The fullness of air

Breath, work and beauty in Lobito and Benguela, Angola

Bibliographic Data

ID18950720
AuthorsJ Auerbach (0000-0001-9064-1474, North-West University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume56
Issue3
Pages543-561
Publication date2022-09-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-3968 • E-ISSN: 1923-3051
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00083968.2022.2029750
OpenAlexW4221132543
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited57

This article considers the social, political and productive engagements with air as a foundational – but often invisible – consideration in scholarship. Drawing on ethnographic research in Angola, it develops Arundhati Roy's notion of “portals” as entry points into the reflection on and theorization of air. The paper argues that an “sanitized sensorium” of late globalized capitalism has shaped ethnographic work over the last two centuries, and in so doing has created an overwhelming reliance on visually informed insights that reveal only a small part of what can be made sense of. This is true for anthropology, as has been well documented, but it is equally true for the field of African studies. Here I suggest that in entering through alternative portals, including the olfactory, we might attend to the spaces between object and subject in which “the fullness of air” may yield valuable insmell – alongside insight

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Capitalism · Ethnography · Field (mathematics) · Object (grammar) · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Work (physics) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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