in my lecture is to tell you about why I think it's important to research smoking. First I'm going to tell you that it's important to my own discipline of anthropology which I hope will tell you something about my own vision for the future of that discipline. And second I want to make the much bigger argument that researching smoking in a particular way lets us see some of the things that are being done that look like bounded attempts to curtail a dangerous habit but which are having a much bigger and more profound effect than we can see on the surface. And I want to argue to you that those effects should matter to all of us. So I'm not suggesting this because I've got a particular view on smoking. When I started my research on smoking 15 years ago I was really interested to know what effects this very large and detailed suite of legislation would have on people, on the people it was directed at smokers themselves. I wasn't interested in getting those people to stop smoking and I wasn't interested in sticking up for their rights to smoke. Another way of saying that is that I'm loathed by everybody in this space. I get a lot of hate mail, I get banned from journals, I get confronted in personal ways at conferences but that to me is data and it's data that demonstrates just how polarized the field of tobacco research is and how that polarization has shaped the research that now occurs within its parameters. So I want to start off by saying that I don't work within those parameters. Now that doesn't mean that I'm a detached observer with privileged access to this space or to the truth of it but it does mean that I've stepped outside the war between public health and tobacco companies to instead study the conditions under which that war is conducted and the smoker around who that battle occurs. So in this, I differ from the vast majority of anthropologists looking at smoking and it is in fact from within their ranks that the bulk of my hate mail journal bannings and confronts confrontations issue. None of the anthropologists here today of course are all accepted and that's because the vast majority of anthropological work on smoking cannot be described as tobacco research at all. Instead, it's better described as tobacco control research. Now that research is conducted entirely within a public health paradigm that aims to bring about smoking cessation. Now don't get me wrong, stopping smoking is a good thing, right? I'm not arguing that we should stop doing that and we should do research on smoking cessation but it does become problematic I think when the intention to stop people from smoking comes to constitute the paradigmatic tone of the entire field to the extent that no other inquiry can be made in that field. There's no doubt that there's a very manifest feeling circulating among anthropologists of smoking that you're either with us or you're against us. That is with us in ridding the world of the tobacco scourge or against us on the side or even the payroll of big tobacco which is something I'm regularly accused of. But why did this happen? How did this situation come to pass? There's a few reasons for this that are really quite interesting to consider. So first of all, a good deal of the anthropological refusal to deal with smoking outside of a public health aligned commitment to reducing the practice has to do with fears over how any research which produces findings critical of public health aims might be pressed into the service of a tobacco, of a pro-tobacco interest. So it's become impossible nearly now to write anything about say smoking pleasure. That's a really difficult thing to write or what smoking might accomplish for people without writing also about how those things might be counted or replaced with something else. And that's just in case the tobacco industry uses academic authority to endorse a libertarian agenda supporting free choice and the pursuit of pleasure which they are known to do. I know from bitter experience that that's just that's not a fear that's just rehearsed. It's in fact made manifest in correspondence directed for example to me demanding for retractions of articles I've written about smoking pleasure. Demands to journal editors at the review stage that article will be pulled since I'm in the pay of big tobacco and even death threats. So thankfully those death threats though invariably issue from the members of a foaming at the mouth anti-tobacco organisation that will for this purpose remain nameless. It's really good that they're not very good at issuing these death threats. And this is because as far as I can make out that they're not very good at spelling. So nearly everyone that I've got from them has a spelling error. So quite against the advice of a new security my response has been to correct the spelling of the death threats and then send them back to where they've come from. I haven't got one for a while because the last one was diabolical. Okay so that's the first reason we don't want to do research that gets drawn into the interests of of pro-tobacco. So the second one has to do with the way that anthropology makes itself relevant and worthy in the world. Now certainly pursuing laudable agendas is attractive and helping to do something good like rid the world of the tobacco scourge not only makes anthropological pursuits worthy it also makes them relevant and understandable to the public to which we're increasingly asked to appeal. I know that as well because as a first-year teacher of anthropology I often get people ring up parents who say okay so Tina is taking anthropology this semester I don't know what that is but can you tell me what kind of job she might get from it? Right so people want to know what the relevance of anthropology is because they often come to us without having heard of it before. So this is that reason has to do with also the fact that funding tends to flow to research projects that do some good in the world and have some purchase in that way. So it's good to do something that the public appreciates, understands. The third reason has got to do with how anthropology tries to demystify people who appear to outsiders to do inexplicable and sometimes quite weird things. Now in many respects it is very weird to cut up some leaves which have been dried out and put them in a bit of paper and smoke them that's weird isn't it? That's a bit weird especially if doing that might hurt you or might even kill you that's even weirder. Now if you were the Australian government you would think that people do this because the biotechnology of cigarettes is good at appealing to human bodies and because people do not know that smoking is bad for them and if they do know that then they don't know in enough depth that it's bad for them. That's a current government position that people are ignorant of all of the effects that tobacco smoking can have on the body and they're also a little bit inclined to take it because tobacco reacts with the human body so well. So you would also think if you were the government that this can be disrupted to some extent by pharmacological inputs like nicotine replacement patches but primarily by public education campaigns. So in this view the smoker has fallen into a dangerous relationship with tobacco but she is also a rational agent who when given the right information can make a rational choice to quit right so when she gets enough information or the right kind of information about how dangerous it actually is she'll stop. Now there's no doubt that the presentation of pretty scary health information has worked right there's not very much doubt about that. So today we're sitting in Canberra site of one of the lowest smoking rates in the country and indeed in the western