I ask in this chapter how embodied memories of violence and survival are captured through the various sensory reconstructions of war as a sensuous world of bodily transgressions. War affects a person’s sensibilities through the engendering of a shift in sense perception owing to unexpected turns of events. I consider how a repertoire of different genres of social texts about war and violence – from songs, letters, and poetry, to autobiographies, oral histories and others – form rich and sensuous repositories. These texts undergird how multiple facets and first-hand experiences of horror and disbelief are enacted through sensory modalities that either work individually or intersectionally. As much as the sensory provide vital clues for what might happen next – in one’s home, in the prison, or at a concentration centre – the sensory also strikes fear and anxiety on what the next course of action might be. By drawing upon ontological security theory, I show how these transpire within possible or potential recourse in differing contexts of precariousness. The senses therefore serve as a potent catalyst as they both incite fear and insecurity, but also latently security and some stability as they provide cues and information for social actors.

The senses provide important everyday and symbolic media through which social order is routinely looked at. Throughout these multifold processes and in relation to exchange and imitation, we are able to discern a number of important issues that arise in the agenda to compose a sensory anthropology of Asia. First, senses serve as vehicles of knowledge across the whole array of everyday social domains in terms of how they organise human–nonhuman experience. Second, comparative approaches initiated herein are not only a response to either Western- or Asian-centric sensory analysis. They further advance the scope of sensory scholarship by prompting inter- and intra-cultural dialogue on the subject. Third, sensory transnationalism illustrates how sensory orders and practices work, and where established sensory norms are responded to by social actors adhering to different sensory scripts in cross-cultural exchanges. The broader intention is to spotlight how sensory cultures, sentient practices and encounters transpire as a way of comprehending Asia through sense perception as a newer perspective in social and cultural anthropology. In doing so, I inquire further both into the breadth and depth of how to articulate the social lives and textures of the senses toward crafting the future of sensory anthropology.

In this chapter, I address cross-cultural encounters of two (or more) sets of sensory scripts. These encounters are evident in the wider literature on colonialism, migration and other local–foreign interfaces. In doing so, it serves as an important reminder for one to take heed of multiple axes of sensory similarities and differences, in addition to a merely the East–West core axis of difference. I also turn the lens around by showing how local populations on the reverse, discern colonial or foreign communities through their sensory faculties as a counterpoint. The focus lies in demonstrating how sensory interfaces arising from these processes and movements of people are theorised using the notion of sensory transnationalism. I map this notion onto colonial–local sensory encounters and propose four modes of sensory engagement: reception, rejection, regulation, and reproduction. These modes collectively show how sensory encounters, stemming from contrasting power positions, lend a different understanding of empire and its everyday lived constructions, including how colonial impositions of modernity through sensory regulatory schemes are also met with resistance. Consequently, categories of colonisers and colonised are unsettled instead of being deployed as inherently asymmetrical categories.

I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

I ask how sensory models are established and operate across different cultures, including their variant ethnographical nuances. This problematises the interplay of the senses whereby sensory conjunctions or amalgams form part of everyday life and ritual practices in many societies, as opposed to the broader compartmentalisation of the senses in Western aesthetics. The chapter compares a range of categories that delineate different senses, as well as the varying modalities per sense. This is accomplished through an investigation of linguistic descriptors of senses as a starting point. How a particular culture names the senses that wield cultural importance is however not merely an exercise in description or enumeration. I analyse sensory nomenclatures in a three-fold manner to unveil the phenomenological epistemology of the senses. First, I engage with the numbers of modalities per sense in order to acknowledge alternate sensory models beyond the hegemonic Romano–Grecian five-sense categorisation. Second, I query the social significance of the nuances of each sense. Third, I raise examples of how two or more senses may be employed synaesthetically. By focusing on cultural interpretations of sensory practices, pairings, and intersections, this approach sheds analytical attention upon everyday orderings of sensory categories and their cultural significance.

The connections between senses and morality are located in politics, religion, music, food, and other practices and metaphors of consumption. Such associations point to desired or positive values that are demonstrated through particular sensory behaviour. These together form social structures that reflect propriety and moral decorum. The governance of good behaviour and subscription to moral codes similarly extend to the metaphysical world of spirits through a variety of corporeal and cognitive modalities. Building upon the phenomenological anthropology of morality, I show how the senses serve as intermediaries of moral binaries. Cases are drawn from myths, legends, folktales, poetry, and ethnographies. Overall, varying sociocultural associations of the different senses with morality, virtue, and disposition present a type of sensory attunement to apprehend moral economies and social structures. I argue that sensory moral economies are, in effect, the product of specific sensory action. Social actors are expected to perform particular ways of being that actualise alignment with ideal, righteous states or dispositions mediated through the senses. The outcome of such sense acts is a combination of immaterial interests and moral sentiments. As sociocultural arbiters, the senses bring to light the moral organisation of society.

What does an anthropology of the senses entail? How can one reconstruct writings and knowledge about Asia through the lens of the senses using anthropological analysis? What part do the senses play in everyday life in Asia across a variety of historical and contemporary contexts – stretching from the pre- to postcolonial and including the transnational? How are the senses connected to a range of everyday life domains that comprise religion, morality, foodways, music, linguistic practices, local–foreign interactions, and the migratory and economic movements of social actors and commodities? How might one develop theoretical argumentation and delineate interdisciplinary and comparative possibilities to analyse sensory cultures? The introductory chapter opens the book by putting forward these core queries that set the stage for subsequent chapters. Apart from charting the field of sensory anthropology, I explain why and how a sensory history of Asia that attends to a wide and non-exhaustive range of sensory cultures is important. I engage with current anthropological scholarship and others that focus in the main on Western cultures or non-industrial societies. I show how this book takes on theoretical, comparative and contextual commitments as key inquiries in articulating the social life of the senses in Asia.