Tag Archives: sensory anthropology

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Maja Sisnowski: Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services

Image 1: Bunk beds in shared accommodation. Photo by Luistxo

“I don’t know how to explain it”, Caro told me in an interview, “but you develop a sense [Gespür] for when you can keep standing in front of the person, because you know: Okay, they are going to shout at you for ten minutes, and then they have used the valve that they needed. And then there are situations where you feel: Okay, I better take a step back, because it might not stay like that.”

Caro was working in one of several emergency shelters in which I observed, participated in daily tasks, and interviewed staff members as part of an ethnographic study on de-escalation practices in German health and welfare services. De-escalation is a common answer in health and welfare facilities to the question of how staff should react to aggressive behavior in a professional setting. My research project asks how de-escalation is promoted as a workplace safety measure, how it is learned and taught in de-escalation training, and how it is practiced on the ground – specifically in overnight emergency shelters for unhoused people in Berlin.

A remarkable aspect of de-escalation, especially in the context of health and welfare settings, is that it approaches aggression at a conflux of care and security practices. Many of my interlocutors, staff members in shelters and de-escalation trainers alike, understood aggression in health and welfare contexts as both potentially dangerous and as a stress response in need of caring intervention. This understanding appears even in the minute sensitivities, such as the awareness of interpersonal space, that Caro brought to situations with palpable tension: she considered both the potential needs of the other person to express frustration and the risk of the argument turning physical. For Caro as for other staff members, sensing aggression in the shelter environment was an integral part of their job. At the same time, their daily work was not in fact defined as security work, but revolved around issues such as organizing food, clothing, and access to places to sleep. In this blog post, I trace how aggression is sensed in the shelters to show how the sensing of in/security is entangled with institutional care and welfare provision.

Security, following Laufenberg and Thompson (2022) and the long line of feminist, anti-racist and abolitionist thinkers they draw on, is a powerful and expansive formation of governance, deeply intertwined with capitalist modes of producing crisis and insecurity. A critical analysis of security asks what versions of security and safety are being produced, whose safety is prioritized, and who is constructed as a threat. Such questions are integral to studying how aggression is sensed and encountered, given the uneven attribution of aggression in conjunction with the production of gendered, racialized, classed and dis/abled difference (Longino 2013; Metzl 2011; Rollins 2021; Chen 2023). In the context of health and social welfare services, the production of difference in relation to aggression is also enmeshed with the apprehension and management of aggression in institutional spaces, especially those designated for particular populations, such as homeless people. Tracing how emergency shelter staff senses aggression can help articulate how aggression is present in institutional spaces, and how it is apprehended in caring and securitizing registers.

A Situated Sensorium for Aggression

The shelters in my research formed part of a perpetually precarious and semi-professional emergency service meant to protect people from cold-related harm at night. They were usually sought out by people who could not access housing and were excluded from or rendered precarious within Germany’s regular social support system. Winter emergency shelters require people to eat and sleep in shared, crowded and regulated spaces that are usually only open during the winter months and during the night. Responsible for enforcing the rules of shelter space, shelter staff were also tasked with keeping the space “free of violence”. This entailed intervening in case of conflict and asking people who were violent to leave the premises. In many shelters, this was done in cooperation with externally hired security staff. In this context, many staff members told me that they were attentive to loud voices to detect a potentially escalating situation. Susanne shared:

When I sit in the office for example, or also at night when I sleep there, then I always listen a lot to what is happening. So I hear when people are having a conversation, and I really pay attention to whether someone is raising their voice, and then I always have to wait whether that is part of the conversation, because someone is telling a story, or whether that is because a conflict is happening.

Aggression, in other words, was not simply heard, it was actively listened for. This active sensing was not practiced in isolation, but in a particular spatial arrangement and within an institutional context where staff could not be everywhere all at once yet bore responsibility to intervene when someone showed aggressive behavior. Sensing aggression, this example shows, is a matter of practice, to be distinguished from the idea of sensing as a passive perception of a given object which comes to the senses. While people in my research certainly had different sensitivities and attunements to aggression, there were commonalities as well, shaped by institutional roles– one could call it a situated sensorium. Notably, as with the sensitivity for raised voices, this sensing of aggression amidst everyday interactions such as a loud conversation also constituted a form of low-tech surveillance in the shelters.

Sensing Stress, Constituting Risk

A situated sensorium encompasses multiple sensitivities, for sounds, touch, embodied states, and institutional routines and atmospheres. Another staff member, when I asked if escalating situations could be sensed beforehand, explained:

Yes, when an argument blows up a bit, then you can hear from the kitchen that it’s somehow getting louder in the eating area, then yes. Of course adrenaline enters into it as well: “Oh God, I’ll go check what is going on there.”

As “adrenaline enters into it”, this staff member’s description introduces a sense of her own embodied response. The sensorial repertoire of sensing aggression in the shelter importantly included such interoceptive sensitivities. Adrenaline was one shorthand way of describing physical sensations of stress (Roberts 2024) to be sensed in oneself, but potentially also in others. Interestingly, adrenaline itself is given agency in this description, causing an impulse to go and check out what the noise is about. Several staff members explained how being aware of their own stress was important for them to be effective de-escalators, and de-escalation training would usually sensitize participants to the signs that they themselves were under stress.

But even more central to staff members was the stress of others. They often described having an awareness for people’s moods as well as for more general atmospheres. They sensed risks of aggression in long waiting times in cold weather, cramped spaces, interrupted sleep, and the small violences of what Goffman has aptly called “batch living” (Goffman 1961 [2022], 10) remarking that certain experiences would make them angry and impatient, too. This sensitivity, I would argue, renders aggression palpable as material-semiotically constituted risk in the institutional space of the shelters, not simply monitored and managed, but also related to vital needs such as sleep, warmth and dignity.

Dis/orienting Gut Feelings

Another register of interoceptive sensing within staff’s situated sensorium, and one I encountered frequently in my research, was gut feeling. Like adrenaline and stress, gut feeling presents as an internal sensation, metaphorically sitting in the pit of the stomach. Akin to the sense [Gespür] that Caro described, gut feeling and related notions were used by research participants to describe modes of knowing that, being grounded in experience and context, resisted articulation in general terms. In the realm of police work, the use of neurobiological discourse (Keesman 2022), as well as reliance on experiential knowledge (Abdul-Rahman et al. 2020, 34) has been critically analyzed as to how it can function as a refusal of articulation and accountability (see also Elbek 2025). In my research, where staff had markedly different mandates and powers, gut feeling served to denote a sense of being oriented and secure in one’s fast and intuitive assessments. In this vein, for example, several staff members explained that they would tell new colleagues to rely on and follow their gut feeling, especially to sense whether a situation was dangerous.

For me as a researcher, gut feeling became especially tangible when I noticed my own senses of in/security morph and shift throughout my research. This happened for example when I moved from a small shelter where I had previously worked to larger shelters with more security staff, or when I noticed myself grow impractically sensitive to the risk of aggression after participant observation in a great number of de-escalation training sessions. Having prior work experience in a shelter, these small disorientations made me aware of how much I did rely in practice on a well-working gut feeling, but they also gave me an embodied notion of how senses of in/security are grounded in specific social arrangements.