world 20 years ago the number was about 20-22% right so it's pretty high and now it's under half that figure right so it's about nine so that's pretty low on the on the poor side of that obesity has gone up I'm wanting to wonder if that's there's a link but uh yeah maybe not so we've got a pretty low rate right and it's worth comparing these as well so nationally in the early 90s it was around 30% and just after World War II it was about 75% right so you got all these really interesting drops and they're pretty easy to peg against the public health information campaigns that have come out so those campaigns that did the most of the work as everyone will know were based on something called health facticity right so health facticity is the presentation of unassailable medical facts and they're presented to Trump the lived experience of smoking a cigarette that might be quite pleasurable it might be quite nice but you can compare it with the the facts of what's going on inside the body this might stop you from thinking that those nice effects of having a cigarette are not worth it right so these um it used to be the case that on your packet of cigarettes there was some texts that said smoking cause lung cancer or one of the other smoking related illnesses but now we know we've got these these are these are the images that people would be familiar with right so they're fairly graphic and when they came out they really caused a splash people were you know shocked by these images which is of course the effect they're meant to have but you might not know that medical doctors were engaged to educate the advertising firm that made these images that was hired by the government about the effects of smoking on the interior of the body so it's a range of effects and these are the ones that are plucked out as being kind of the most terrifying ones that you might experience right so you've probably all got your favorites one of my favorites is I um this second one um I've got lots of informants in my research who are blue-eyed smokers and they won't buy that packet right because it looks back at them and it makes them feel a bit cheap so they don't buy it um but other people have got other favorites and some of these are worse than others so this third one you might know that's Brian um so Brian died of lung cancer very quickly after he was diagnosed and Brian has his own Facebook page his own website and he's dead but he's got his own things and Brian came up a lot during my research and one of the things that came up the most was that people thought Brian was a bit of a wuss right smokers thought Brian was a bit of a wuss because he had died so quickly and he couldn't handle fags so um he's an he's an interesting kind of character the other thing that's often said about Brian is that he looked better and a bit more like Michael Stipe after he had cancer and a bit worse beforehand where he had a mullet so you know it's an interesting array of packs and what I'm trying to tell you is that responses to these vary right so they don't necessarily have the health effects you think that they have when they're presented and I'm going to talk about that a bit more later so anyway medical doctors were engaged to educate the advertising firm high by the government to produce those images and the images were of course designed to portray what really happens when a person smokes and to disrupt how smoking might feel with the grim reality of the practice now that's a hard thing to do because a lot of the effects of smoking happen inside the body and they're not seeable to you especially in the course of having a cigarette and at least that was the thinking in the late 90s that was how we thought about cigarettes in the late 90s that you couldn't see these things and and you had to make them be seen to be believed so nothing of course is more authoritative than that visual mode of health facticity when those images are medical okay so despite these indisputable successes of this campaign in particular anthropologists have nevertheless been roundly critical of the rational agent who can see those things and then make a choice to stop their argument has been that agents are not automatons who will simply respond as predicted to information and actions designed to get them to quit agents they said instead best understood as inextricably intertwined in their social worlds and these must be properly understood in order for cessation campaigns to be successful now that's pretty important and particularly important because there's a clear social gradient in smoking Australia is on the numbers of predominantly white middle-class countries so there are more white middle-class smokers than anybody else on the numbers that percentage wise the picture is clear in Australia and across the western world that smoking is disproportionately prominent in the lower socioeconomic registers right it's really clear as well that some populations smoke more than others so here we're talking about Aboriginal populations especially living in rural and remote settings migrant communities and and proverished people of other other kind of backgrounds so public health campaigns had to date been made by white middle-class people for white middle-class people and anthropologists were a bit upset by that situation and they thought that campaigns must be made for culturally and specifically socioeconomically specific groups on potentially quite different grounds than these so you might not make an appeal on health facticity grounds you might make an appeal on some other grounds that were more appropriate to the people that you wanted to reach and the view was formed and it's been formed by a number of different people independently but it's this one for Aboriginal people smoking suspends and implicates them in webs of cultural meaning and social exchange so that's produced all the time as a particular way of thinking about Aboriginal relations with smoke and with cigarettes so it follows from that and this is the next thing that anthropologists have been active in saying it makes rational sense for Aboriginal people to have a smoke if their goal is to be socially and materially entailed in their community so they're saying it makes sense for people to smoke right it's rational if you want to get them to stop you have to show not how cigarettes will impact their insides like that you've got to show them instead how cigarettes destroy the social networks that they hold so dear right so that's the thinking and you might know that that resulted in oh how come this is not working Evans I need you quick can you do that because it's really important relying on the next picture quite heavily okay so you might know it culminated in this campaign now that that woman is called by the government in the campaign Indigenous woman that's her name right so that's Indigenous woman and she is part of the Break the Chain campaign which was done in the early 2000s so I don't know if you've ever seen it does anyone remember this campaign it's a really interesting set of text that goes with it and I'm reading here from the government website Indigenous woman I watched Pop die lung cancer from smoking mum had a heart attack from her smoking then we see a picture of her family and her voice grows softer with concern for their health Indigenous woman my sis and uncle Barry have trouble breathing she looks sadly over her sick neighbour's house Indigenous woman Rosie next door had a stroke and the doctor said it was from smokes and I was smoking for years too but I quit we see her own children playing happily in contrast to the illness and worry that she is experiencing this is this is all off the website right this is what the government