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Journal of Material Culture
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DOI: 10.1177/1359183508095495
2008 13: 251 Journal of Material Culture
Russell Hitchings and Shu Jun Lee
The Case of Young People in Contemporary Singapore
Air Conditioning and the Material Culture of Routine Human Encasement:
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AIR CONDITIONING AND THE
MATERIAL CULTURE OF
ROUTINE HUMAN
ENCASEMENT
The Case of Young People in Contemporary Singapore
RUSSELL HITCHINGS
University College London, UK
SHU JUN LEE
University College London, UK
Abstract
There are many factors shaping the relationship between human bodies
and their immediate environments and the mechanical control of ambient
thermal conditions is playing an increasingly important part. It is with this
in mind that this article travels to the tropical island of Singapore where the
assumption that the air surrounding people should generally be cooled has
quietly become entrenched. Specically we focus on the young people we
nd in this country and consider how the presence of air conditioning has
become implicated in particular combinations of social practice and sensual
expectation amongst this group. The conclusion we draw is that it is only
by attending to the contextual interplay of bodies, clothing and immediate
climate that we gain the fullest sense of the processes underwriting a much
wider retreat into indoor social spaces where these elements could be usefully
understood as the material culture of routine human encasement.
Key Words adaptation air conditioning bodies clothing comfort
Singapore
251
Journal of Material Culture Vol. 13(3): 251265
Copyright
2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore)

[DOI: 10.1177/1359183508095495]www.sagepublications.com
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FORMS OF PHYSICAL ENCASEMENT
Inside the hushed environment of the museum hall, the reverence with
which we approach the items on display there stems partly from their
encasement within a cool and contemplative context where they have
come gradually to appear magically untroubled by any mundane
problems of material wear or physical effectiveness. In this way certain
techniques of preservation have arguably been complicit in encouraging
more removed modes of academically understanding objects. This is
because the routine practices of museum conservation can inadvertently
imbue artefacts with an uncanny sense of stasis (Colloredo-Manseld,
2004; DeSilvey, 2006) as they take them imaginatively away from the
activities within which they were originally implicated (Ingold, 2000).
One of the technologies enlisted in this exercise has been the air condi-
tioning unit that unobtrusively helps us control the ambient environment.
The initial argument of this article is that we might want to turn the con-
ceptual tables on these devices. Rather than allowing them to slip into
the background as something of a quiet accomplice in encouraging more
abstract forms of academic analysis, we might want to place these units
centre stage since they are themselves directly implicated in the orches-
tration of immediate sensory experience. One of the reasons we might
want to do so is because, like the seemingly inert objects we peer at inside
museum collection cabinets, air conditioners can encourage a strangely
encased kind of human existence where, like the eventual decay of the
artefact, any physical unravelling of the person can come eventually to
connote an inappropriate lack of ambient control.
Recent considerations of clothing that take an explicitly material
culture approach have emphasized how physical fabrics and personal
activities work together to sustain particular social practices (see, for
example, McVeigh, 2000; Summers, 2001; Bannerjee and Miller, 2003).
In the wake of Bourdieus (1990) insistence that weaving was much less
about the cultural cosmologies that often interested the academic and
much more about the warmth of the material that would subsequently
become paramount to the wearer, these studies are conceptually inno-
vative in the way they have been determined to attend to both physical
and symbolic elements according to how each comes contextually to
the fore. Given that the possibility of cultural communication through
clothing must always rst contend with mundane matters associated
with helping people achieve personal comfort and complete practical
tasks, this exercise makes a great deal of sense in terms of tempering
the excesses of previous academic accounts that centred on more seem-
ingly scholarly issues such as symbolism (Woodward, 2002). Taking one
recent article from this journal as an exemplar, Allerton (2007) describes
how the sarong offers several interesting opportunities in terms of how
it helps many Malaysians achieve a range of practical objectives. Here
J o ur nal o f MATERI AL CULTURE 13( 3)
252
it is the immediate qualities of the cloth that she rightly understands
as central to this process and, in making this kind of argument, she is
now far from alone. Indeed she is accompanied by a growing group of
researchers who argue that we should be wary of how previous research
strategies tended to pull garments conceptually away from their wearers
before they were given any analytic opportunity to tell us how they
physically felt about inhabiting them (Woodward, 2002; Kchler and
Miller, 2005).
