ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the changing nature of tobacco-human hybridity in the 21st century using a variety of examples and others’ ethnographic research, written and visual sources. It firstly returns to the contemporary experience of tobacco’s hybridity, and the shifts that can be observed in terms of who is smoking, where and why. The chapter then focuses on the worlds of tobacco manufacture, with further examples of corporate agnotology that continue to mystify and obscure, and a changing technoscientific assemblage of which these processes are a part, particularly the rise of the internet. The ‘smoking islands’ model works better in Kwanwook Kim’s study of female call-centre workers in South Korea. Women’s smoking is still heavily stigmatized in South Korea and women’s smoking rates, like those of their female counterparts in China, have historically been very low. The chapter ends with a consideration of the e-cigarette as the latest example of tobacco’s shape-shifting.