Entanglements of Care and Security

Importantly, within the context of the shelter environment, as well as in de-escalation training, I also came across registers of sensing in/security that were not oriented towards sensing danger. When I asked Britta about whether escalating situations announced themselves beforehand, our conversation turned to food:

When [people] know good food is coming, they are looking forward to it. But when it’s announced that there is rice…or couscous…! (Laughter). We are not friends anymore then. […] The first time in my life, I was homesick because I was on a trip and the food was bad […] One time, I was frying onions for dinner, really a lot of onions. And onions always smell so incredibly delicious. And then, [X] came in, and said: (sniffing the air) Home, sweet Home. Polska. Or something like it, he signaled that it smells like home […] And that’s a good feeling, because I think everyone knows this, some smells are just familiar and the smell of fried onions brings humanity together. (Laughter)

Throughout my research, I came not only across sensitivities towards danger and risk, but also encountered sensitivities to smells, tastes, or touch, that feel safe or give a sense of home, connection or pleasure. Including such sensitivities in a sensorium for in/security sheds light on entanglements of care and security while also opening possibilities of thinking security beyond efforts of securitization and surveillance. Laufenberg and Thompson describe how abolitionist and care-ethical criticisms of contemporary security regimes attempt to redefine security: “In this vein, not more carceral security – and hence more police, more punishment, more surveillance and more sealing of borders – is the appropriate answer to (social) insecurity, but more care – and thus more resonance, connection, and responsivity, more care, responsibility and solidarity.” (Laufenberg and Thompson 2022, 32, my translation).

What, against this backdrop, does it mean to grow sensitive to loud voices, to prize gut feeling, sense adrenaline, and smell the fried onions?

For one, attending to staff’s situated sensorium for aggression in the shelters highlights the ambivalences and confluences of care and security within the asymmetrical power relations of institutional encounters. It shows subtle ways in which policing and securitization is present in spaces of care or welfare provision. At the same time, I suggest, this sensorium can be read as reaching – without being able to transcend its institutional context – for ways of feeling safe beyond carceral security.

Maja Sisnowski is a PhD candidate with the Health, Care and the Body research group at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests move in the fields of feminist science and technology studies, critical disability studies, care and security.

References

Abdul-Rahman, Laila; Espín Grau, Hannah; Klaus, Luise and Tobias Singelnstein. 2020: Rassismus und Diskriminierungserfahrungen im Kontext polizeilicher Gewaltausübung. Zweiter Zwischenbericht zum Forschungsprojekt „Körperverletzung im Amt durch Poli-zeibeamt*innen“ (KviAPol). Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 11.11.2020, https://kviapol.rub.de.

Chen, Mel Y. 2023. Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire. Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478027447.

Elbek, Laust Lund. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and How The ‘Police Nose’ Smells.” FocaalBlog, December 24 https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Goffman, Erving. 1961 [2022]. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Books.

Keesman, Laura Danique. 2022. “Primordial Brains and Bodies: How Neurobiological Discourses Shape Policing Experiences.” Body & Society 28 (4): 80–105. doi:10.1177/1357034X221134440.

Laufenberg, Mike, and Vanessa Eileen Thompson, eds. 2022. Sicherheit: rassismuskritische und feministische Beiträge. 1. Auflage. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Band 49. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Longino, Helen E. 2013. Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Metzl, Jonathan Michel. 2011. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston, Mass: Beacon.

Roberts, Celia. 2024. “Adrenaline.” In Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary, edited by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcom, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts, 15–23. Bloomsbury UK.

Rollins, Oliver. 2021. Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Sisnowski, M. 2025. “Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services” Focaalblog January 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/23/maja-sisnowski-gut-feeling-adrenaline-and-fried-onions-sensing-aggression-in-german-health-and-welfare-services/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Laust Lund Elbek: Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells

Image 1: Police officer in residential area. Photo by Rigspolitiet

Suspicion appears to sit largely in the nose: we might say that something ‘stinks,’ ‘smells off,’ that we ‘smell a rat,’ or perhaps ‘something fishy.’ Such suspicious smells may, in turn, compel us to ‘sniff out trouble’—at least until we ‘lose the scent.’

While these metaphors can seem curious or quirky at first sight, they do map onto two domains of meaning directly related to suspicion: universal perceptions of danger (decay or spoiled food) and images of searching and tracking (a dog on a trail). The association between the sense of smell and suspicion is further reflected in the olfactory system’s function as a bodily warning system triggered by smoke, bad food, leaking gas, and so on (Ramšak 2024).

It is from this general metaphorical terrain of olfactory suspicion that I take my cue. Based on fieldwork with Danish police officers, I reflect on what is colloquially known as the police nose (“politinæse”)—a ubiquitous term in Danish police lingo that refers to officers’ ostensible unique ability to “catch a whiff” of something suspicious on their beats.

I suggest that while the police nose can be understood as a particular kind of ‘craft’ rooted in accumulated sensory experience, it also connects to wider public and scholarly debates regarding the dilemmas of the police’s discretionary powers. To anchor these thoughts,I begin with a brief ethnographic trip to Hill Park, a marginalized housing project in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to take a closer look at one specific police nose in practice.

‘The Nose’ In Action

In the early spring of 2024, I joined Detective Jensen, a calm and friendly man in his early forties, on a routine patrol around the estate. Around 10 am, the skies on the fringes of the city were as grey as the concrete blocks themselves. The estate, which is home to roughly 5,000 residents, most of whom come from immigrant and/or working-class backgrounds, had not quite awoken from its winter slumber yet.

As we rolled slowly past a kindergarten, Jensen smoothly brought the patrol car to a halt. “What’s that over there?” he said, narrowing his eyes. He had spotted an inconspicuous, grey car parked partly out of sight behind a shrubbery. “It’s just, you know, why is it parked there?” he asked, staring firmly in the direction of the vehicle. He motioned for me to follow him as he opened the door, got out, and walked toward the grey car. When I caught up, he explained: “After a while, you develop a police nose, you know, a kind of sixth sense. When you’ve pulled over so many cars or seen them parked in funny places, it triggers your attention. Why is it parked here? Has it been deliberately hidden? Has it been stolen? What’s up with it?” “Have you seen that car before?” I asked. “No,” Jensen said, walking around the car and reaching for a door handle to check if it had been left unlocked. “I haven’t seen it before, and we know the area well. So, I’m just having a look around now, you know—checking what’s on the ground, what’s on the floor, is it unlocked, does it have something to do with some of the familiar kids from the estate, yes, no…”

Jensen reached for his phone to scan the car’s license plate. “I’m just checking who owns the car,” he explained. “And then I’ll check what we know about that person. It’s 10 o’clock now, right? Is it someone who lives in the area, or someone who comes from the outside? That’s the sort of thing I want to know. Right now, things look peaceful enough, sure. But we always take a look around.”

He took another inspection round and then got down on one knee to have a look underneath the car. “What do we have here? Is that an unpaid parking ticket? And this right here definitely looks like a mixing tray of some kind,” he said in a slightly triumphant tone. Pointing to the shrubbery surrounding the car, he said, “If it had been dark out, this place would have been completely out of sight, right?”

The ‘Police Nose’ as Embodied Skill

Jensen’s discovery of drug paraphernalia in Hill Park was itself an unspectacular event, yet his explanation of the process behind it—that he had followed his police nose—opens an ethnographic window onto the importance of sensory inference and the ability to detect subtle environmental cues in everyday policing.

Indeed, the notion of the ‘police nose’ is no idiosyncrasy of Jensen’s, but a familiar phenomenon among Danish police officers that has also been noted by other ethnographers (e.g. Sausdal 2018). Police representatives themselves also assert that “everyone in the Danish police knows what the police nose is.” In the British context, a direct parallel exists in the form of the copper’s nose, which refers to officers’ allegedly unique ability “to sense when something doesn’t feel right” (Quin 2025, 11–12). Related sensory idioms of police officers acting on gut feelings or a ‘sixth sense’ (a term that Jensen also used) abound across the world.

Now, because of its vague and arguably somewhat self-elevating character, one could be tempted to dismiss talk of a unique ‘police nose’ as mere occupational folklore and mystique. I suggest, however, that it also points to a rather less arcane skill; namely, a developed capacity for decoding environments in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. As Jensen put it, the police nose materialises once “you’ve pulled over so many cars, or seen them parked in funny places”—an observation that also implicitly invokes the well-known ability of smells to awaken past experiences(Ramšak 2024). And certainly, to an outside observer such as myself, the car parked in Hill Park would, if registered at all, probably index “someone left their car here.” But to Detective Jensen, it also indexed the possibility that “someone tried to hide their vehicle—let’s investigate.”