Yet, whilst these studies are commendable because they return us to
the fundamental importance of immediate sensory experience, it is clearly
not only the clothing enveloping the person that provides new kinds of
physical opportunity. Indeed, rather than investigating the interaction
between bodies and clothing as though they operated within something
of a conceptual vacuum, we could recast them as only two amongst the
many material layers that collectively encase us. To continue with the
Malaysian example, whilst sarongs may be so central to local cultural
life there that they should be rightly understood as extensions of the skin
(Allerton, 2007), this intimacy is clearly itself already reliant upon other
forms of physical enveloping since it is only within the tropical conditions
associated with this country that such thin fabrics are enough to keep
humans sufciently warm. Our initial argument is therefore that we could
extend this approach through a more expansive understanding of the
material culture of embodied experience since, though they instinctively
seem more elusively immaterial and though they are certainly harder
to pin down and potentially preserve, the envelopes of ambient air that
encase people can have profound effects upon their actions and experi-
ences. This article seeks to demonstrate why we think this approach
might be useful by drawing on a study where the wider aim was to
consider how a small group of young Singaporeans have come to depend
on the presence of conditioned air. The wider conclusion we come to is
that this process can be usefully understood in terms of interlocking
layers of local human encasement.
COOL COMFORT AND THE SINGAPOREAN CASE
An increasing awareness of the ironic tension between the accumulating
evidence for anthropogenic global warming and the growing popularity
of mechanical answers to the question of how to keep humans sufciently
cool has led a number of social scientists to examine thermal comfort
consumption. This has primarily been in terms of the routine practices
encouraged by seemingly innocuous devices such as the air conditioner
(see, for example, Ger et al., 1998; Shove, 2003; Chappells and Shove,
2005) where there are several underpinning anxieties to this exercise.
One is that continued atmospheric warming might encourage people to
Hitchings and Lee: AI R CONDI TI ONI NG AND HUMAN ENCAS EMENT
253
retreat further inside thermally neutral fortresses that protect them from
the outdoor extremes that are expected to accompany these climatic
changes. Another is that the resultant use of air conditioning technolo-
gies, which themselves consume signicant amounts of energy, will only
serve to exacerbate the problem in terms of increased carbon emissions.
A third is that this situation might be made yet worse as people come
gradually to no longer care about an external environment upon which
they have largely turned their backs. Clearly there is much at stake here.
Yet, whilst these endeavors have produced several important insights,
they have also tended to centre on the western world and the northern
hemisphere where the worry is that demand will rise sharply as peak
summer temperatures start routinely to surpass the points above which
people decide they are willing to pay for the pleasures of mechanically
cooled air (Chappells and Shove, 2005).
Far away in the tropical east, meanwhile, there are already places
where air conditioning is understood as a necessary installation in every
car and almost every commercial building. An excellent example is the
tropical city-state of Singapore where, in a matter of decades, air condi-
tioning has become so common that almost all Singaporeans now enjoy
its benets in one way or another. Competition in this country has driven
down prices, just as the government has encouraged demand to keep pace
with increased levels of afuence. In public areas, it is now common to
enjoy this kind of cool comfort by taking advantage of the ambient
environments found within shopping malls (Chua, 2003) whilst, in the
domestic setting, air conditioning is now almost as common as the video
player amongst even the poorest of groups (DOS, 2005 and see Figure
1). Beyond the home, ofce and mall, conditioned air has also started to
spread through bus interchanges, tennis courts (Straits Times, 2005) and
254
FIGURE 1 Spread of air conditioning in Singapore. Households with audio/video
CD players, personal computers and air conditioners (%), 19932003.
