Alessandro Gusman
UNIVERSITY OF TURIN

Anthropology and Sense of Smell:
the rediscovery of a forgotten sense

Lost smell

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has written how, during a stay in New York, he was struck by the lack of smells there. He recounts how he was made fun of, ‘When I told my friends that the cinnamon rolls we’d bought from the bakery had lost their smell’. His friends explain to him that ‘the heavenly cinnamon smell that made you long for the sweet roll’ is actually artificial, sprayed onto the roll in the bakery.
Pamuk goes on to explain that this lack of real smell provides him with food for thought about the increasingly blurred link between appearance and reality. One day, he says, we are going to grow accustomed to this lack of non-artificial smells and decide that it doesn’t matter if, at home, the cinnamon rolls no longer have the wonderful smell they had at the bakery. (Pamuk, 2007)
A great deal has been written and said about the ‘olfactory silence’ (1) that supposedly characterizes contemporary society, variously described as ‘deodorized’, ‘odoriphobic’, and marked by the expulsion of olfactory stimuli from an increasingly artificial environment, hence from the dayto- day dimension of human existence. (Corbin, 1982)
Thirty years ago, the French historian Lucien Febvre (1968) coined the expression ‘greenhouse men’ to denote the condition of the inhabitants of large urban centers, in contrast with ‘men of the open air’, who lived in a habitat rich in what, all things considered, were pleasant sensory stimuli (the rule in the sixteenth-century Europe he was describing).
This radical change, the social and historical reasons for which are well-defined, has obviously touched not only upon the lifestyle of individuals in general, but also, and more precisely, their sentient relationship with the world, progressively ‘filtered’ through the windows of houses, offices, cars, shops and increasingly, computer screens. Writing about Tikopia, where he carried out his anthropological research, Raymond Firth stressed how there was no point on the island in which it was impossible to perceive the sound and the smell of the sea. The contrast with urban spaces, which tend towards ‘monosentience’, specifically the rule of sight, is sharp. (Firth, 1961)
After all, who could write a description of the smells of a city to compare with Patrick Suskind’s in his novel Perfume? The olfactory panorama of seventeenth-century Paris that he reconstructs so masterfully was much richer in stimuli than the one we are accustomed to in the cities of the third millennium. (Suskind, 1992)
In contrast with the idea of ‘olfactory silence’, some scholars have noted a renewed interest in the sensory dimension on the part of science and art, and numerous initiatives have been and are being undertaken to stimulate the diffusion of what has been described as ‘sentient culture’. (Howes and Marcoux, 2006)
As Pamuk suggests in his story, even marketing has discovered the potential of stimulating the senses to spread consumer choices. The capacity to attract is tied to the perceptive appeal that goods and the place in which they are sold manage to acquire. If they are to draw a response from the buyer, it is thus increasingly important for products to possess not only the right appearance, but also to be attractive to the senses of smell, hearing and touch.
In the case of smells, marketing experts have an especially effective and deceptive arm to deploy: their ability to manipulate the consumer through the sense of smell is high because, as scientific studies have shown, the response to this sort of stimulus is instinctive and immediate. This is why, walking into the New York bakery described by Pamuk, the customer is immediately consumed by the desire to touch and bite into the sweet cinnamon rolls. Scent, albeit artificial, has played an unexpected role: it has stimulated the olfactory centers, evolutionarily old parts of the brain associated with emotion and gut reaction. The response to the good smell of food is instinctive, uncontrollable and often unconscious. One’s mouth literally waters and the desire to buy follows as a consequence. Psychological studies have shown that even when we are conscious of the artificiality of the stimulus perceived, the attraction of smells, albeit decreasing, is nonetheless still quite high.
Not that interest for the sense of smell is economic and commercial alone, as in the case of marketing. The socio-cultural component of smell, long neglected in western society, is being reassessed, if only in well-defined experiences such as wine or cheese tastings or perfume samplings. One might even go so far as to say that smells are capturing people’s imagination again on account of their unusualness. Our noses are untrained because we are brought up in environments in which olfactory stimuli are few and far between, and receive an education in which the learning of sensory skills is conspicuous by its absence. So we put ourselves to the test in situations to pick up extra knowledge about smells, emotions, memories and the meanings they convey.
Another ongoing phenomenon is the creation of original ‘olfactory panoramas’ from mixing and mingling with smells and flavors typical of the aesthetic and culinary traditions of countries outside Europe. (2) Olfactory panoramas, like visual and sound panoramas, are born of the superimposition of human activities over the natural environment. They cannot obviously be considered static and given once and for all, but they are transformed continuously and negotiated by people in social interaction and in interaction with the environment.
There are, in short, original new voices and situations that create new shades in the olfactory panorama to which we are socialized, forcing us to rethink the role of aromas and the sense of smell in society— not to mention the possibility of speaking in olfactory silence. The situation I have described is, of course, different from the one that led Alain Corbin to coin the expression in the early eighties. In the meantime, interest in the senses, in general, and the sense of smell, in particular, has increased. We might ask nonetheless whether any olfactory panorama—even if its stimuli are limited or it is dominated by negative stimuli such as the smog from cars in cities—is comparable to silence. Isolation from perceptive stimuli is possible for hearing and sight—by merely plugging the ears and closing the eyes—but not for the sense of smell, except for the few instants in which we manage to hold our breath.
Smells are never absent from our environment. In fact they accompany us all the time, often on an unconscious level. More than of the absence of olfactory stimuli, it would thus be proper to speak of a panorama that is rather flat, monotonous, embellished only here and there by unusual elements, most of them artificial.
As I have said, olfactory panoramas are connected with human activity and, as such, convey meanings and recount the society that produces them. It was the concept that human societies are as many ‘worlds of meaning’ that triggered the reflection of what we define as ‘anthropology of the senses’ or ‘sensory anthropology’.

