Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
An Anthro-Phenomenological
Exploration of Smoking Cigarettes
ABSTRACT
The commonplace activities o f eating and sexual interaction (of some
types) have captured and held the attention o f anthropologists and
phenomenologists. Each o f these activities has been routinely
considered in terms o f pleasure and danger.1 Each is (or, in the case
o f sex, may be) penetrative, and involves the circulation o f matter
inside the body after that matter has breached what we come to
identify as the boundaries o f the body. Penetration may be
considered to be the basis upon which pleasure and danger rest in
many anthropological and phenomenological explorations o f these
aspects o f human social life. Another penetrative activity, smoking,
might also be considered to be both pleasurable and dangerous.2
This paper explores the ways in which frameworks o f pleasure and
danger are contained in pro- and anti-smoking discourse, and how
these discourses relate to, and depart from, the smoking experiences
o f a small number o f cigarette smokers.
Introduction
Attempting to account for the appeal of smoking, Jack Katz has noted
that smoking routinely makes visible the respiratory process that evidences our
inextricable intertwinement with the world. This usually invisible process is
vividly marked out in plumes of smoky evidence. Katz suggests that marking
the more usually invisible exhalation phase of respiration accounts for some of
the appeal of smoking, based on the idea that exhaled smoke visibly moves
beyond what people, living under the conditions of a western ontology in which
the body is theorized as ‘being separate from’ the world and its contents, might
experience as the solid sitedness of their own bodies.3 This visible move
outbound through breath, Katz argues, effectively extends one’s own personal
reach in the world. This process, of exhaling breath that is more usually hidden
from our view, is vividly marked out in plumes of visible smoky evidence.4 I
propose that this concept of extension is often labeled ‘escape’ in cigarette
advertising.
Labeling the necessarily intertwined relationship of the body in the
world as either extension or escape makes a nod in the direction of the Western
ontology that theoreticians such as Moreton-Robinson have made reference to;
such labeling implies that there once was a time at which body and world were
not inextricably intertwined, until the body extended out into world from its own