Adapted from DOS, 2005
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Audio/video
CD player
Personal
computer
Air conditioner
5.4
32
61
4.1
17
11
31
30
42
1993
1998
2003
even crematoria (New York Times, 2002). Arguably the Singaporean fasci-
nation with this form of thermal consumption scaled new heights in 2005,
when the opening of the rst sub zero degree bar (Today, 2005) presented
excited tropical consumers with the hitherto unavailable opportunity to
combine social drinks with the embodied delight (Herschong, 1979) of a
freezing ambient environment.
Singapore is characterized by uniformly high temperature and humid-
ity levels and ofcial sources generally use this geographical situation
to justify their reliance on air conditioning. In 2001, the environment
minister paid tribute to air conditioning which had seemingly enhanced
productivity to the extent that this technology was one of the reasons
why Singapore now enjoys the highest per capita GDP among countries
on the tropical belt (Ministry of Environment, 2001). Previously, the
future rst Prime Minister had taken an even stronger stance when, in
a poll regarding the millenniums most inuential invention, S.M. Lee
chose the humble air conditioner which, with distinct echoes of environ-
mental determinism, he went on to argue has allowed people to become
as productive in Singapore as they are in the more temperate regions of
the world (Wall Street Journal, 1999). On initial examination, it would
appear that both the government and the people of Singapore are quite
happy to perpetuate a wider belief about how particular ambient environ-
ments indicate social progress that we see more widely in the region
today (Brody, 2006). This is even though this situation comes at quite an
environmental price (see IACEE, 2000 and see Table 1) and it was with
this in mind that we devised a short project to explore the extent to which
Singaporeans have actually come to rely on this technology.
Rather than assuming that it is simply sensible for Singaporeans to
adopt this technology, we followed the argument that air-conditioning
use depends on the establishment of particular forms of embodied order
(Chappells and Shove, 2005) and that we therefore need to understand
how these orders become locally institutionalized (Hitchings, 2007).
Some scholars have already noted how air-conditioning expectations have
underwritten the global spread of the standard business suit (Longhurst,
2001; Shove, 2004) and Ingold (2004) has suggested that the urban
experience is increasingly engineered so that people have come to lack
255
TABLE 1 Main consumers of electricity in Singapores buildings (residential
and commercial)
Main electricity consumers in buildings Electricity consumption (%)
Air conditioning 33
Refrigeration 25
Adapted from the IACEE, 2000
embodied condence when it comes to more unusual forms of physical
encounter. We also know that, in the industrially developed West, people
now spend over 90 per cent of their time within buildings (Kosonen and
Tan, 2004). There is therefore a reasonable amount of evidence to suggest
that many urban lives are increasingly groundless (Lewis, 2000) in the
sense of being routinely removed from more earthly forms of unpre-
dictable environmental experience. Yet bold contentions such as these
clearly need to be examined in the light of different patterns of physical
activity on the ground in order to understand the extent to which they
are indeed at large within individual cities. In other words, they needed
to be understood geographically and this was the stance we sought to
advance in our Singaporean study.
Whilst much more is known about the social effects of air condition-
ing in America (Prins, 1992; Cooper, 1998; Ackerman, 2002) where public
porches and sun parlours have been gradually replaced by more private
forms of controlled indoor ambience, the social relations surrounding
this technology have, to the best of our knowledge, not yet been explic-
itly researched in Singapore (although see George, 2000 for a passing
consideration). We sought to
consider how air condition-
ing is implicated in the lives
of young middle-class Singa-
poreans today because we
reasoned that they would
provide a particularly pro-
vocative account of this issue.
This is because it could be
easily argued that it is this
social cohort, more than any
other in the world, that has
been most exposed to the
effects of this technology.
Our method involved inter-
views and focus groups with
a group of eight Singapor-
eans in their 20s alongside
wider observation of how air
conditioning was integrated
into particular local practices.
Our wider aim was to see
what this approach would
reveal about how they felt
about their air-conditioned
existences. Clearly we were
256
FIGURE 2 A high-rise residential building in
Singapore, showing ats equipped with air
conditioners (indicated by arrow).