Anthropology of the sense of smell

Is ‘oculocentrism’, the absolute predominance of sight over all the sensory faculties, a natural given for the human species? Or is it the result of a historical and cultural process in which the main stages were, first, the invention of printing, then later, in the twentieth century, the invention of video technologies, the computer and the internet?
The distinction between oral societies and print societies McLuhan and Ong made in the sixties now seems dated insofar as it creates a rigid dichotomy that levels societies into two groups: those that transmit information and knowledge through hearing and those that do so through sight. Aside from the fact that it is hard to accept categories as fixed and uniform as this, the orality/scripture distinction stresses only two faculties and overlooks the rest.
Without obviously wishing to deny the fundamental importance that sight has for the human species, the anthropology of the senses seeks to recover the multi-sensory dimension of our relationship with things and with other people in the conviction that any experience involves the human being as a whole, not just one of his or her sensory organs. (3)
In addition, the study of the sensory dimension strives to rethink the tradition, long dominant in western culture, whereby the sensation is a mechanism, a universal, pre-cultural response to stimuli from the environment. If we accept the idea that perception is, instead, mediated by culture, it becomes evident that the senses, on a par with every other human faculty, have to be educated, and that the type of education they receive differs in different contexts: children, for example, learn to perceive and find out about the world through locally transmitted models. We realize in this way that cultures are ‘worlds of sense’, (4) and that if perception is a bio-cultural phenomenon with an evident learning component, then there will be spheres of meaning not open to view. Disinterest towards the senses of taste and touch, deemed primitive and more to do with animality than humanity, precludes these spheres and the mass of cultural values they reflect.
To conclude this brief account of the ‘perceptive revolution’ in the social sciences, it should be pointed out that it is not only our capacity to use our sensory faculties that depends, in part, on received education. Societies also create representations and metaphors that charge the senses with a symbolic value that transcends the act of perception per se. This line of investigation has led to recognition of the existence of a ‘collective sensory sensitivity’, (Matera, 2002) and to emphasize how societies do not confine themselves to the physical value of the senses, but also attribute to them a cultural value that often differs from ‘natural’ values. ‘Senses which are important for practical purposes may not be important culturally or symbolically.
For instance, while sight is greatly valued by the Inuit for hunting and other activities, it does not have the symbolic importance of hearing and sound, which are associated with creation […] Sight can thus be said to be of practical value for the Inuit because it perceives form, but sound has cultural priority because it creates form.’ (Howes, 1991, p. 258)
Shifting the question into the ambit of smell, we discover that the sense isn’t as neglected elsewhere—and in European history—as it is here. Contexts in which the environment is least altered by human action obviously offer richer, more stimulating olfactory panoramas. In such cases, the ways of knowledge may also pass through the nostrils. While, in the West, sight and hearing are generally considered the senses of education par excellence, there are cultures in which the exploration and cognition of the world explicitly take on a more multi-sensory dimension: in other words, all the senses are involved in the relationship between individual, society and environment.