From this perspective, the idea of the police nose (like its various cognates) invokes what Tim Ingold has referred to as a process of enskilment, which denotes the gradual and practical “embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents” (2002, 5). Not at all unlike the Arctic hunters that originally inspired Ingold’s concept—hunters whose “perceptual system […] is attuned to picking up information, critical to the practical conduct of [their] hunting, to which the unskilled observer simply fails to attend” (Ingold 2002, 55)—Jensen and his colleagues gradually learn to sense subtle cues in their surroundings that may, or may not, refer to something of police interest. The police nose, from this perspective, could be understood not as a mysterious ability magically conferred by the badge or uniform, but as an occupational shorthand for an ‘enskilled’semiotic process of quickly scanning the environment for signs.

Pride and Prejudice?

The police nose, however, is more than just a skill; it is also a source of professional pride and identity. As Jensen’s remarks on its development also seemed to suggest, ‘having a nose’ for detecting trouble is closely tied to understandings of what it means to be a good officer. From this perspective, the semantic link between ‘smelling’ and ‘suspicion’ speaks not only to a generalized imagery of danger and detection, but also to a vocational ideology among police officers that values intuition, fine-tuned senses, and personal experience. Yet, the reading and interpretation of signs and cues in one’s surroundings—arguably the key ‘task’ of the police nose—is never a neutral endeavour but is always-already embedded in social-political contexts (Eco 1979). To illustrate this, let us briefly return to Hill Park and the car half-concealed by a shrubbery.

As Jensen finished his inspection of the vehicle and its surroundings, we got back into the police car, and he continued his reflections: “It’s broad daylight now, of course. And early in the morning. So, the person in question may be asleep, or perhaps at work or something.” “It’s not that early, though, is it?” I said (it was approaching 11 am by now). “Yes, yes, to some it is, it depends on who you ask. To you and me, it’s not very early, of course,” Jensen replied. “But to some of the citizens we encounter often, 11 o’clock is very, very early. These are people we typically only see after 3 pm. If they don’t have anything to do—no school, work, or education—then we see them in the streets at 3, and then they’re probably awake until, I don’t know, 1, 2, or 3 am, no matter what day it is.”

Jensen’s remarks reveal an acute awareness of the temporal and social rhythms of the neighbourhood, which is part of his regular beat, as well as of those well-known residents he deems to be of immediate ‘interest.’ And while it is precisely such contextual familiarity that renders the police nose useful in practice, it also follows that its inferences are often situated in a social field shaped by unequal relations of power. Put somewhat bluntly, to most police officers, a car parked in an affluent neighbourhood would be unlikely to index the same thing as it would in Hill Park. And so, regardless of its accuracy in specific situations, the ‘police nose’ thus also speaks to long-standing debates concerning the classed nature of suspicion and its broader implications regarding the trade-offs between discretion and accountability in policing.

I should interject here that this is not to suggest that Detective Jensen or any of his colleagues operate on prejudice—I have no indication to that effect whatsoever. My intention here is simply to leverage Jensen’s reflections to illustrate how what the police nose ‘smells’ is inevitably embedded both within broader structures of meaning and power as well as individual officers’ accumulated sensory experiences.

This tension has not gone unnoticed in Danish public debate, either. During the 2011 Roskilde Festival, for example, police requested that 25 Romani individuals identify themselves, and when questioned critically by a newspaper journalist, the on-duty officer explained: “It is our police nose that compels us to check up on the Roma bunch.” The reportage does not mention whether officers managed to ‘sniff out’ any illegal behaviour, but it stands to reason that few ethnic stereotypes are more tenacious than the one linking ‘Gypsies’ to petty crime and delinquency.

Eleven years later, Amnesty International explicitly flagged the possible association between the ‘police nose’ and the phenomenon of ‘ethnic profiling’ in Danish cities (Amnesty International Denmark 2022), following a publication documenting that “the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 27% higher for immigrants than people of Danish origin. For descendants of immigrants, the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 45% higher than it is for people of Danish origin” (Søndergaard and Hussein 2022, 3). The publication also led to this potential ‘dark side’ of the police nose being discussed by national politicians and police chiefs at the high-profile political festival on the island of Bornholm.

The smell of (ir)rational bureaucracy?

References to a ‘police nose’—or what is variously referred to in other contexts as a “sixth sense,” “gut feelings,” “hunches,” or even “intuition”—circulate among police officers as a shorthand for an almost instinctive ability to read and respond to subtle environmental cues in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. The olfactory character of the metaphor, in turn, does not appear semantically incidental, as it evokes suspicion, vigilance, and an intuitive mode of noticing that something is ‘off’ before it is consciously articulated as such. This contrasts with visual and auditory metaphors, which often seem to signal rational processes—“I see” can mean “I understand,” for example—and resonates with the idea that “the sense of smell has fewer and less deep metaphorical connections with the mental domain” (Sweetser 1990, 43). The ‘police nose,’ indeed, seems to denote a pre-reflective rather than purely rationalistic mode of knowing and engaging with the world.

On the one hand, the ability to act on a fleeting je-ne-sais-quoi is a crucial part of the craft of everyday policing and is a skill that officers hone in practice as they immerse themselves in the rhythms, histories, and social makeup of their daily beats. On the other hand, the police nose is clearly not a neutral bureaucratic instrument, but rather a visceral pattern recognition tool that operates within structures of power and experience that co-condition what counts as ‘suspicious’ in the first place. As public and scholarly debate has highlighted, references to a police nose may thus run the risk of concealing implicit bias in discretionary policing behind a linguistic veil of vaguely defined expertise.

The police nose thus presents itself as a double-edged sword. As a professional ideal and sensory skill, it highlights the real importance of officers’ heightened situational awareness and responsiveness. At the same time, some contexts may be automatically assumed to “smell” more than others—and what smells, and to whom, is to a considerable extent shaped by a politics of inequality. And while no obvious silver bullet is available for resolving this tension, it remains something to be mindful of, as even the sharpest nose may lead us down a path that does not quite pass the sniff test.

Laust Lund Elbek is assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of social anthropology and political science, with a focus on state-citizen relations in highly securitized contexts.

References

Amnesty International Denmark. 2022. ”Det er jo en offentlig gabestok, og jeg ved godt, hvad Hr. og Fru Jensen, der kører forbi, tænker”. Copenhagen.

Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2002. The perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

Quin, Emily. 2025. ‘The Copper’s Nose’: A Grounded Theory of a Policing Phenomenon, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Ramšak, Mojca. 2024. The Anthropology of Smell. New York: Springer.

Sausdal, David. 2018. Everyday Deficiencies of Police Surveillance: A Quotidian Approach to Surveillance Studies. Policing and Society 30(4):462-478.

Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and CulturalAspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Søndergaard, Jeppe Kirkelund, and Tarek Hussein. 2022. Etnisk Profilering: Hovedresultater fra tre undersøgelser. Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Cite as: Elbek, L. L. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Susana Durão and Tilmann Heil: Care, Cordiality, and Control. Multisensorial Encounters with More-than-Security in Urban Brazil

Image 1: Gated community ‘Vila Inglesa’ in São Paolo. Photo by Cornelius Kibelka

In urban Brazil, portarias–entry halls and porters lodges–and their staff absorb the circulation of people and goods as they pass between the streets and domestic spaces. In Rio de Janeiro’s and São Paulo’s middle-class neighbourhoods, the relative calm at the portaria turns into a hustle and bustle at certain times of the day. In a block of small apartments, the rhythm of movement picks up in the evenings, when domestic and maintenance workers leave the premises, residents return home from work to pick up their orders and mail, and deliveries from restaurants, shops, and pharmacies arrive in ever shorter intervals.