Photo by Shu Jun Lee
implicitly talking about buildings here and the way in which people
become inclined to stay indoors. However, we preferred to focus on
immediate physicality, which was much less about specic structures
and much more about the different bodies of people and air that we
found within them. Clearly we were also interested in sustainability here
and how we could potentially intervene in improving the local Singa-
porean situation. Yet, in this project, our intention was to start with
practice, rather than policy, in order to begin with an understanding of
the scale of the challenge faced by any possible intervention. With these
contextual points in place, the following three sections describe differ-
ent aspects of how our respondents were habituated to particular forms
of experience. We conclude with what they collectively seem to suggest
about how we should understand the suites of material culture associ-
ated with situations such as these.
THE UNIVERSAL EXPECTATION OF AIR CONDITIONING
Its like a house must have a door or something.
Chewei
Regardless of individual aspiration, it is worth beginning our discussion
by stating that the collective conclusion our respondents came to was
that removing air conditioning from the lives of most Singaporeans was
not only impractical but almost impossible. In other words, the demand
for air conditioning had largely reached the point where it was an expec-
tation. In the public sphere, with regard to the ofce and the school, air
conditioning was seen as essential not only for enhancing productivity
but also as a courtesy towards employees and students who themselves
worked hard to ensure the collective organizational success. Put differ-
ently, those working in such places deserved to be rewarded for their
efforts and this meant air conditioning. Indeed air conditioning was,
more broadly, seen to be something of a public entitlement. Immediately
prior to this research there had been a high prole public debate about
the government decision to air condition bus interchanges. Yet the inter-
esting point here was that this discussion centred on the extent to which
this intervention might impact upon ticket pricing. What these discussions
revealed was an assumption that air conditioning would be provided in
public spaces. This outrage, which was shared by the young people with
whom we talked, stemmed from the fact that this service was poten-
tially not without personal cost. In other words, air conditioning in public
spaces has come to be seen as something that should be either paid for
fully, or at least heavily subsidized, by the relevant authorities. In this
sense, conditioned air was an ambient entitlement that they felt should
always be provided in the public realm.
257
In the private sphere, air conditioning was equally regarded as a
basic rather than a luxury good. In the past, our respondents were aware
that it conveyed a certain degree of status and, though it had not entirely
lost this position, the meaning had certainly changed. Whereas air condi-
tioning was previously associated with wealth and generosity in terms
of providing cooler air to others, the air-conditioning unit was now one
in a range of symbols against which poverty and thrift was judged. Whilst
it continues to be used ofcially in household surveys and informally by
individuals in gauging status, whereas in the past only the very rich
could afford cooling systems at home, today respondents felt that only
the very poor would not be able to pay for them. Indeed the absence of
air conditioning from the modern Singaporean home was more conspic-
uous than its presence. That is to say that these young people were more
surprised by a missing unit than an available one. Of course, this does
not mean the air conditioner is always in use. Indeed it was more often
understood as a necessity in preparation for those days when the weather
was to be shut out. In other words, an installation at home was necess-
ary to make the household feel secure in the knowledge that it can cope
with changes in the weather, or simply that it is able to control its own
private environment. Regardless of usage, however, the central point was
that the presence of air conditioning was always anticipated. Like the
door to a building, this technology has become understood as a ubiqui-
tous feature of both public and private environments.
THE PRESENTATIONAL POSSIBILITIES OF COOLER
ENVIRONMENTS
Id rather be cold and wear a cardigan. Theres only so much you can do to
avoid the sun whereas when you are cold you can easily put on a shawl.
