Basu, S. (2025). Entangled Skinscapes: Sticky Memories, Tactile Rumours and the Trouble with Touch. Anthropology in Action, 32(2), 1–10.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2025.320202

Open access: Yes

Notes: Violence, experienced or enacted in any form, moves through our bodies. In this article, Basu talks about the “entangled skinscapes” through which violence (and, in particular, political violence) is experienced and made sense of. Here, Basu defines entangled skinscapes as the “layered sensory surfaces through which violence is felt, carried, and reactivated across bodies, homes, and digital interfaces” (p. 1), where surfaces are understood as both the body through which violence is registered and digital screens, where violence is registered and traced. Through an excellent ethnographic account in India, working with survivors of political violence, Basu explains how “survivors described their phones as both indispensable tools and burdensome archives, storing images, messages and reminders of the violence. The phone had become a device of remembrance, a ritual object through which past violence resurfaced in the present, as seamless as one touches their forehead or chin when thinking deeply” (p. 5). In this way, Basu positions the screens as a second skin, where touch brings back and forward past, present and future experiences of violence.