Doormen strike a delicate and demanding balance of control, cordiality, and care, attending to the routine coming and going as well as to specially tailored requests. For example, although building regulations often demand the residents to pick up their own orders, in many buildings, porters patiently pass on the codes to the delivery boys, carefully guard the goods until pick up, or even dispatch them in the elevator to the recipient. It is only late in the evening when the sensorial overload in the interstitial zone of the portaria dies down. Later at night, nothing remains but the quiet perseverance of the night porters who, struggling with their fatigue, attend to people returning home late and night time visitors, who arrive in the dark and leave before dawn.

In cities where private security workers like doormen and their equipment are part of the ordinary (White and Diphoorn 2024; Durão 2023), the doormen’s accounts of the world they inhabit disclose the density of the socio-techno-material relations in portarias. Often derived from brief and localized tasks and encounters, the sensory density builds up over time and enriches the socio-techno-material mediations of urban inequality (Heil et al. 2025).

As Northeastern migrants in the country’s richer Southeast, racialized men and women most often constitute the staff at portarias. Their stories unravel the material and sensorial making of more-than-security in the urban. Shaped by the interplay of care, cordiality, and control, we ask how more-than-security is constitutive of the social, racial, gender, and material hierarchies that grow out of colonial and neoliberal logics. We argue that the socio-material worlds of porters as well as their embodied and multisensorial engagements with this world reveal a subaltern archive of the making of (in)security in contemporary urban Brazil. While the infrastructure of portarias materially provides for the provision of hospitality and security, the multisensorial and embodied practice of porters foregrounds the intricate entanglements of care, cordiality, and control in these transit spaces and the interactions with the people who pass.

By engaging in dialogue with those who breathe life into portarias, we account for the subaltern registers of the urban that, according to Ananya Roy (2011), describe significant features of contemporary dynamics, which urban theory has been unable or unwilling to account for. We draw from our continuous long-term fieldwork on private security in São Paulo (Durão) and on social hierarchization and difference in Rio de Janeiro (Heil), starting in the 2010s. Attending to the logics of control, cordiality, and care in portarias in urban Brazil, anthropology can learn about the everyday layering of neoliberal and colonial logics as well as the material, sensory and embodied experiences that reproduce and reconfigure the social, racial, and gendered hierarchies at stake at the threshold from public to private.

To (not) care

At first glance, the infrastructure of portarias facilitates both hospitality and security. Providing for hospitality, it taps into a hotel aesthetic with shiny receptions and uniformed staff who greet hosts and guests, manage registration devices, and announce someone’s arrival. In contrast, special security devices disrupt the smooth material surface of hospitality. For example, double gates, fencing, and turnstiles interrupt the circuit of people and things, performing the securitization of buildings, their inhabitants, and their assets.

Workers who attend to the coming and going of people, services, and things are always (expected to be) already present at the entrance (Durão 2023). This holds for nearly any residential arrangement in urban Brazil, from social housing to the utmost luxury homes. While there are contemporary discussions about a complete virtualization of control in such spaces, especially among the middle class, such systems of remote doormen are far from comprehensive implementation. At best, more elaborate gadgets–from responders to biometric recognition and outsourced security cameras that are part of networked digital vigilance across the whole city–are added to existing security assemblages that porters are a part of. Porters themselves reproduce the discourse of those residents who believe that it is them–the cordial and caring staff –who are needed for it to feel right when arriving back home. As one doorman said: “Nothing compares to our presence at the front desk; no technology of a remote gatehouse takes care of the residents or the building itself when there is a problem” (emphasis added).

Image 2: Portaria of a vertical condominium. Photo by Tilmann Heil

A middle-aged man from the country’s Northeast, Junior, served the afternoon-evening shift at the portaria of a middle-class condominium in Rio de Janeiro’s privileged southern zone with some 100 small apartments. Every night, he was feeling exhausted from the swell of deliveries that arrived with vain motor boys. Their behaviour could be intimidating or simply unnerved but, for Junior, it did not amount to being offensive. Most of the time, Junior was light-hearted at work and cultivated decent relations with residents and everybody else who stopped by. Not only did he receive and dispatch deliveries for the recipients, but he also compensated for regular technological glitches and badly designed spatial setups to best attend to the inhabitants’ needs and sensibilities. Normally up for a joke to cheer people up, Junior also knew well when a calmer and more careful approach was appropriate or in his best interest. Like Junior, many doormen were convinced that attuning to the cordial routines of the coming and going was more important than technology. This also held true when they swiftly attended to the expectation of informal care and when unknown people and behaviour demanded vigilance and control.

Delivery boys were a case in point. To Junior, they were a security risk who, protected with helmets, could carry out a quick raid in the building. The owners’ assembly had debated whether to keep motor boys out of the building by making it mandatory for residents to receive their orders at the gate. However, the residents decided against it, letting convenience overrule the emergent sense of insecurity. Junior had adapted to the decision but in private left no doubt on his part: he would not risk his life for the residents in the event of an armed burglary. Keeping his views to himself, he avoided any unnecessary stress by maintaining a sense of cordial care.

While Junior was ready to frequently go out of his way, he could become irritable and upset when residents and visitors imposed their desire to have him serve them instead of doing his job. Having to wait in the rain for a moment while Junior attended to another immediate demand, Ligia, a resident, lashed out that the building’s standards left much to be desired. Why had Junior not rushed to the gate with an umbrella to protect her? Junior had jokingly asked where she had seen such service performed by an average doorman. He still found the expectation absurd and a breach of both common sense and respect for him and his work. For Junior, Ligia was among the two or three “crazy” residents with anachronistic expectations who seemed to be a rule of any apartment building. All that remained between Ligia and Junior were minimally cordial greetings.

While Junior was still directly employed by the building, Julia worked as an outsourced access controller (controladora de acesso) in a gated community of some 330 residents in São Paulo. Having moved to São Paulo as a young married woman, she had followed her sister-in-law’s advice and started to work at a portaria. She had timidly adopted the protocols and routines of politeness and control from her co-workers. She struggled with the feeling of being permanently compared with her sister-in-law who worked alternating shifts, was already known, and had more experience on the job.

If someone unknown arrived, Julia greeted and, in painstaking fashion, requested all key information – destination, purpose, full name, ID, previous visits. After completing a facial registration and announcing the visitor, she provided them with the information on how to leave later. While everything had been going well, Julia felt increasingly exposed to blackmail from one of the residents. The resident claimed to be dissatisfied with Julia’s lack of friendliness and her apparent inability or unwillingness to show more affection and attention whenever he entered or left the condominium. Julia felt she was being accused of failing to be welcoming, something she highly valued in her interactions with residents.

Increasingly under pressure, Julia began to fall ill, gain weight, and suffer from nervous breakdowns. The day she missed work to see a psychiatrist, without prior notice, she was fired “for just cause” by her service company. After the fact, she realized that her dismissal was due to the same resident, for whom Julia had never felt right. He had asked the condominium manager to make her redundant, which the service company used to end her contract with them. Julia assessed the work at portarias as follows: “Outsourcing is a cruel world because everyone considers themselves our bosses: the employer, the supervisors, the building manager, the caretaker, the residents, and even their children.” While she had initially found the role of providing hospitality as part of access control agreeable, she had come to develop a strong dislike of the system that had effectively rendered her a disposable resource.

Image 3: Portaria of a horizontal condominium. Photo by Susana Durão

A good-looking young black man, Zé was a janitor acting as a doorman in an upper middle-class building in Rio de Janeiro’s southern zone. During conversations, Zé had shared numerous stories of doing residents a favour as well as working extra hours and additional shifts. During a shift as a porter, a son of a resident ordered Zé to look after some belongings he had temporarily placed on the sidewalk for pickup. While generally feeling inclined to go out of his way, Zé had disliked the way the request had been posed, eventually halted the task, and returned to his actual duties. Zé was aware that his refusal to outperform for an ill-tempered son of an owner might get him into trouble. And so it happened. When the son returned, he verbally attacked Zé and almost physically assaulted him. This entire experience conflicted with Zé’s love for looking after the building and its inhabitants in the best way possible.

