Human sensing, when taken as a conceptual tool, allows us to acquire wisdom in the sense that we are able to feel, acknowledge, and respond in a variety of ways. Through sensing, sensory interactions and knowledge both condition and configure human interpretation and meaning-making. These forms and processes of sensory interaction, knowledge circulation, and transference have transpired and traversed a vast range of domains analyzed in various disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and beyond. This special issue presents a collection of articles selected from a workshop that earlier took place at the National University of Singapore. By drawing attention to different sites and contexts across Asia, the authors deliberate upon how social actors negotiate and respond to sensory learning, doing, and maneuvering. Through a closer and more nuanced engagement with how sensory knowledge is acquired, deployed, and contested, the papers foreground sense-making scripts and practices across cultures and social groups which may intersect with, contest and/or complement other forms and domains of knowledge-acquisition and knowledge-use. Contributors focus on different aspects of social life that include medical healing practices, permaculture, youth and pedagogy, clay sensibilities and technical knowledge, and marketplace ethnography. They therefore engage critically with a wide-ranging spectrum of discussion and analysis pertaining to the sensory and its multiple forms, engagements, and contestations. By delineating and unpacking varied ecologies of sensory knowledge and the processes of learning, doing, and maneuvering, the papers also develop refreshed theoretical interventions in examining sensory knowledge, practice, and infrastructure as they interrelate extant scholarship.

This thematic section explores how sensory and affective experiences mediate social hierarchies, marginality, and belonging across Asia. The papers bridge affect theory, sensory anthropology, and sociological studies of the senses to examine how smell, sound, touch, and other sensory registers become sites of social differentiation, endurance, and resistance. Introducing the concept of sensory endurance, the collection theorizes how derogatory sensory ascriptions – such as ‘foul’, ‘noisy’, or ‘shabby’ – govern affective experience and sustain power asymmetries, while also enabling marginalized communities to endure and contest oppression. Ethnographic studies from India, Nepal, Singapore, and Taiwan reveal how sensory and emotional practices shape lived experiences of caste, citizenship, labour, and education. Together, the contributions illuminate the sensory and affective dimensions of slow and structural violence, advancing comparative perspectives on stigma, inequality, and the embodied politics of everyday life.

Teaching and learning effectively, inclusively, and critically about the power and politics of race and difference remains a protracted yet important struggle. Race is an emotionally laden and provocative issue facing many societies, and the concomitant privilege and ideology that upholds it are oftentimes surpassed through processes and mechanisms of "invisibling." In this article, I add to the plethora of debates and discussions concerning race as an organizing principle by showing how through the sensory, seemingly one of the most mundane, banal, and quotidian aspects of social life, can be a potent epistemological tool with which to teach how "race" can be reconstructed, negotiated, and maneuvered by social actors in the context of multicultural Singapore. Social formations of "race" undergo new ways of categorization, perpetuation, and judgment with the sensory as an emotive medium of recognition and placement. I foreground some of the pedagogical strategies I have employed that draw on emotions and the senses to instigate meaningful and critical class discussions, and the variegated classroom responses to the teaching of race and multiculturalism in everyday life. More specifically, I show how students as well as their respondents deploy emotions and the sensory in practices of inclusion and exclusion upon racial selves and others. A more creative and inclusive classroom and learning environment is therefore imperative to stimulate discussion, particularly alternative, critical, and meaningful ways of thinking about race. This, I contend, will necessitate a reflexive reconfiguration and maneuvering of power dynamics within the classroom setting, and our experience in teaching undergraduate students through particular kinds of strategies I have used during discussion groups have reaped interesting outcomes, both on the parts of the instructor as a reflexive participant and the students in the classroom.

This volume explores how the city and the sea converse and converge in creating new forms of everyday urbanity in archipelagic and island Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from case studies spanning Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and New Caledonia, the volume rethinks the place of the sea in coastal cities, through a mobility-inspired understanding of urbanity itself. How might conceptualisations of contemporary coastal urbanisms be approached from the sea, in ways that complicate singularly terrestrial, fixed framings of the city? What connections, contradictions, and dissonances can be found between sea change and urban change? While addressing these questions, the authors re-centre more marginal voices of those who dwell and work in islanded metropoles, offering new insights on the futures and contested nature(s) of littoral urban transformation.

Hearing loss is common among the elderly population (See ▶ “Disability”; ▶ “Disability Types”; ▶ “Impairment”). People over 60 years old experience a hearing decline of about 1 dB annually (Walling and Dickson 2012). The common clinical tests for mild and moderate hearing loss use whispered voice, finger rub, and watch tick, and the threshold is often set at less than 25, 30, or 40 dB at 500–4000 Hz. Based on the global estimation by WHO (2014), about one third of adults over age 65 had disabling hearing loss. The prevalence of hearing loss in the United States stands between 20% and 40% in adults aged 50 years or older (Chou et al. 2011). About two thirds of Americans aged 70 or older have hearing loss, out of whom about one fifth use hearing aids (Lin et al. 2013). It is also estimated that one fourth of older Americans over 70 years of age has hearing impairment, with men having higher prevalence than women (Dillon et al. 2010). According to the 2010 US census, the prevalence of hearing disability (“Is this person deaf or does he/she have serious difficulty hearing?”) was 8.9% for the age group of 65–74 and 22.7% for the age group of 75 and older (Erickson et al. 2012).