text is so Indigenous woman because I don't want our kids growing up thinking disease and dying like that is normal she looks direct to a camera strong and determined to change her smoking habits for the good of her community Indigenous woman if I can do it I reckon we all can and she's doing it in this kind of voice that's relatable right and it's a particularly chosen voice right to make it relatable now the ad ends there and then people are advised that they should call the quick line if they want help right which has a specific dedicated Indigenous section that you can access now that's a really interesting ad I happened to be watching it one day with an Indigenous friend who said Jesus that woman is so dangerous that even living next door to her means that you could die right so he thought she was a problem and she was if you were near her then you would you know suffer in some way now he was joking right he was taking the piss and and making that a funny kind of remark but it was an interesting thing to say because clearly he recognised that sociality was at the core of this but he was talking about the wrong sort okay so what's happening here is that anthropological work which informed this ad and others like it translates inexplicable behaviour like continuing to smoke even though it might kill you and even though it's expensive deep ethnographic work reveals why people are actually doing that it's because smoking is the key to sociality and once you know that and makes sense and they're rational the agents become rational so it becomes explicable we know why they're doing it and then we can make a campaign to help them to stop it. Now that goes right back to Malinovskian revelations based on ethnographic work that revealed for example Trobrian islanders to not be primitive but to be civilised persons right or like civilised persons in the sense that their behaviour made sense their rituals made sense and you shouldn't compare them on unequal grounds so it's a really long-standing notion in our disciplinary kind of context so that understanding of context is very important and it has meant that we can't make distinctions ever since that time on the differences between people unless we understand their context and that tends to level things right but that and that's an advantageous position but it's got some drawbacks. So in 2003 the anthropologist Bruce Katfra urged anthropologists to think carefully about those drawbacks all right he thought that the consequences of classical anthropological translations came in the form of closing down alternative methods and modes of inquiry that might provide us with different insights into those social worlds than we than we had. Nigel Rappor also has contributed to that discussion and has made a much more recent urging in the development of his concept of distortion a form of complex connectedness that escapes the bounds of relationality of structuring and systematics as is currently construed in much social science. The internal consistency that anthropologists often rely on to explain social worlds could fall apart he thought. Katfra's well-known complaint is that anthropologists invariably try to explain things like magic witchcraft and sorcery as a mechanism for releasing social tension and explaining misfortune or else a psychological expression of desire when one has no control over the world. But what if the operations of magic and witchcraft and sorcery worked instead to offer people new understandings of their worlds and he thought they might do that by forcing things together that are normally kept apart. And I wondered that of Michelle a girl I encountered in Adelaide in the early 2000s when she was just 16 and eight months pregnant and a heavy smoker. Brazenly Michelle was smoking in the street and that of course led me to ask her for an interview because how could you pass that up if we're interested in smoking and there's this woman you know about to pop who happens by. So of course I rushed her and asked her for an interview. Now she told me that she'd learned from the new warning labels that she'd seen on her friend's packet of Winnie Blues that smoking could reduce the birth weight of your baby. So she had taken it up. That's because and I'm quoting her here the thing I'm most afraid of in the world is having a big baby and it ripping me in from end. Right so that's pretty scary she was a slight woman some people in the back are crying that's okay back don't worry. And she wanted to make sure it got smaller right so I think it's this one or one like it right so on the bottom there you can see problems during the birth of your baby having a smaller brain and body so that's that's something she wanted to do so she wanted to solve this problem. Now this is tempting right to analyze and I did analyze it originally this way that we're looking at someone who was trying to rest control over the world this small scared person desperately responding to an increased loss of control over the world with magic packets right just like cap for his subjects made what control they called over their social worlds we might say that Michelle was acting entirely rationally she was smoking to make a small baby so as not to rip end to end during childbirth. That's a that's a quite interesting idea and it's true that Michelle was buying these packets in particular as though they were particularly good at doing this work of reducing the baby's size she would reject packets that didn't have that label on them as though they were infused with some magical baby shrinking force of their own right so that's a that's an interesting kind of strategy but there are other explanations on offer I think. Michelle's use of public health messaging effectively fused two very different registers of meaning and reasoning together the world of public health and its authoritative insights into what smoking does to unborn babies and Michelle's own smoking now those two things were never ever meant to come into contact with one another in such a way that a public health warning could justify smoking that is never how they are intended to be used and it provoked horror among public health officials when they found out about this particular practice. In what world can an anti-smoking warning validate smoking how can this happen but of course in Michelle's world those things did and effectively made a new world for Michelle in which she started to try to influence that baby right under her own hand and she wanted to see how it would respond to her when she tried to influence it she was deeply interested in whether the baby that she could not yet see would do what she wanted it to do or whether to quote her again it would be like its bloody father and be huge and stubborn strangely the headline smoking gives pregnant mother's insight into who their babies are wasn't the headline that the Sunday Telegraph ran with when it came across this part of my research instead it went with exclusive teen mum smoke in bid to deliver tiny babies and I was inundated with media attention for the month the point is that only the latter headline is permissible in the world of tobacco control research right and that is validated by a long-standing anthropological desire to translate inexplicable worlds of others in rational terms but there are other things we can see besides Michelle's baby when we abandoned the internal consistency that Capra and rapport each complain about and these are things that I think we should all be worried about so to explain what these things are and why we should worry about them I want to go back to where I made a little bit earlier I said that when the ad series including eye and tongue and aorta and brain came out they were