Minyi
But how was this physicality lived out in terms of how cooler indoor
experiences were welcomed? With a sense of their expectations in place,
we now turn to the social opportunities presented by this form of ambient
inhabitation. Here it was immediately clear that the high temperatures
of Singapore have spawned a yearning for cold conditions and, whilst a
history of deprivation has certainly bred desire, it was also the case that
cold was generally preferred to heat. This was largely because they felt
there were more alternatives available to them for dealing with colder
conditions. In other words, colder environments were understood as
offering a variety of coping strategies that warmer temperatures were
simply unable to furnish. Hot weather was seen to limit the clothes that
could be worn without compromising on decency, and air conditioning
relieved them of these constraints. The arrival of cold has therefore
258
extended the range of fashionable choices available to the consuming
tropical body and these stretched from cardigans and shawls for women
to long-sleeved shirts and jackets for men. Elsewhere Chua (2003) notes
how the globalization of black clothing has inuenced Singaporean youth
such that they have increasingly abandoned the brighter colours of trad-
itional ethnic outts. Yet little account is taken here of the role of these
fabrics in helping individuals manage their tropical comforts alongside
air conditioning. This is important when changes in personal appearance
are always partly a product of the thermal conditions surrounding people
and the scope these conditions correspondingly offer for forms of indi-
vidual expression. In this way, just as air conditioning can be understood
as being responsible for the global diffusion of the standard business
suit, it logically follows that more subdued international fashions might
spread more easily through the tropics if mechanically cooled air is in
evidence. Since we know that black clothing absorbs more heat, it is
likely to be much more welcome when the person it covers is otherwise
prevented from getting too hot.
Building on the opportunity for personal expression through clothing,
the social interactions of our respondents were largely organized within
air-conditioned spaces. Catching up with friends was the best example
where this interaction was often characterized as entailing a brief meeting
over an infrequent coffee. As such, the young people we talked with told
us how they felt there was little time to waste in order that these friend-
ships were efciently built upon. Certainly they did not want to wait for
any more gradual forms of embodied adjustment. Rather than nding
more creative ways of achieving an appropriate bodily state then, and
regardless of the amount of time that was actually available to them,
their feeling was often that immediate time pressures were generally
such that they could not wait for any form of physical adjustments. This
meant that air conditioning was required. Indeed this was doubly so
when they wanted to wear what they understood to be more culturally
expressive forms of clothing, as a wider variety of items could be worn
when the background temperature could be assumed always to be cooler.
Such an idealized public social setting also encouraged people to recreate
these conditions at home in preparation for possible visitors. Providing
this kind of personal comfort meant removing the possibility of dis-
comfort and there was little time to lose. Air conditioning was clearly
carrying a weighty social load (Wilhite and Lutzenhiser, 1998) in terms
of supporting modes of social interaction that were culturally attractive in
Singapore, if not yet always unquestionably understood as appropriate,
and this took shape through particular kinds of personal presentation in
terms of clothing.
259
THE CREATION OF MORE PHYSICALLY SENSITIVE PEOPLE
We all remember taking buses with no air conditioning, right? Well I think
it plays a part in our tolerance because subsequent generations will be taking
air-conditioned buses
Kenneth
Yet to focus only on the relationship between clothing and ambient air
clearly only gives us part of the picture. To do so would be to forget the
dynamism associated with the even more immediate. This is in terms of
bodies themselves and this is the topic of our third empirical section.
When we talked about whether one set of conditions was preferable to
another, the argument was generally that it was much better to have it
cold than hot. In other words, people were increasingly assumed to have
a greater tolerance when it came to lower, rather than higher, tempera-
tures, which was itself somewhat ironic in view of the tropical conditions
found outside the buildings within which we conducted our study. Whilst
no one was really in favour of heat, what was especially interesting here
was the implicit acceptance of the argument that what was comfortable
for one person was not always so for another. Although sometimes argu-
ments were weakly marshalled about how air conditioning had become
essential in view of local climatic conditions, all our respondents were
well aware that previous generations had endured the tropical environ-
ment, either without any conditioned air or certainly with a more minimal
usage. In other words, they understood that perceived thermal thresh-
olds were dynamic in terms of how they varied over time and between
individuals. Some felt that recent local weather changes, such as shifts
towards slightly hotter conditions, may have contributed to the heavier
use of air conditioning within their generational cohort. Yet most remained
relatively unconvinced by any form of scientic or popular argument
about local climatic change.
