(Re)making smoking: Of packets and practice

Abstract

Taking as foundational the well-established anthropological idea that material things can be determinative of expectations and practice, the authors advance the notion that packets are constitutive of smoking in the era of smokefree legislation. Adorned with warnings, graphic messaging and particular colouration, they say that packets do not simply respond to the ‘problem’ of smoking; they are actively involved in remaking it anew, in, with and for the smokefree context, in which smoking is purposefully denormalized. Focusing in the main on the graphic images that ‘plain’ packets bear, they track and trace this constitutional force via sensory means, attending particularly to a reworking of the role presently accorded to vision in the Australian government’s public health ‘view’ that assumes a stark separation between the cigarette packet and the respondent smoker.