Smoking causes creative responses: on state antismoking policy and resilient habits

Abstract

This article is framed by the complexities associated with exploring a morally positioned and emotive practice - the practice of smoking cigarettes. Smoking is bound up with a multiply of issues and positions, including (but not limited to) the role of the state in the regulation of bodies and their practices and in the moral positioning of those practices, and the rights of the individual. It is also bound up with particular understandings of bodies and their relations with other bodies. In antismoking advertisements, smoking practice is firmly situated within frames of corporeal boundedness and individuality, and particular emotions and moral positions are drawn upon to locate the smoking body relative to other (non-smoking) bodies, and to the practice of smoking itself. Based on finegrained ethnographic research, and moving away from moral and dualistic positionings of the practice, I take up a phenomenological perspective to explore the profound experiences of sociality, corporeal connection and rupture, and the wide range of emotional experiences that are central to practices of smoking. I also draw attention to the ways in which public policy and action regarding smoking might be understood, acted upon, resisted and altered, in ways that make it meaningful in the lived experiences of smokers. Many of the responses that smokers make to state policy and action are not those intended by policy makers, and demonstrate both the creativity of the responses, and the dangers of assuming too much about how people will behave. Show more