What they were much more willing to recognize was that their hunger
for cooler air had grown because their tolerance of heat and humidity has
shrunk. One respondent directly admitted that her tolerance threshold
has decreased because of her increasing reliance on the cool comforts of
air conditioning. This was so much so that she was willing to state that
she had become the kind of person who always wanted an appropriately
cooled ambient environment. Whilst few respondents were this aware
of changes in their own physiological desires, most agreed that their
increased exposure has certainly made them less tolerant of their local
outdoor climate. One respondent considered these thresholds in terms
of the levels of tropical heat and humidity with which people feel they
can cope. He noted how the generation succeeding his is growing up
with fewer social spaces in a non-conditioned state. Focusing on the
arrival of air conditioning inside buses, his reasoning was that, since they
260
are still unable to drive, contemporary children are likely to be more
familiar with this form of public transport. For him this meant they would
therefore grow up so accustomed to air conditioning, even in such basic
places as commuting spaces, that this technology will inexorably come
to seem the only possible tool for achieving the appropriate thermal regu-
lation of their bodies.
The argument for air-conditioned environments attracted even more
adherents when we came to issues of bodily wetness. Complaints about
high humidity levels and the threats these pose to individual senses of
well-being were much more passionate than complaints about the heat.
Humidity, in particular, was able to induce the arrival of sweat that could
collect in unsightly ways upon clothing, which, linking to our previous
section, was particularly problematic when they were now used to
choosing from a range options for fashionable display. Here the dehu-
midifying ability of air conditioning gave it a distinct advantage over
all other cooling methods. Bodily wetness in the form of perspiration
emerged as an especially detestable condition, except when exercising.
In line with comparable studies amongst Danish youths (Gram-Hanssen,
2005), our young Singaporeans were especially concerned about their
own embodied cleanliness in the eyes of their peers where the most
detestable kind of personal pollution was leaked from within in the form
of sweat rather than attached from without in the form of dirt. Yet these
Singaporeans had also seemingly surpassed their Danish counterparts
since they have also internalized a particular discourse of health. Our
respondents were more worried about the threats posed by sweat in
terms of individual well-being since sweat was not only socially unpalat-
able but had also become understood as likely to indicate illness. Indeed
this preoccupation sometimes seemed to mean they could not discipline
the mind to focus on matters other than the body when the environment
was too warm. In other words, these young people had internalized a
version of the human productivity argument espoused by the government
in terms of the importance of xing indoor ambiance at specic human
standards since, to do otherwise, would mean that people simply could
not function effectively.
Perhaps the most important thing to note here, however, was how
they seemed compliantly happy to retreat indoors. Whilst on one level,
such a response is unsurprising in view of their lifelong exposure to the
paternalistic style of government that has characterized this country, this
willingness is of some signicance when we know that the extent to
which people nd particular thermal environments tolerable is, at least
in part, conditioned by experience. Wider studies have shown that new-
comers to hotter climates have a different idea of what ambient temp-
erature feels neutral (Auliciems and Dedear, 1986) and that individual
thermal sensitivities can change over the course of only months as bodies
261
adapt to the temperature associated with particular seasons (Spagnolo
and de Dear, 2003; Nikolopoulou and Steemers, 2003). The combination
of factors discussed by our respondents may therefore be understood as
particularly powerful when we recognize that our sense of the most com-
fortable ambient condition is itself quite dynamic. Here Singaporeans
have been relatively malleable in terms of going along with different
government initiatives and therefore it is unsurprising that the young
people we spoke with were resigned to the fact that they were more
sensitive than their forebears in terms of coping with heat. Nevertheless
it was still arresting to recognize that what we were actually talking
about was the development of new forms of bodily disposition and new
kinds of physical sensitivity.
INTERLOCKING LAYERS OF HUMAN ENCASEMENT
If the Singaporean government persists with its stance of universal
endorsement and developers continue to shun more environmentally
responsible forms of building practice, it seems reasonable to suggest that
expectations of air-conditioned comfort will seep even further through the
spaces of urban Singapore. As Grosz (1998: 47) argues, bodies and cities
have a way of dening and establishing each other and, in this way, we
could easily imagine many Singaporeans becoming locked into a cycle
of increased reliance on air conditioning. Indeed it seems entirely plaus-
ible to suggest that a future Singaporean society could easily become one
where the majority are found almost exclusively indoors. This is especi-
ally so when young people there are already disinclined to derive the
benets associated with outdoor experiences (see also Kong et al., 1999)
and the heat that conditioners pump out into the immediate environment
will only make local climates even hotter (see Hough, 1995). This article
has highlighted some of the different factors we should consider in under-
standing this process where it emerged that, though the ways in which
these dependencies will develop in the future are certainly still unde-
cided, for the moment it is clear that many young people in this country
feel increasingly unable to live without air conditioning.