specifically designed to get people to think about what smoking really does to the body as opposed to what it feels like to have a cigarette and I remarked that this was tricky because most of the damage smoking wreaks occurs inside the personal body or at least it was thought to in the 1990s when those ads first came out now those ads share in common a focus on the insides of the smokers body in my personal favorite aorta actually this is a better picture of it aorta for instance we witnessed a gloved hand extruding the thick white paste that is built up inside the aorta resultant of smoking until I really like talking about this right it's it's a really lovely image especially when it's moving which I haven't decided to do to you today because it is quite gross and so it just kind of squeezes out like a tube of toothpaste and the the people who made the ad refer to that as breechy gunk just in case you're planning to have I don't know if we have breechy's after this do we yeah okay good so that's good think about that when you're eating in breechy's and so this this is a really nice image and then there's another one dubbed stroke or brain and that features a bloody stroke in progress there there it is there's a close-up of the of the blood from lung uses a viscous brown liquid described in image captioning and a voice over in the television version as rot in progress that's what rot looks like in the this is not a very good picture but in a better one you can see it's black like the the damaged cells lung sacs are actually blackened and that's called rot in progress and the copy for that ad in particular says no wonder smokers feel short of breath that's because their lungs are rotting right you probably remember this now these ads for which were designed for telly aired from 1997 to 2004 and began with the smoker drawing in smoke right in a single breath and then the viewer gets to follow that smoke down inside the body until it is yielded up right as exhalation but it only films the process of inhalation you only get to see what it does inside the body you don't get to see what happens after the smoke is exhaled so the ads are trying to get across the idea that smoking causes damage inside the body of the smoker but since 2004 following scientific findings regarding the status of secondhand smoke the focus of advertising anti-smoking advertising legislation and public health campaigns has dramatically shifted to what the smokers exhaled smoke does to other people right so they're no longer interested in this and you won't see these ads anymore this change is referred to informal policy context as the process of denormalization denormalization is that purpose will change in the interpretation of smoking from a widely practiced and socially acceptable behavior to one which is increasingly typified as destructive dirty and anti-social to give the federal government's exact definition of it so is anyone here a smoker yeah look out i'm talking to you so denormalization is manifest in a multiple of legislative forms that make particularly evident the dirtiness of smoking and you may have experienced some of these things right smoke-free public space legislation for instance constrains smoking to a certain shrinking area of public outdoors the current national tobacco strategy which is a five-year plan that details the government's legislative and public health education agenda for smoking prevalence asserts that more and more areas will become smoke-free and that and i'm quoting them here smoke-free public spaces have become the norm in line with public awareness of the risks of inhaling second-hand smoke and that has dramatically increased so they think the public is more aware and it clearly is now i want you to note well the language used by the government to describe the smoke that issues from the smoker it's called second-hand smoke now they could call it something else but they never do so we have to start off with the idea that three sorts of tobacco smoke are produced in the course of having a fag the first one is mainstream smoke and that's the smoke inhaled into the smokers lungs right so when you're drawing in exhaled mainstream smoke is the smoke that they breathe out from their lungs and then you've got side stream smoke which is the smoke that escapes that route and comes out through the tip of the burning end of the cigarette exhaled mainstream smoke and side stream smoke can both be described as environmental tobacco smoke but they never are in government documents they're always called second-hand smoke and that's on purpose right that's because only the term second-hand smoke captures the repulsive notion that the smoke that is breathed in has been used before right it is second hand okay that's pretty gross so it's a marriage as well we know from watching the ads from a particularly revolting body that's got rotted lungs right so not only is it second hand it's also being used by this particular set of disgusting lungs now no wonder smokers feel short of breath their lungs are rotting proclaims this television voiceover as i told you no wonder or even less of a wonder that during my own study into how Australian smokers have experienced this denormalization that i frequently encountered non smokers passing by smokers who would do things like draw up their collars put their hands over their face or abuse people in the street to protect themselves from this has this ever happened to you yeah i'm very sorry so i've got lots and lots of data on this but my favorite one is when it happened to one informant of mine called Rosie who was having a fag blew out her smoke a man happened by and said hey don't you blow that stinking shit on me i do not want your cancer it's contagious now right so that's the extent to which people might think that smoking or drawing in second hand smoke is dangerous now air interconnects all breathers right what is exhaled by one will be breathing in another by another but this repulsive fact is backgrounded in the course of ordinary respiration you probably weren't thinking before about how that's happening in here but it is right you're doing it now and normally we don't think about that because that would make it awkward wouldn't it like a lot of things but but a smokers odiferous exhalations make revoltingly clear that we're all interconnected because you can see it in the smell right now the problem with odor is that we don't detect it until it's entered our bodies right so by then it's too late once you once you've if you've smelled it it's too late it's already in you right and then it has breached our bodily boundaries and when things do that those things are often conceived of as dangerous right they're breaches they get through our defenses and they're often dangerous or thought to be dangerous now because it can do that the smell of smoke has proved more than enough to create the embodied sense that second hand smoke is really dangerous to breathe in right because of that property in fact the government has relied entirely on the smell of smoke to make that claim because second hand smoke in the outdoors is not really dangerous to inhale at all it is verifiably dangerous to breathe in in the indoors there's absolutely sound science that says if you're breathing in inside you're in trouble right and this will make you sick this will result in in verifiable and and documentable diseases but it's really different in the outside where the legislation is now all happening so as Australian scientist Stafford Dorb and Franklin and Dorb is Mike Dorb who is a very staunch anti-smoking campaigner right so he this is his science and I'm quoting him in contrast to indoor smoking second hand smoke dissipates really