Sensory endurances: Feeling and resisting the margins

Abstract

This thematic section explores how sensory and affective experiences mediate social hierarchies, marginality, and belonging across Asia. The papers bridge affect theory, sensory anthropology, and sociological studies of the senses to examine how smell, sound, touch, and other sensory registers become sites of social differentiation, endurance, and resistance. Introducing the concept of sensory endurance, the collection theorizes how derogatory sensory ascriptions – such as ‘foul’, ‘noisy’, or ‘shabby’ – govern affective experience and sustain power asymmetries, while also enabling marginalized communities to endure and contest oppression. Ethnographic studies from India, Nepal, Singapore, and Taiwan reveal how sensory and emotional practices shape lived experiences of caste, citizenship, labour, and education. Together, the contributions illuminate the sensory and affective dimensions of slow and structural violence, advancing comparative perspectives on stigma, inequality, and the embodied politics of everyday life.