Whilst this, in itself, is not an insignicant nding in view of the lack
of explicit research on this issue, we want to conclude our article by
returning to some of the broader conceptual arguments with which we
began. Within the wider social analyses of air conditioning, Prins (1992)
contends that the insidious skill of this device is linked to the way it disci-
plines people so they no longer have any excuse to stop working and
gradually come to hate the hot and the wet. Instead of warmth, he argues
that air conditioning promotes an attachment to pleasurable forms of cold
where the arrival of bodily uids and odours is eventually understood as
an unsavoury threat to the individual. Longhurst (2001) suggests some-
thing similar in her contention that bodies are increasingly monitored so
262
that they now feel more insecure than ever. The fear here is that the
leaky boundaries of the body could become apparent at any point and this
fear is partly and perversely derived from the way in which technologies
such as air conditioning allow us to present an increasingly ordered front.
All this was certainly the case for Singaporean youth. Indeed this was
so much so that the appearance of sweat was an immediate source of
concern. Yet what was also the case was that air conditioning presented
them with exciting new opportunities in terms of physical presentation
and social interaction and it was also making them more sensitive to
warmer ambient environments in a way that clearly surpassed ideas of
social distaste. How then were we conceptually to accommodate this
diversity of factors? We concluded that one useful way would be to attend
to how combinations of physical elements align themselves according to
the nature of the cultural context in question.
It is interesting to speculate that, whilst the great variety of garments
worn by western women is often assumed to relate to the cultural
communication of femininity, the fact that thermal sensitivity is actually
more pronounced amongst females (Wang, 2006; Karjalainen, 2007) may
also play a part in terms of encouraging them to seek out more and differ-
ent responses to their climatic environments. Turning this account on its
head, however, we could equally understand the process working in the
opposite direction where the more limited range of options available to
men in terms of appropriate clothing has eventually made them less
physically attuned to variation in their immediate thermal surroundings.
Examples such as these, alongside the case presented here, suggest that
cultural practices of clothing, the local predominance of particular
ambient conditions, and bodies that themselves possess dynamic degrees
of thermal sensitivity are phenomena that intertwine in intriguing ways.
Given that all three display some degree of malleability, they could be
collectively understood as the material culture of routine human encase-
ment where those interested in the establishment, and potential un-
settling, of ambient expectations would do well to attend to how any
unsettling is likely to involve a combination of all these three. The more
conceptual nal argument we would make therefore is that it is only
through a deliberately expansive approach to the ways in which bodies,
clothing and immediate climate are locally interlinked that we produce
the richest sense of the processes currently responsible for a much wider
retreat into indoor social spaces.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the seven participants who gave their time to help with
this study. Rosie Day and Stefan Ramsden provided useful editing advice along
the way and the comments of two anonymous reviewers were very helpful in
terms of dening the specic contribution of this article.
263
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RUSSELL HITCHINGS lectures in geography at University College London.
His research investigates everyday practices in contemporary cities and considers
what they tell us about the changing ways in which people relate to the natural
world. So far these interests have been substantiated through two specic projects.
The rst concerned the experience of plants in London gardens and the second
is currently considering how ofce workers relate to the bundles of phenomena
that come under the banner of outdoor experience. Address: Department of Geog-
raphy, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. [email: r.hitchings@ucl.ac.uk]
SHU JUN LEE is a geography teacher in Singapore. She completed her BA
in Geography at Oxford University and the empirical material for this article was
derived from the dissertation she wrote as part of the UCL Geography Environ-
ment, Science and Society Masters course. This project was completed in 2005
and was originally entitled Cool Comfort Consumption in Tropical Singapore:
An Investigation into the Social Attitudes and Private Experiences of Air Condi-
tioning. [email: shujun@gmail.com]
265

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