quickly after the smoke ceases out after smoking ceases outdoors the concentration of outdoor second hand smoke is a product of the density and distribution of smokers wind direction and speed and the stability of the atmosphere high outdoor second hand smoke concentrations are generated by high smoke density low wind velocity and stable atmospheric conditions so you have to try really hard right to get enough to cause harm there have to be enough smokers in the space you have to be downwind of them and they've got to stay there and you've got to stay there and you've got to breathe in at the right minute so it's pretty hard to do right the government hasn't needed that science anyway right it isn't there and they haven't needed it but it has fundamentally altered how people make claims on the air which seems like a shared resource shared equally but might actually be differentially accessed and understood we know this of course from the fact that those of us who have the least social and economic leverage live in the most polluted places because you've got to right in the context of smoking differential claims on the air impact the most intimate of relations with the air itself it impacts how people do their breathing I realize this is like interviewed Natalia a 47 year old office worker in Canberra as I listen back to my recording of our interview to write it up I record how when I realized how when she drew in on a cigarette Natalia's smoke emerged around her words and she said things like it's hard she said I feel it shameful because and then she stopped it was weird it was a weird kind of cessation of the recording it sounded like she'd stopped talking and breathing out and she had in fact ceased exhaling and that's because someone walked past so she held her breath in so she didn't have to exhale into their respiratory right of way right because she knew she'd be abused if she did so this woman who happened past looked briefly across at us it coughed loudly and theatrically pulled her jump her arm gave us the finger and moved on right so no wonder you don't want to exhale into that because you're probably going to get slapped so Natalia had held her breath and her speech until that woman had passed by now that recording prompted me to check others and there were dozens of them that I'd made and they were these punctuations were everywhere right that people had stopped talking while I was talking to them in the street so acute attendance to the waft of the air into the respiratory right of way of non-smokers in the era of smoke free speaks powerfully to the political dimensions of the air itself and who might dominate that that's perhaps best expressed as well in the fact that the air has lots of contaminants in it but it assumed to be pure and unsullied until cigarette smoke gets into it and then it's a problem it's a polluted problem you'll notice probably that our own smoke free campus information asks us to keep the air pure and clean by not smoking as though it were not you know sullied before so those whose breathing is conducted in deference to the rights of the non-smoker and whose rotting emanations are considered the primary pollutant of a previously clean air are increasingly constrained within particular space specifically they're allowed to conduct their filthy breathing sorry only within areas classified as public land now that category to that category of public land belong things like vacant lots footpaths curbsides interstitial nowhere spaces that tend to already gather the marginalised the production of material and I differ as pollution in those shrinking marginal spaces in the form of cigarette litter and odor confirms the thesis of the smokers filth right so if they weren't dirty before they are now because look at the mess public land stands in contrast with public space where civic activity is intended to be carried out and in which the public body forms up smoke free public space legislation seems on the face of it to be democratic in the sense that it seeks to secure the quality and integrity of the air for all breathers but it's profoundly changed how and which already marginalised people can participate in the public where and how they can breathe as brant reminds us this shares much with prior attempts to segregate one group of people considered polluting and dangerous from a dominant group erroneously considered to be at risk from their presence and of course he's controversially talking about the Jim Crow era in the American south when he says that in short we're mucking about with who can and cannot be the public under legislation with quite another name now you might say that even if the odor of cigarette smoke is not dangerous when encountered in the outdoors it's still offensive right still invasive and it shouldn't be allowed in the air for that reason but if you do think that consider the expansion of scent free public spaces that ban strong owner lest they cause offense strong perfume body odor and distinctive food odours are already banned in a number of public spaces including conference venues public transport vehicles and so on those odours too tend to be borne by the socially and economically marginal and by the non-white other cheap musky perfumes unwashed bodies and alien food smells belong to others not to the white middle classes with its increasing deodorisation and distinctive middle class smell is beginning to characterize public space and it doesn't smell like anything this is perhaps confirmed by the fact that by far the biggest selling room deodoriser in Australia and America is not a scented spray but instead a product that eliminates odours before you get to smell them that's a sensitive middle class nose right there middle classes maybe have no smell you might then say to me oh well smokers can in fact circulate in public space it's only when they have a lit cigarette in their hands that they're a problem and that they experience any censure at all but they don't right thanks to the emergence of something called third hand smoke now according to the Mayo Clinic which gives the kind of most basic definition third hand smoke is and I'm quoting them here residual nicotine and other chemicals left on a variety of indoor surfaces by tobacco smoke this residue is thought to react with common indoor pollutants to create a toxic mix studies show that third hand smoke clings to hair skin clothes furniture drapes walls beddings hair skin all this stuff right and long after smoking has stopped and you can't get rid of it you can't expunge it right so no one's sitting next to this guy right maybe because he's so you see that and he's now a considered to be a contaminant now that's that's a really interesting and horrible thing to tell you about right and you maybe you didn't know it before but it is it's starting to get real purchased in public space so in california for example it's very common to go into a hotel and see a plaque in the lobby that says at one time we permitted smoking in this hotel we've replaced the curtains we replaced the carpets we've washed it out but it's still dangerous right because it's got this third hand smoke circulating around so you can tell from that that this the the idea is that it lasts forever because we don't know how long it actually lasts for and that is extremely dangerous right extremely dangerous almost as dangerous as smoking itself. Now there have been some studies about how long third hand smoke might remain after smoking has stopped and the one that I'm thinking of is conducted by George Matt who's a third hand smoke researcher in the US and he concluded that even being after being vacant for two months a house being vacant for two months being prepared for new