A Political History of Breathing

Our proposal examines, in the long durée artifacts that arguably made breathing safer. It looks at artifacts that aimed to test, to purify, clean, filter, and disinfect air.

Breathing stands at the interface between the self and the environment. It intimately connects the inner body with the exterior medium. Inevitable and necessary, breathing may also be hazardous. It mediates between life and death, sometimes between health and sickness, and often between good and bad performance (speaking, sporting, singing). An intimate action, it also provokes the subtlest contact with the other. The changing relationship of humans with air reflected ways of understanding their place in nature, in society, and in the cosmos.

Thus, artifacts that mediate between the body and air attain epistemological, social, moral, emotional, religious, and political significance. These artifacts mediated between the individual and the contaminated environment, introduced vital air to deprived lungs, and allowed fresh air to make its way in and out of the body. Such objects, this volume argues, pose questions about gender and expertise, ideologies and civil rights, the construction of social identities, and the exercise and contestation of political and scientific power.