Four milligrams of phenomenology: an anthro-phenomenological exploration of smoking cigarettes

Abstract

[Abstract]: The commonplace activities of eating and sexual interaction (of some types) have captured and held the attention of anthropologists and phenomenologists. Each of these activities has been routinely considered in terms of pleasure and danger. Each is (or, in the case of sex, may be) penetrative, and involves the circulation of matter inside the body after matter has ‘breached’ are identified as the boundaries of the body in a western ontological framework. Penetration may be considered to be the basis upon which pleasure and danger rest in many anthropological and phenomenological explorations of these aspects of human social life. Another penetrative activity, smoking, might also be considered to be both pleasurable and dangerous. This paper explores the ways in which frameworks of pleasure and danger are contained in pro and antismoking discourse, and how these discourse relate to, and depart from, the smoking experiences of a number of cigarette smokers.