Yet, to care had to feel right. Young, gay and black, Zé had no illusions about the place in society to which the son had tried to forcefully assign him: racialized servitude, that is, a colonial fantasy of hierarchy prevalent among Brazilian middle-classes and elites. The portaria was one of the spaces in which they could try to subordinate people to feel authority, guarded and cared for. Those for whom Zé went out of his way at least maintained an appearance of basic respect and appreciation for the care he gave.

On the day, Zé sought the resident warden to relay his view of the incident. Rather than the lack of what Zé would normally judge to feel right based on a demonstration of respect and appreciation, he foregrounded the risk of physical violence after rejecting to deviate from his contractual tasks, namely, to deliver security-hospitality in the premises of the building. It clearly transpired that Zé knew his rights, so he obtained what he demanded: two weeks off with full pay.

When Zé returned to work, a lingering tension prevailed whenever the resident passed, yet it was buried under the performance of a rather cold hospitality. The incident inscribed itself into multiple layers of abusive behaviour in which society’s colonial dependence on servitude materialized. The worst behaviour emerged when contempt for the staff made residents behave as if anything was allowed. Such were the moments when Zé, acting as janitor, once more found himself ambushed: responding to complaints about a sickening smell, he eventually tracked down human faeces hung outside an open corridor window as the cause of the nuisance in an explicit attempt to humiliate Zé. It remained unclear who had played a trick on Zé, reinforcing the sense of how widespread the contempt was for Zé and other workers in precarious conditions like him.

Conclusions

From failing to be friendly enough behind a glass window or providing immediate shelter from rain, to fearing physical violence or deliberate humiliation, the stories of the workers of portarias like Julia, Junior and Zé are plenty. Their stories provide deep insights into the socio-material and sensorial logics of more-than-security in urban Brazil. The porters’ embodied experiences and sensory memories linked to the portaria, its devices, and types of encounters reveal how they experience the pleasures and discontents of cordially providing a sense of security and hospitality as well as informal care. The entanglements of acts of cordiality, care, and control performed by doormen in portarias show the confluence of the effects of neoliberal outsourcing and the country’s colonial past that establish a net of unequal interdependence and servitude. Their interplay specifies the multiple tensions in which the hierarchies of class, race, region of origin, and gender continuously co-constitute one another.

A first contradiction emerges from the ever-more widespread material security infrastructure and the confident affirmations of doormen that they are effectively and affectively indispensable at the portarias. In contrast to security personnel trained to defend while providing hospitality (Robb Larkins 2023), the porters are aware that the care work they perform for the people is vital for the coming and going in portarias precisely because it extends beyond a narrow provision of security.

Yet far from simply feeling appreciated, let alone recognised for the complex and multiple duties performed, doormen put up with the local effects of the multi-layered history of service and servitude in Brazil and their colonial and neoliberal roots. Junior, Julia and Zé were all from the country’s Northeastern states and had come through family networks to work in the Southeastern metropoles. While unobtrusive routine prevailed, specific encounters made them easily feel the logics of racist subordination in which the aspiring and traditional middle classes of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo engaged, also – but not only – when faced with the hard-working Northeastern “Others” (Schucman 2012). Such subordination showed the violent effects of the intersections of class, gender, region of origin, and race. For Julia, the exigencies to be overly nice and pleasing were distinct from the risk of physical abuse, as in the case of Zé.

Given specific visceral reminders, porters could hardly forget the multiple hierarchies into which they were placed. The enduring impact of the colonial past was particularly evident in how workers of portarias navigated the provision or denial of care in spaces that were otherwise characterised by a calming sensation of hospitality-security. For doormen, all they expected was to treat (and be treated) well, based on a bare minimum of reciprocity and respect. Yet too often service was demanded on the terms of servitude. However, the conflicting influence of growing neoliberal outsourcing and formal workers’ rights could alter the course of events. Those directly employed, such as Junior and Zé, were able to voice their dissatisfaction and give space to their emotional push back against what seemed to be utter abuse. They firmly believed that the more-than-security they provided was not easily outsourced. In contrast, Julia was already employed through a service provider, which enhanced her precarity. Still affectively abused, she was simply made redundant, with no opportunity to push back.

The ensuing effects are perverse: on the one hand, the subaltern multisensorial archives of portarias reveal the increased vulnerability of workers when neoliberal logics intersect with colonial social and (infra)structures. On the other hand, the limits of neoliberal profit maximization become apparent in the thorough investment of residents in the personal and potentially abusive touch of relations of care, cordiality, and control that still define the circulation of people and other things in the entry halls and porters’ lodges of urban Brazil.

Susana Durão is Professor and Researcher in Anthropology at the State University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Tilmann Heil is a Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the University of Leuven and Principal Investigator of the Global South Studies at the University of Cologne.

References

Durão, Susana 2023. Conviviality in Inequality. Security in the City (São Paulo). Mecila Working Paper Series 62.

Heil, Tilmann, Fran Meissner, and Nikolaus Vertovec 2025. Techno-Material Entanglements and the Social Organisation of Difference. Ethnic and Racial Studies: 1–17. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2025.2469694.

Robb Larkins, Erika 2023. The Sensation of Security. Private Guards and Social Order in Brazil. Police/Worlds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Roy, Ananya 2011. Slumdog Cities. Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2): 223–238. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x.

Schucman, Lia Vainer 2012. Entre O “Encardido”, O “Branco” E O “Branquíssimo”. Raça, Hierarquia E Poder Na Construção Da Branquitude Paulistana. Doctoral Thesis, Social Psychology, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.

White, Adam, and Tessa Diphoorn 2024. The Everyday Political Economy of Private Security. Policing and Society 34 (1-2): 1–9. doi: 10.1080/10439463.2023.2268256.

Cite as: Durão, S. & Heil, T. 2025. “Care, Cordiality, and Control. Multisensorial Encounters with More-than-Security in Urban Brazil” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/susana-durao-and-tilmann-heil-care-cordiality-and-control-multisensorial-encounters-with-more-than-security-in-urban-brazil/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen: Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique

Image 1: Photo of an election poster for former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza. The poster burnt down and destroyed in relation to the uprisings in Maputo 2010. Photo by author

Introduction

The pots and pans that were banged at night in Mozambique in late 2024 and early 2025 are now silent. However, their legacy is neither muted nor forgotten—reflecting similarly the trajectories of other forms of protest the last decades which has shaken Mozambique and, especially, its ruling party (see Bertelsen 2014).

What unfolded was extraordinary: The country’s heavily contested presidential and parliamentary election of 9th October 2024 was followed by loud street-based protests and riots across Mozambican cities which were often met with brutal violence by police and security forces. The clashes between young men and the police left around 400 dead and thousands injured.

Here I would like to draw attention to a form of protest that was somewhat eclipsed by the street-fighting, namely the banging of pots by female protestors in their homes and on the street. These female protestors engaged the collective sensorium of urban citizens and shifted the very sense of security and insecurity in this highly unpredictable political situation. Beating pots—on balconies, in courtyards, in kitchens with open windows and in the streets—mediated the population’s sense of insecurity, amounting to a gendered form of collective rejection of the violence of the state apparatus. For Mozambique, this marked a definite shift in terms of both the participation and the format of political opposition in the country, the noise also, crucially, instilling fear in the erstwhile security apparatus and the police

Maputo 2024 and 2025: Protests, rhythm, collective security

Centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and violence ended with liberation in 1975 at the hands of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo – Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). In the half-century that followed, Mozambique has seen ongoing civil war conditioned respectively by Cold War dynamics (1976/77-1992), experiments in Afrosocialism (1980s), and multiparty elections from 1994 onwards. Given the merging of the Frelimo party with the Mozambican state apparatus in this period (Bertelsen 2016), few were surprised when Frelimo won in October 2024, securing the party elite victory in both the parliamentary and presidential elections.