The senses and their concomitant practices have historically and contemporaneously traversed borders and boundaries and in effect, acquire different meanings. Sensory modalities and ways of knowing become reconfigured as a result of cross-cultural sensory encounters in everyday life. Drawing from colonial and contemporary ethnographic encounters in Singapore, we make a case to extend sociocultural analyses of the character of the sensory—in particular, sound and smell—to consider its agentic potential to permeate and traverse boundaries. We employ the sensory as a lens to capture intimations of connectedness and disconnectedness; and to more broadly unravel alternative and comparative understandings of mobility and movement through time and space.

Beyond Bicentennial, pp. 319-338 (2020) No AccessCHAPTER 16: INTER-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS WITH MALAY FOOD: ETHNICITY, HYBRIDITY, COSMOPOLITANISMNoorman AbdullahNoorman AbdullahNational University of Singapore, Singaporehttps://doi.org/10.1142/9789811212512_0016Cited by:0 PreviousNext AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsRecommend to Library ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Abstract: The following sections are included: Introduction Malay Food at the Crossroads Cosmopolitanism and Extending the Boundaries of "Malay Food" References FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Beyond BicentennialMetrics History PDF download

The field of ghosts and spirits is pregnant with emotional accounts of misunderstandings, altercations, pain, sadness, discomfort, anxiety, and vulnerability. Many scholars reject personal accounts of the supernatural in view of its ostensible failure to meet the standards of scientific validity and credibility. There is, however, much to consider, given that the experiences in ethnographic fieldwork in these settings comprise complex and multifaceted intersections that deal with the vulnerability of researchers and the "others" we are studying ethnographically. This chapter discusses and unpacks the relatively neglected issue of "vulnerability" that ethnographers face in fieldwork, with an emphasis on the study of ghosts and spirits. I present selected ethnographic fieldwork experiences and critical moments based on my study of spirit possession and everyday religiosity among Muslim families in Singapore and Malaysia. Embracing and reflecting on the relational dimensions of vulnerability not as a "problem," which needs to be resolved through recourse to "objective" knowledge but rather through meaningful engagement and reflection through such "critical moments," enables us to revisit and redraw the boundaries of social research and contemporary ethnographic field methods.

Social and behavioral sciences tend to naturalize impartial objectivity and ignore the affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography as epistemological insights. Taking seriously the affective aspects of anthropological research not only acknowledges researchers’ emotional responses to environments, places, situations, and people within “fieldwork,” but also entails an invitation to extend researchers’ affectivities to anthropological training methods, other forms and arenas of educational practices, as well as researchers’ everyday practices and professional interactions as academics.

The researcher’s body and sensory faculties are both experientially involved in interactional field settings. Drawing on their research, the authors sketch out three sensory encounters informed by theoretical and methodological debates pertaining to subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Dealing with issues of race, gender, and heritage, the authors demonstrate how their bodies as researchers go through processes of sensory learning and calibration. Data are collectively generated along with respondents during fieldwork. In the discussion, the authors provide a lens through which corporeal and sensory experiences can be deployed as an important methodological tool in the generation and theorization of data in ethnographic research.

Increasingly, there exists work that shows a strong and intimate entanglement between emotions, memory, food and the senses. Relevant cultural anthropological and sociological literature have very convincingly engaged with the centrality of sensory perceptions and embodied experiences in cultural interpretation (Classen 1993, Howes 1991, 2003, Low 2005, 2007, Sandelowski 2002), which includes the means through which personal, group, and national memories are embedded within foods and foodways (Choo 2004, Law 2001, Sutton 2001). These connections, however, become particularly amplified when they are located in transnational and/or unfamiliar contexts. They highlight, amongst others, the pertinence of the senses and food in remembering emotive experiences of the ‘home’ that social actors have left behind as a result of migration-be this short or long term. The association with ‘home’ also suggests that different (and often intersecting) levels of identity can be reproduced and/or reconfigured when experienced in such new contexts. Food and the attendant sensory registers then readily become quotidian expressions of multiple belongings and embodied connections social actors have with ‘home’. An encoder of experience, memories and histories, these provide media through which ‘stories and histories are told and remembered, places described, identities formed and communities imagined’ (Choo 2004: 206). The embodied experience of preparing, cooking and consuming food-akin to Proust’s (1981) ‘madeleine moment’ in his ‘remembrance of things past’—reconnects and triggers memories of ‘home’, as well as the concomitant smells, sights, sounds, textures and tastes, which are consequently relived and experienced in an unfamiliar present.1

The lived, and oftentimes silenced, experiences of "foreign workers" articulate the negotiation of power relations between "citizen" and "foreigner", and "Us" and "Them". These are translated into discursive practices that, in effect, legitimize and entrench differences — hence, inequalities — that effectively discipline the "foreign worker" as "not one of Us". By taking the example of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore as a case study, I argue in this paper that the workspaces of "foreign construction workers" in Singapore typify that of a "total institution", which correspondingly moulds the worker into a discursive ideal — the "good, docile Other". Such impositions and productions of Otherness, however, face rupture as workers (re)negotiate, (re)work, and (re)inscribe their everyday lives through the employment of what James Scott (1985, 1987) terms "everyday 'resistances'" in rising above that which subjugates them. I will present in this paper primary data elicited and collated from direct participant observation, fieldwork, and in-depth interviews conducted in a construction project in Singapore.