‘Everyone’s Annoyed’: Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others

A growing literature illuminates the limits of claims made on the basis of sensory perception in scientized, rationalized, and bureaucratic contexts. How to understand exceptions to the rule – cases where claims based on sensory experience are taken at face value, even without corroborating evidence? Here, I focus on one such exception, in which citizen complaints about the smell of a small shantytown functioned successfully as both demands and justifications despite a lack of the kinds of instrumentally and technologically enabled corroboration that the literature would suggest are necessary to strengthen such claims. I show how complaints slotted neatly into a specific cultural structure, an olfactory cosmology in which ‘bad air’ that endangers health can be identified by smell and requires ongoing management and amelioration, and where adherence to hygienic norms is required for full moral citizenship. The case suggests ways that the apparent weaknesses of olfactory claims might allow them to be uniquely weaponized in social and political life, and shows how such claims can exploit shared norms, values, and meanings to enroll others in the demand for action.

Socially Constructing Healthy Eating: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Healthy Eating Information and Advice

A variety of materials offering healthy eating advice have been produced in the United Kingdom to encourage people to eat well and avoid diet-related health issues. By applying a Foucauldian discourse analysis, this research aimed to uncover the discourses used in six healthy eating texts (two state-produced and four commercial texts), how people positioned themselves in relation to these discourses, and the power relations between institutions and the U.K. public. Ten discourses including scientific, thermodynamics, natural, family/caring, emotional, medical, and moral discourses were uncovered and offered up subject positions in relation to moral citizenship and personal responsibility. Through the use of biopower, foods appeared to be categorized as “good” or “bad” foods in which bad foods were considered to be risky to health due to their nutritional composition. Most texts assumed people have the agency to follow the advice provided and failed to consider the readers’ personal contexts.

Beyond ‘Propaganda’: Images and the moral citizen in late-socialist Vietnam

This article forges connections between two vibrant areas of current research within and beyond Asian studies: visual anthropology and the anthropology of morality and ethics. Its focus is on achieving moral citizenship as represented in Vietnam's visually spectacular capital, Hanoi, and on images as active and morally compelling, not mere reflections of the challenges of late-socialist marketization. The case of Vietnam compares intriguingly with other contexts where visuality has been fruitfully explored, including India and post-socialist Eurasia. The question asked is how images, both personal and official, can work either to provide or deny the viewer a quality of moral agency which they feel to be their due. The answer is found in the intertwining of silence and speech in relation to images. This includes what is said and unsaid in regard to public iconography, including memorial statuary and state message posters. It is proposed that the visuality of the urban street space is a continuum involving significant interaction with the intimacies of home and family image use. The article also seeks to add to our methodological ideas about treating fieldwork photographs as a basis for interaction with interlocutors, hence as active research tools rather than mere adjuncts to observation and analysis.

“If the People Do Not Raise the Issue, the Officials Will Not Investigate”: Moral Citizenship among China’s Fake-Fighters

Are China’s fake-fighters (打假, dajia) heroic consumer activists or morally dubious profit-seekers? Do they make the marketplace safer for ordinary consumers by using the law to “fight” fake, dangerous and falsely advertised goods, or benefit only themselves through the exploitation of legal loopholes? Since the 1994 Consumer Protection Law introduced a fiscal incentive that made fake-fighting a viable career, its practitioners have struggled to define their work against these stereotypical characterisations. In this empirical article, I show that fake-fighters reject criticisms of their motivations while at the same time avoiding censure by party-state authorities wary of activism couched in terms of rights by framing their work as a practice of moral citizenship. Fake-fighters believe it is their responsibility to highlight potential dangers in the marketplace, disseminate legal knowledge, and, crucially, prompt the government to enforce pre-existing laws to better protect consumers and advance national development.