However, in Mozambique’s last election Frelimo attained a majority so improbable that it defied even the most cynical of expectations among experts and citizens alike. For instance, ghost armies of voters—politically loyal subjects conjured from the realms of both the living and the dead—were called up to attain majorities for Frelimo in districts widely known as opposition party strongholds. Rampant ballot-stuffing bolstered other draconian moves, including manipulation of the country’s complex vote-counting system and widespread voter intimidation.

Formal complaints by the opposition were initially quashed, deepening the unpopularity of Frelimo. Protestors rapidly took to the streets and engaged police and security forces in sustained battles. By 27 January 2025, 313 protestors were registered as killed. While there had been protests against previous elections, the scale, form and distribution surpassed these (Feijó and Chiure 2025a, 2025b).

Central to the protests unfolding over several months was how Venancio Mondlane—popularly called VM7 and the founder of a new opposition party—emerged to contest the result. His firebrand speeches drew heavily on his background as a pastor in the Pentecostal church Igreja Ministério Divina Esperança. VM7’s dramatic contestation included well-orchestrated social media broadcasts from his exile in South Africa and a dramatic heroic re-entry into Maputo on 9 January 2025 where he was greeted like a hero—all cast, recast and morphed on social media.

Revisiting such events in November 2025, these months of unrest and protests also assumed a new and, for Mozambique, unprecedented shape—or, better, shapelessness. Evading the violence of the streets and residing within their apartments, on balconies or in courtyards, every night, female citizens banged their pots and pans for hours, chanting slogans against the Frelimo regime and the stolen election, sometimes accompanied by blowing whistles. In many video clips circulating on social media, one may see that the officers from the police force and the security apparatus are visibly affected by the noise surrounding them, treading more carefully and being visibly nervous.

The format, scale and space of these protests and how they affect also those meant to exert control on the streets, mark a shift in the Mozambican political landscape as the rhythms of protest were also emitted from areas of Maputo inhabited by segments of the population often characterised as wealthy or upper middle class—groups commonly perceived as allied with or integral to the Frelimo-state and not previously having been important parts of protests. Further, it is equally surprising, therefore, that Taela (2025: 6) and others suggest that it was initiated in Eduardo Mondlane University’s student housing—where banging pots was accompanied by throwing books and papers out of the windows onto the streets. Clips of protests have continuously filled the pluriverse of social media and across Maputo residents were informed about what was happening, including both wealthy areas downtown, as well as poorer areas, such as in the bairros Mafalala, Maxaquene, and Chamanculo. Some of the first images and clips surfaced immediately after the election and soon came to visually and graphically dominate several of the popular digital channels Mozambicans follow.

In the weeks and months to follow, the banging of pots rapidly turned into a massively popular mode of protest, mobilising especially women and girls and inserting them into a politics of resistance against the stolen elections. As Taela notes (2025: 6, my translation from Portuguese):

The pots and pans only came out of the cupboards at night, after protesters faced extreme police repression on the streets during the day. Banging pots and pans, known as panelaço, emerged as a strategy for those who wanted to protest but did not want to do so on the streets.

As shown in the many clips on social media, noise started after dark and the rhythms churned out from households were often rapid and intense — rhythms sometimes layered, with sounds ranging from the metallic drum of cheap aluminium pots to the deep humming of cast iron kitchenware. Many clips capture entire neighbourhoods banging in synced rhythm—but, crucially, with few of the protestors being visible.

The repeated banging of pots generated a sense of unification, collectivity, and participation mirroring the mass congregations that usually define street protests but in this case often marked by becoming heard, not seen, as well as being nocturnal, not diurnal. On the street in the same clips, one may see the heavily armed state security forces moving uncertainly through the dimly lit streets, navigating endless cascades of drumming and humming being poured over them. In some clips, the same forces nervously fire teargas grenades against balconies only to be met by a more massive wall of noise.

In many respects, Maputo’s panelaço of 2024 and 2025 constituted an act of resistance that transcended electoral and party-political registers: By amplifying and transmogrifying the soundscape of food-preparation from the individual households and into the public sphere, also collectivizing the sounds, what was repelled by noise was not only ghostly voters but also ossified politics, societal structures, and the gendering of space. This was also an explicit subtext in the many items on social media, namely that women were banging pots to be audibly present as a collective and that women’s politics should be recognized. In many of the acts, including during daytime, women set up kitchens in the streets where they cooked for protestors— extending the private realm of the kitchen onto the violently contested public spaces. Thus, these protests and practices may also be seen as extending care for others in its most inclusive sense. The symbolic importance of the pots should not be underestimated, as noted in a Facebook post by Zito Ossumane that was widely shared in Mozambique (translated from Portuguese):

The pots and pans, in a desperate gesture, decided to speak. They sacrificed themselves, banging against each other in a metallic hymn, invoking the god of kitchens and stoves. It was a collective prayer, a cry for help that spread throughout Mozambique, as if the noise of one neighborhood could travel through the bowels of the entire country. […] The revolution of the pots and pans has already begun. May the revolution of everything else come.

Panelaço: Shifting timespace, generative noise, sonic agency

The nocturnal banging of pots and their rhythm—synchronicity and non-synchronicity, collectivity and not—is not unique to Mozambique nor to postcolonial Africa. Writing on Paris and the 2016 nocturnal Nuit Debout protest—a form of charivari protest well-known from across Europe and North America—Shaw (2017: 117) notes “that the move to the night might be seen as an attempt to find a timespace in which a more open and creative politics is possible, strategically responding to the reduction in the freedom to protest in the more heavily surveyed day.”

Precisely the evasion, the slipping away into the night, the search for other than a securitized and striated space, is central here; in Paris the hypersurveilled urban spaces and in Maputo the security forces and their oftentimes indiscriminate diurnal violence exacted on protestors and civilians. Both index long-standing practices of evading statist domains of control, surveillance and, ultimately, notions of security defined by a central government. Further, in such evasion there is also a blurring of the public and private as protestors would often be confined to homes due to the imposed nightly curfew, left to consume news on TV or social media. Engaging in banging pots and pans may, in some sense, be interpreted as an inclusive, low-stakes form of protest, reflecting other social media activism as a facile way to “vent frustration” by protesting from the comfort of your home. However, here the Paris and Maputo cases diverge somewhat as in the latter those banging the pots were constantly fearing teargas grenades and shots launched at their balconies—as well as the volatility and violence of the situation being underscored by the number of casualties in daytime street protests.

Within contexts that are increasingly conditioned by non-democratic forms of securitization—including places like Mozambique—we, as anthropologists, also need to shift our attention to include the full sensorium: our own and of the fellow humans we engage. This includes exploring also what is entailed by “radical listening”, as Brandon LaBelle has called it. He also notes that “from an insurrectionary urgency, gestures and acts are made that force into being a heterogeneous space of social becoming, whose weakness or invisibility, whose transience or strangeness upset or elide established structures to produce what I think of as unlikely publics” (LaBelle 2018: 14-15).

Arguably, the nocturnal beating did produce what we might, with LaBelle, call “unlikely publics” with noise, rhythmicity, and the rearticulation of the quotidian kitchenware into powerful messages of distrust, assertiveness, collectivity. These forms also carved out yet another terrain for a gendered and classed form of political agency in a violent, state-orchestrated security state environment, instilling fear in the powers-that-be and their agents in the streets

Noise against the nocturnal body of democracy

The political theorist Achille Mbembe connects the nocturnal to various capacities and dimensions of the postcolony in many of his writings (Mbembe 2003). Crucially, he draws our attention to what he calls “the nocturnal body” of democracy. This is a form of organ constituted by the (often hidden) violent parts of democracy and statecraft, exemplified by the plantation and the penal colony.

The image of the nocturnal body aptly captures the shape of the postcolonial state of Mozambique and its long-standing impulse to deploy violence against its citizens—both at day and night (see Machava 2025). However, what is spectacular about the protests in Maputo in 2024 and 2025 and the many incarnations of citizen-led uprisings before that (Bertelsen 2014; de Brito 2017), is that the body of the populace unites through rhythms the source of which is invisible yet tangibly, corporally, and sensorially experienced.