residents with new carpeting and paint third hand smoke residue is still detectable so they've moved out the smoking residents painted it did all this stuff and it was still detectable but detectability is different from danger right so just because you know it's there doesn't mean that we can prove that it causes a danger and that's really interesting because that again similar with second hand smoke has not stopped claims being made for its danger and for those being rehearsed and in some cases carried out in the social world. So this is particularly problematic because infants and children are considered particularly susceptible to this contamination because they like to crawl around on the ground and be in contact with the carpet and clothes and all of that sort of stuff. So there has been a kind of moral panic around this and I have accessed this by looking at parenting websites. I don't know if any of you have ever been on one of these but they're very terrifying. So one near mother posted to the Australian what to expect site expressed great trepidation about telling her smoking father-in-law about the conditions under which he would be permitted to touch her newborn daughter right. What should she do? She asked the post this post sums up the advice. Why on earth wouldn't you say something to him? Don't worry about his feelings if some dirty smoker stuck their finger in my baby's mouth or in fact even touched it their life would not be worth living. Isn't standing up for your health and the well-being of your baby more important than upsetting his stupid father-in-law do not let him touch her right. So this is followed up with advice from doctors on the site who advised that if there's a smoking in the family and you've had a baby then that smoker should glove up wear a mask and a surgical gown and and they if they don't have those things they should wash their mouth out wash them sit have shower change their clothes right and preferably does not smoke or not come over okay. So father-in-law's life I think may well not be worth living under those conditions if in fact near mother did not let him touch the baby. The consequences would be pretty severe because touch is the very sensory foundation upon which the institution of family is constructed and maintained right. So like other institutions family is premised on and defined by fleshing into relations and it's those repetitive relations between specific body parts of one body to another that create and maintain the social body of the family and other ones like the military and factory floors in late capitalism. As Collins puts it the most repetitive behaviors that make up the family structure are the facts that somewhat heteronormatively the same men and women sleeping the same beds the same children are kissed and spanked and fed they're touched and they touch back right so that's family. So those touches conform to corporeal codes that are immediately understood as the space and time of body has to occupy in the family but it's not just within families that we might see these touches codified and validated we might see them in other areas as well. However unsubstantiated claims for the danger of third hand smoke shape relations of touch outside the family with just as significant implications. The executive director of action on health and smoking conveniently acronymised to ash has already foreshadowed the legal possibility that people with a family history of cancer may be entitled to smoke free places restaurants workplaces and any other places that they frequent that entitlement would require smoke free staff and by that I mean not just people who have quit smoking but people who have never smoked because we don't know how long this contaminant lasts. That's an interesting idea because this means that smoke does something very unsmoked like it stays put and it stays right whereas if it's in the combustible smoky form then it goes away and it drips third hand smoke stays perhaps forever so anyone employed in a job like that would violate the conditions that people are entitled to to have a smoke free workplace or a smoke free restaurant or any other kind of place in public. This has already been tested as tobacco.org reported in June 2009 a US federal court forcing university to protect a woman and her unborn child whose health was threatened by third hand smoke residue on the clothing of an office mate. One doctor providing a statement to the court submitted that the woman's sensitivity was to the tobacco smoke residue on the person of not just his clothing but on the person so maybe his hair maybe skin and therefore to protect the woman's health this man should not be allowed to share an office space with her and he was summarily dismissed right and the case was upheld. So that decision indicates that third hand smoke can reach out to touch others even the unborn via off gas moving out from the smoker and now there are campaigns and all sorts of things circulating in public space about the dangers of these people so I've seen from the ash website for example smokers breath can be harmful to health don't sit next to them on the bus protect your family don't become complacent right most most non smokers are exposed as they circulate among us smokers have become as George Matt that researcher I mentioned before has dubbed them mobile tobacco contamination packages right I don't know how this makes you feel but probably bad so this codification may in and through touch is that smokers are quite literally not to be touched and you shouldn't touch them. Now this emergent coding for touch is highly consequential for our definitions of the public I've already across the western world as I've said smokers are increasingly located on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and they've been prevented from practicing smoking in public space by legislative force on what I've suggested to you are the false bases of articulated danger of second and third hand smoke inhalation. Resultantly those already marginalised bear the additional burden of relegation to public land where you can still smoke but the purported danger of third hand smoke is not to be contained by means of means of spatial segregation right it is instead to be controlled by excluding the person to whom residue sticks and from whom off gas emits for who knows how long lest they endanger us all they may well become untouchables. Now as I said at the beginning of this tour which I'm now going to bring to a close it's really hard to write about those untouchables without appearing to undermine laudable cessation work but I think we've got to lest we let the public become an even narrower definition than it already is for it has never belonged to us all. To me at least we must continue to examine the conditions under which the public is constructive and who is allowed in and out of it for we may all be imperiled by the narrowing of those parameters this doesn't mean that I'm advocating you to go out and stick up for the rights of smokers right but it probably means we have to think about the consequences of legislation pertaining to them. Thanks. We have a few minutes for questions um up the back just a minute. And thank you so much for one of us it's going to be interesting um at the start of your talk you mentioned that this topic I guess we're going to be referring to it as self-destructive behaviour right and sorry as self-destructive behaviour at humans. Is that? Yes well it's not yet something is essentially we're doing something that's considered you know it's considered destructive. So I wonder whether you know with this sort of research we're entering you know another area of self-discipline. Is there a quality of