The paradoxical combination of tangible and elusive in the nocturnal acts of panelaço showcase protests that are multivocal, yet highly gendered through transforming quotidian objects into vessels for resounding, collective rhythms of resistance and protests. Crucial here is also the enshrouding in darkness of protestors, effectively obscuring the waxing and waning numbers of those who beat the pans—although the many deformed pots and pans are there for everyone to see during daylight. It also underscores the possibilities inherent in the pliability of the political that is attained via collective (but not organized) efforts, indexing also the forms of articulation available in the restrictive political ontology dominating Mozambique (cf. Sumich and Bertelsen 2021).

This in situ generation of a sensorium of security beyond both the state and the marketized commodity form of metal gates, guards, guns, and alarms is significant and is a form of protest with long historical roots that has become globalised—from Argentina to France, from Canada to the Philippines. In Mozambique, its collective format is poised against the massive nocturnal body of the one-party state and its street-level presences. Finally, if noise should be approached as generative, as suggested by Serres (2007 [1980]), then the nocturnal beating pots, the rhythmic banging and its endless recursivity, as reproduced and shared by digital channels, generates an enduring, common sonic space of collective security against the violence of the state’s nocturnal body.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has published on political violence, postcolonialism, urban transformation, and socio-cultural dynamics, most of which is based on his long-term research in Mozambique since 1998.

References

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2014. Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique. Ethnos, 81(1): 25–52.

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2016. Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique. New York: Berghahn Books.

de Brito, Luís, ed. 2017. Agora eles têm medo de nós! – Uma colectânea de textos sobre as revoltas populares em Moçambique (2008-2012). Maputo: Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE).

Feijó, João, and Rita Chiúre. 2025a. “Afinal ‘foi só Maputo’? A geografia do protesto pós-eleitoral”. Destaque Rural #324. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR).

Feijó, João, and Rita Chiúre. 2025b. “Quem saiu às ruas? Uma análise dos actores em protesto durante as manifestações pós-eleitorais”. Destaque Rural #331. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR).

Machava, Benedito Luís. 2025. The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990. Ohio University Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola.” Research in African Literatures 34(4): 1–26.

Serres, Michel. 2007 [1980]. The parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, Robert. 2017. “Pushed to the margins of the city: The urban night as a timespace of protest at Nuit Debout, Paris.” Political Geography 59:117-125.

Sumich, Jason and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2021. “Just out of reach: Imminence, meaning and political ontology in Mozambique”. Current Anthropology, 62(3): 287-308.

Taela, Kátia. 2025. “A ‘Revolução das Panelas’: Mulheres, Crise de Cidadania e Protestos em Moçambique Contemporâneo”. Destaque Rural #337. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural

Cite as: Bertelsen, B. E. 2025. “Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/bjorn-enge-bertelsen-pots-that-go-bang-in-the-night-noise-and-rhythm-as-enacting-popular-security-amidst-political-protest-in-mozambique/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Beatrice Jauregui: Anxious Anticipations: Border-crossing In/security and the Implosion of the US-led Global Order

Image 1: Akwesasne territory. Source: Mohawk Council of Akwesasne

Born on US soil to citizen parents, I applied for my first passport at age 12, when my grandma took me with her to visit Italy and Greece for two weeks. My biggest concern then was packing my best clothes and how the passport picture unfortunately highlighted my crooked teeth and frizzy hair. Ten years later, I renewed the passport to make my second trip overseas, this time to go to India to do independent student research on a grant from my university. Imagine my awe and confusion when—thanks to a letter of introduction by an Indian government official whom I met through a professor—I was able to bypass the customs and immigration lines with a police escort at the airport in New Delhi and get my passport stamped without question in a back office before being shuttled into a gleaming white ambassador car to meet with a senior police officer. These early experiences crossing international borders were therefore smooth. They contrast dramatically with experiences shared by people who have long been Othered and constructed as suspect in various ways. Precisely this sensory experience has become more salient for me recently.

On an episode of The Chris Hedges Report podcast, Canadian writer Omar El Akkad talks about growing up with a “cultural survival kit” that (in large part) traces back to his witnessing a soldier interrogating his father at a checkpoint in Egypt. He says he is always anxious to go through airport border security, and points to how so many people more or less like him (i.e., brown skinned and/or naturalized citizens, with names indexing certain national or religious identities, perhaps with different accents to their spoken English) are “regularly dragged into secondary” inspection at US (or other) border crossings. El Akkad shares that this pervasive experience involves things like “pre-emptively preparing” for interactions with government agents “and trying to put them at ease” so as to suggest to them “don’t be scared” of me. He notes how over time he realized that it would behoove him to behave less “yes, sir, no sir” formally with border security officers, and instead act “more casual because that’s how people who are from here are behaving”. He remarks how only some feel “the cumulative effect” of how border securitization intersects with racism and other forms of discrimination. This is just one account of ways that marginalized peoples sense and embody insecurity at official border crossings globally through consciously altered comportment—never mind the millions who annually attempt to migrate unofficially or illegally, often risking or losing their lives.

I moved to Toronto for work over a decade ago and am now a dual citizen of both Canada and the US. Until recently, crossing between these countries felt easy, oiled by trusted traveler programs and historically friendly political economic relations. The only thing that ever “detained” me was a lonely border agent posted at a remote intersection of western Quebec/upstate New York, who was thinking of going back to school and wanted to chit-chat when he asked about my business and I told him about my scholarly research and teaching on police. He got an impromptu 20 minutes “office hours” session, and it was mildly endearing since that afternoon I was not in a rush while returning to Akwesasne from doing some fieldwork with members of their sister community in Kahnawà:ke, which is a Kanien’kehá:ke (Mohawk) territory near Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). The first time I felt significant anxiety about crossing this complex international boundary was a few days later, when I was informed by Canadian border agents that I could be fined thousands of dollars and my car seized because I had inadvertently not followed proper reporting procedures while conducting research in Akwesasne, a territory that straddles both the US-Canada border, and also the provincial border between Ontario and Quebec.

Akwesasne’ronon (the Kanien’ké:ha word for members of this Indigenous community) experience the insecurity, jurisdictional confusion, and exclusionary power of international border enforcement every day, since boundary lines zigzag irregularly through their land (Image 1). People joke about homes where the kitchen is in Canada and the living room is in the US, and relate far less amusing struggles over which problematic governing agreements dictate action on everything from commercial licenses to speeding tickets and the illegal trafficking of drugs, firearms, and human beings through the territory. As members of a sovereign First Nation recognized by both Canadian and US federal governments, Akwesasne’rono have special rights to move around their territory as needed without incident or incrimination. Unlike US or Canadian citizens—and with the exception of several designated crossings where there are special “express” lanes only accessible to Indigenous people with “native status” cards—Akwesasne’rono are not required to “check in” with officials when they traverse the border, not least since it would be impractical, often impossible to do so. But even people with all of their status documents in order have shared countless stories about being routinely questioned, detained, investigated, or otherwise inconvenienced—and reminded of their colonized Other-ness—by government agents on all sides. One community member with a status card even reported that he had to sit for several hours at a checkpoint one weekday after getting a medical X-ray, since agents detected radiation on him and classified it as suspicious and indicative of a potential security threat.

It is hardly news that even some of the most supposedly “friendly” and “porous” borders for some—especially persons privileged to have passports from globally powerful countries or other types of legitimating documentation—have long been places of anxiety, uncertainty, frustration, fear, paranoia, and terror for others, particularly people identified with groups facing prejudice and discrimination on the basis of indigeneity, nationality, race, religion, and other markers of cultural difference. Many in this latter category have become used to embodied experiences of sensing insecurity in a liminal space of exceptional, arbitrary, and mostly unchecked power meted out by state authority figures.