vindictive or you know self-destructive behaviour? I wonder whether your research has shed some sort of right on the difference between what's this phenomenon of social smoking and you know indicative of what you call individual smoke. Yeah yeah yeah um part of that question I think comes back to the notion of addiction itself right so um smoking fits really uncomfortably in frames of addiction it's it doesn't come from the same place um and the best example of that I suppose is if you're a faggot you don't become weird and strange when you're smoking so you can still go to work you can still do your stuff it's only when you quit that you become intolerable and that you look like the rest of the addicts right so there is a distinction between those studies which look at the physical dependence of smoking and that they've never had purchase in anthropology but but the the real purchase in anthropology as I've tried to say is that you've got to understand the social right and even when a person is alone that still comes to into play so if you are experiencing loneliness then cigarettes are not nicotine delivery devices they're friends right and they become your your social familiars and and you you can't do without them because then you would be undone entirely from the social world so this it's that kind of um relationship that's been examined the most fully rather than the physical side yeah um I just wanted to ask you to develop a bit further I mean you're talking about a whole lot of practicity which in the first programs were kind of addictive exposing the invisible interior damage yeah and then you sort of contrasted that with the indigenous woman generic um I've seen a number of those ads I thought they were still showing but are they still trot them out from time to time right but they're not they're not the new stuff yeah but I suppose I'm kind of interested in the kind of relational field that's constructed for indigenous Australians but clearly is that idea of you know if you're prejudicing sociality if you're prejudicing you know relations then that's what you're sort of aiming for with this kind of I mean there's obviously when you're discussing you know second-hand smoke third-hand smoke I mean there's also an appeal to the idea of you know sticky family relations yeah but in general it's much more of a kind of a notion of a more isolated individual in relationship to a kind of anonymous public space and just sort of flowing on from that I suppose I'm interested in I mean you talked about air and of course we think about air you know often not just in relationship to smoking but pollution global warming etc so how far do you think there might be a kind of bit of a leakage of metaphors between all of the stuff about sort of you know air pollution and smoking and on the other hand you know this idea of a kind of you know a long-term sort of lingering of the residue of smoke I mean in some ways also influenced by you know metaphors and facts around sort of radioactivity and I think just my final sort of piece on that question was why things are so different in France yeah why can't we be like France I've often asked myself that ask a character that you're positing in inverse places pertaining in France as well no um France is not part of the four-country alliance right which is us Canada US UK um that's a growing alliance and there are again it's always constituted on this oh there's a whole set of social relations that are very different there and you can't do this you can't impose this kind of thing and you know it's all about you know entailment with food and wine and all these kinds of other things but I really like your question about metaphors and I think it's really important to ask in relationship to the air right because the air has been um there's a couple things to say about it I mean the first thing I think is that we don't normally think about the air as having history it's takes away our pollution from space and from time and we don't see it and that's why air has become so important in thinking about global warming and pollution because suddenly it does have a history and you can see it so smog stays with us and that's a worry it's a similar kind of situation with smoke because smoke wafts away right and you can't see it anymore but once you get to the idea that it doesn't and it sticks on you and that it remains you dispense with that whole whole idea that smoke goes away and won't bother anyone the air can't take care of it anymore can't take it away neither in fact can water and so all of the things that we used to rely on to cleanse the air cannot be relied upon anymore I also like that metaphor because the air itself is not the social backdrop against which this occurs it is thoroughly entailed in all of those practices I talked about and it's used very effectively by the state to get these powerful you know legislations into the very tin tacks of or the micros of people's you know bodily lives so breathing you know the legislation works because it changes breathing all right or it changes how you breathe with others or it changes I mean smoke's a very hard thing to control because it does move on the air so I don't know if people remember in the room when in bars we'd have smoking sections and non-smoking sections and the smoke would just go nuts and just go like this across right so but so it was a nonsensical kind of thing but now we don't have that anymore but we still have this idea that if you're on a beach and someone's smoking over there then it might come to you over here and this might still present a danger so I think the air is actually really important and the idea of an assailant air that comes in attacks and does the work of the state but also the work of the public in its airy kind of travels it also reminds me of theories of miasma you know that this idea of rot you know and it being born on the wind and that if you happen to be in the way you would you would be beset by this assailant air that is miasmatically you know contaminated so it's a really they're all really old ideas I suppose is my point so none of what I'm saying is new it's all to me a revisitation of things which have gone before yeah so I think thank you for your question I think that's great in your book you would mean to be in a smoker at certain times shame, shame, it's not true and I mean just a stupid process or a role and everything you say about a third-hand smoker and you don't need to let your students say you want to go out and just wondering like you know as as I have okay and I should be with you thanks for that event with anthropologists, you have to be engaged anthropologists to have a personal stance on this that you were clearly did not let off in your lecture board Because that's because I want to keep my job right because they just gave it to me I don't want them to take it away. It's extra money and everything. Anyway, no It's helped me right smoking to from time to time So I I have never called myself a non-smoker and I don't frequently call myself a smoker either for obvious reasons So I don't want to be in either of those camps because I'm it doesn't matter what disclaimers I make about that I'll always be situated if I were one of the other in in those political terms I talked about but Methodologically it has helped me know and to be a faggot and come up to people right in the street And say can I ask you about your smoking whereas if I've come up without one people don't want to talk to me They think of them the government they they run away, right? They don't want to talk to me and they they or they think I'm gonna abuse them for smoking So it's been methodologically good for me to go to people and I am planning on Seeking