Recently however, and increasingly so, persons in the former (privileged) category, including myself, have begun sensing insecurity in borderlands as well. A stark case followed the re-election of Donald Trump as US President on a platform that included hard-line anti-immigrant and blatantly racist ideologies. Many have watched with horror as these ideologies play out in constant news streams about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids leading to the kidnapping and deportation of thousands of people across the US. Simultaneously, there are many stories circulating more or less publicly about increasingly arbitrary allegations of “anti-Americanism” and “national security threats” suspicions against persons who express dissent against or negative evaluations of some of the regime’s destructive and incoherent policies.

There are now many news accounts of foreign nationals getting caught up in the US immigration-detention dragnet since the beginning of 2025, sometimes allegedly due to procedural errors or miscommunications. Governments, NGOs, universities, business corporations, and others have been issuing travel warnings to their constituents, advising on how to respond to increased surveillance, search and seizure of electronic devices, denial of entry, and possible detention depending on one’s citizenship status. Stories have been circulating about people having their passports marked with a five-year ban from entering the US simply for being critical of the Trump regime. All of this is of course alarming for millions of people who have any sort of relationship with or reason to travel to the US. And it has dramatically shifted my own sense of in/security, even as someone with all of the (supposed) rights of US citizenship, and the privileges associated with being a well-educated descendent of white European settlers with no criminal record. Before traveling to the US, I now always anticipate interrogation. I carefully review the content of all of my devices; rehearse what I might say if questioned; and even give my children instructions on what (not) to say and do when we travel together. I have never been so anxious when passing through Canada-US border checkpoints, sometimes to the point of feeling physically ill, or unable to eat, bordering on panic attacks, even though I know “rationally” that I have done nothing wrong or anything that should warrant increased scrutiny or sanction.

My exponential increase in anxiety around crossing into the US is not simply speculative paranoia based on distant doomster social media stories and second-hand rumors. It emerges out of two specific circumstances related to expressed recognition of state violence. Foremost is a history of speaking out against occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine/Israel (Bangstad 2025), to the extent that I have been profiled alongside thousands of others on the defamatory Canary Mission website with false charges of being antisemitic and pro-Hamas, and of allegedly supporting “terrorism”. I have viewed documented evidence of persons listed on this untrustworthy propaganda website being interrogated about it explicitly in secondary inspections at the US border; and in some cases, if someone was not a US citizen, they were reportedly banned and denied entry to the US. This is part of a larger pattern of the current US government’s weaponization of antisemitism as a smoke screen to try to bring universities and other institutions to heel with threats of rescinding of federal funding, canceling of work and study visas, and banning international student admissions as punishments or “warnings” for not falling in line with regime policies or allowing open protest of war crimes and atrocities. I admit to feeling afraid even now as I write this, and hope this will not cause harm in the future.

The other key factor that has amplified my sense of anticipatory insecurity about border crossings more generally relates back to my decades of research in India on police and security infrastructure. After some critical comments I made in independent media about harmful discriminatory policies and practices of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) government that has now been in power there for more than a decade, representatives from the Indian consulate came to my house in Toronto and issued me a “show cause notice”, criminalizing me for alleged “anti-national” activities that violate “the sovereignty and integrity of India”, and accusing me of “clandestine activities” in relation to my research. The charges are as absurd as they are baseless, and a Delhi-based lawyer has done their best to set me up well to fight these allegations in court as needed. But the government’s strategy of harassment and intimidation has compelled me to self-censor. While I still write candidly in scholarly sources about my research, I am more hesitant to respond to inquiries from journalists requesting comments on politically sensitive matters. And while many friends and colleagues already know about this old “news” of my essentially being blacklisted from a place I have considered another home for decades, this is the first time that I’m sharing it publicly in writing, more than three years after state officials first darkened my doorstep. Meanwhile, I have not attempted to return to India, even though I technically still have what is known as OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) status. I have read and heard about many stories of other persons with this status having their cards revoked, and I fear arriving at that airport—where, recall, I was once able to bypass the long lines of foreign passport holders even though I had never before set foot in the country—only to be deported immediately, like other colleagues who have been unfortunately caught up in the Indian government’s dragnet of nationalistic hyper-securitization.

This is how state harassment and repression of dissent have always worked, of course; through instilling generalized suspicion along ideological divides, engendering amorphous anxiety that accumulates like moss, and shapeshifts into intensified fear and paranoia that spreads like a contagion. Rapidly changing technological capacities aside, most of the routine and exceptional tactics, strategies, and outcomes of potential and actual state violence are not new. But their sensory impact on new populations, and in relation to US power specifically, indicates substantive and seismic shifts. One key feature of these shifts is the increasingly blurry “border” between a palpable fear of mere “inconvenience” (perhaps I’ll miss a flight, or my phone will be seized at the border and I won’t ever get it back) versus the probability of a seriously harmful impact on peoples’ lives (perhaps I’ll be detained indefinitely, or they’ll do a full forensic image of my seized device that will lead to serious legal or financial complications, never mind the violations of privacy). Scaling up and out, it also seems that we are witnessing significant realignments and sea changes in the global order of political economic power, heretofore dominated by the US through what some have called “empire” in the post 1945-era.

Returning to El Akkad’s reflections, he acknowledges that as someone with the privilege of Canadian citizenship, his border-crossing fears have been, if not “silly” (his word), then still mostly about trying to ensure “as few headaches as possible” and to prevent the potential hassle of losing time, money, or equipment. For me as a dual citizen, I would like to continue to feel that the worst I might suffer at the Canada-US border is a short period of detention until I could obtain legal representation. But there is a growing sense that what appears to be intensified and unpredictable border interrogations of anyone and everyone—not just the “usual suspects”, which of course has always been “unjust”—may only get worse, and that the “normal” national and international legal protections may not hold, such that even citizens who don’t protest too much may be subject to extraordinary rendition. It feels like I now know more people than not who express some version of this fear on a regular basis, and especially in the lead up to a trip crossing the US border—or in a decision to avoid going to the US altogether, which also now seems far more common. The boundary between nuisance and violence has become more than a little insecure.

The (again) not new or unique, and yet intensified and arguably more-prevalent-than-ever, sense of insecurity around crossing borders into the US is also indicative of concerns well beyond just mobility and migration. It indexes the decline and fall of political economic forms and cultural ways of life that many people, including some of the wealthiest and heretofore well-protected and well-served by the US-led global order, have long enjoyed and don’t want to let go. Among other touchstones of security, it seems that US-based global and national governing institutions, free speech, legal and regulatory bodies, human and civil rights, social services, educational opportunities, and trust in mediated knowledge production are disintegrating across the board. Many try to go on as before, hoping for a savior in litigation, legislation, or perhaps a new leader, assuming the next US national election occurs on schedule. This mass tendency to “keep calm and carry on” seems to have a deeper sensory structure than mere maintenance of morale in the face of widespread and ongoing degeneration. Perhaps it exhibits something more akin to what Alexei Yurchak (2005) has called “hypernormalization” in the context of the end of Soviet Russia, wherein people expressed a strong sense that things would always continue as they had, even as their world was falling apart around them. I cannot predict with any precision the long-term or even immediate future of the US-led Global Order. But the fluctuations and increasing sense of creeping dread and acute terror that I now feel every time I approach the border of the country of my birth signify the insecurity, if not the complete implosion, of so much that so many of us have always thought to be true and trusted.

Beatrice Jauregui is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. She is author of Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India and co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Global Policing and Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency.  

References

Bangstad, Sindre 2025. “The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and Academic Freedom” Focaalblog 28 March, https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/28/sindre-bangstad-the-ihra-working-definition-of-antisemitism-and-academic-freedom/

Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton University Press.

Cite as: Jauregui, B. 2025. “Anxious Anticipations: Border-crossing In/security and the Implosion of the US-led Global Order” Focaalblog December 22. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/22/beatrice-jauregui-anxious-anticipations-border-crossing-in-security-and-the-implosion-of-the-us-led-global-order/