you know recompense from my winning blues from the university at some point Talked about that later So and maybe retrospectively suing it for giving me cancer, but no Horses saying no about that But right now I'm not a smoker Because and that's because I was I had a recent diagnosis of Threat cancer which didn't turn out to be true, but it really scared me this works this stuff, right? It's really quite funny But yeah, the answer to that is that I I don't have an ethical position per se But I do have a practical position that I've got to be very carefully Attendant to during the management of my fuel work. I hope I don't become a third-hand contaminant lecturer But although it would get me out of teaching So yeah There's an illustration and how rules are created through violent means, right? They're pretty violent. Yeah And part of what you seem to be saying is that there's a there's a real component of harm But then it's all the other stuff that kind of adds on to it And I wonder if you really want to have that. I mean I can see how that's useful to sort of See you going through the rhetorical divide around But but how do you actually criteria in a heart Around how violence Well, I don't think violence is unusual though I don't think it's in any way constrained with this field and I think actually that touch itself even Within a family is always a potential for violence and on the unfurling of violence So I think that's what works because it is so ordinary and so normalized that you can hitch these things to it very very easily This is a remark. I also made in respect of how the public has never been You know for everyone and there are equally violent means which weed out, right? Those those people who aren't meant to be in that participatory public and that is very obvious in white middle class Countries. So we see this in all sorts of ways. I was recently in Liverpool where it's pretty That violence is having trouble being enacted in the same way that it's being enacted here I don't know if you've been to Liverpool, but you can't go up to a bunch of people who are smoking and abuse them because you will die all right, so that Parallel research which has been carried out in Liverpool has has a really Different version of violence is much more out there. It's much more open And it's coming from a different source the opposite source from what we would experience here But I I think the subtlety of violence actually has taken me a long way here So when I say violence, I don't just mean these particular acts we can call Particularly violent. I think it's a property of social life And then it's been very usefully used and utilized in the management and the creation of the public But I think it's an interesting question. So thanks. It's good to think about Frank I think my question is a little bit related to the last one that is I wanted to ask you about What this led you to by way of reflections on research on a topic where there is obviously an increasing You know, but scientific understanding of the actual objective harm of a particular practice which is But in the in the face of that Sort of better understanding what you and your collaborators might have Come to think about how to prevent tobacco research from immediately falling into the category of tobacco control research What you have thought about Trying to keep those two things We've been very unsuccessful in that mission if that was was our mission. We we screwed it up royally. It's not happening It's been impossible for us to Create a space and and there are really only four or five of us who do this sort of work And we're all roundly attacked all of the time for doing it. So all of us have Made those observations relevant to other areas So obviously one of the observations that I've made relevant to another area is in my own discipline, right? So what are the consequences for not looking at laudable? Practices I think they're that Particular insight is very useful because we've seen it before and we keep repeating it in anthropology We did it with illicit drugs research, right? We keep doing it in certain kinds of ways, which is of course why I'm interested in alcohol now So I haven't attempted to make that sternly about tobacco Although it is very interesting to think about it in the space of vaping Right, which is having very different effects in the countries where that's Been introduced of course vaping in Australia is treated exactly the same way cigarettes. You can't do it end of story So I think there's there's a real Question there about what relevance this has had because I've been doing it for for 15 16 years now So clearly there are lots of places where this has purchased Um, I suppose one of the ones that probably Fletch was talking to me about the other day was what do you do with hate mail? Right, we should universities let researchers have hate mail So that I don't know Fletch should they we don't we haven't had this conversation yet But it also raises questions about the kind of data that you get From whom how universities manage that how they manage things like academic freedom. You're allowed to do this This is my calibrated huge Jackie who who deals with that idea so there's there's all sorts of productive Notions about it that don't rely on Well, we're now seeing tobacco validly being regarded as a dangerous thing. So The questions are quite other. I think it's the answer For such an interesting that it seemed that the smoker are dangerous But the second smoke the second hand smoker carry the poison, but they are not dangerous anymore. They can touch the beam made of wrong second Um It's interesting. I talk about injustice people Because I do know that in the minority going in central asia and especially in my area even the idea of science Education of public city and the hills hygiene all of these get into That area there's a huge strong resistance Because a lot of reason may just about talking about the hype that too And also there's a kind of skill of their home culture tradition That have a strong resistance against this kind of modern It seems that there are two kind of channels going along together. They don't really interact here. It's a very kind of plain space where everything political each other very influential and viable But in some areas like in saturation My areas might not Yeah, that's well, that's a big challenge, right? Um for public health researchers next so the first um the first kind of work I suppose was to get a hold of smoking in western countries and then it's it's increasing that so Matthew Corman And uh, peter benzin who I call peter benzin and hedges and he really hates it, right? Are the primary researchers in this space and they're encountering just as kinds of things that you you talk about But they're both anthropologists and so This does not shock them at all It fits right into that whole idea that well You've really got to understand social circumstances under which this happens the historical circumstances and then you create very particular Strategies and so that that's what it looks like the world over and you have more countries partnering up To this world tobacco free kind of Of project so there's lots of money in it as well that they get funded Amazing amounts, right to do this kind of research. Whereas I get very little No one no one wants to give me much money to do to do that Okay, we um, we don't have time for any more questions But we continue talking to Simone talking to each other upstairs where we have some catering Just as a public health announcement. There will probably be soft cheese. I'd go for the hard cheese Also, I smoked 15 years ago. I may be toxic But thank you very much Simone. Thank you all for coming. Thank you