Let’s take as an example the identification of plants and flowers: according to the educational practices common in our society, this is a visual matter. We learn to distinguish a rose from a tulip by their appearance, not by their different scents. The same applies to trees. In other contexts, the process is primarily olfactory. The Waraos of Venezuela, for example, use their noses to learn to identify medicinal herbs, useful for curative purposes but extremely hard to distinguish visually from other herbs without therapeutic properties. Even more interesting is the case of the Desana, a tribe that lives in the Amazon. Smell is their means of creating a taxonomy of the animal species that live in the jungle. Indeed, they also use smell to classify the tribes who live in the vicinity, attributing a particular odor to single individuals and the places in which they live. The cultural significance of this is wide-reaching. In marriage, for example. It is believed, in fact, that women ‘to wed’ should come from a tribe whose smell clashes with that of one’s own: in other words, man’s ‘other half’ has to be complementary smell-wise. (Reichel- Dolmatoff, 1978, pp. 243-291)
Through examples like these, we see how in different societies aromas and sense of smell play a non-secondary role in social relations, in establishing and crossing borders (a fact often tied to the volatile hence ingratiating component of smell), in defining groups and in constructing moral categories. The shift from the perceptive to the moral field tends to be frequent, not only with regard to smell. As happens with sight and the straightforward matching of beautiful/good and ugly/bad, we associate good smell with the morally upright (think of the odor of sanctity that the Catholic tradition sees as a sign of the physical noncorruption of saints after death), and bad smell with the corrupt. This match is significant, since the stink of corruption, of rot, of putrefaction, is especially evident to the nose, which we use as a sort of revealer of corruption, physical and moral, the two dominions being closely intertwined in epistemologies in which there is no room for the separation of soul and body.
There are numerous examples of this moral use of the sense of smell. Indeed, we might even think in terms of a veritable ‘olfactory morality’: from Hamlet’s ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ to the foetor judaicus attributed more than once down the centuries to the Jews, to the Tuaregs’ use of aromas to define social boundaries, described by Susan Rasmussen, (1999, pp. 55-73) smells are used as markers of identity to define the integration/segregation of a group or a single individual.
Among the Haya of Tanzania, with whom I spent a research period in 2004, the fundamental distinction is between what gives off a good smell (okunukagi) and what gives off a bad smell (okunukakubi). Whereas good smell is generic without further specification, (5) bad smell is classified differently. The Haya elaboration of ‘bad’ fits in with the thesis whereby, on a moral plane, smells play a role, above all, of exclusion. Particularly interesting is the use of the term ekijunda, which normally refers to the smell that comes from something that is putrefying, hence not to a living being. But it is also used in a moral sense to describe the corruption of modes and mores and of the soul (hence meaning someone who stinks particularly because he or she is ‘dead in the soul, dead inside’). More rarely, with the same meaning and with reference especially to women the word orupakuchu is used. Ojunzile (‘You are rotten’, in a moral sense) is a serious insult towards another person that requires a well-founded justification and may determine social stigmatization. Thus, among the Haya too, the nose is an organ capable of revealing the corruption of an individual.
In this conception, evil and immorality can be hidden from the eyes of other people by taking care of appearance, but they cannot be hidden from the nose; the body may be intact and the eye may be deceived, but the nose averts immediately if ‘someone stinks of death’, is corrupt inside, which is a characteristic in particular, I was told, of he who ‘doesn’t know how to live among others’, who commits acts that endanger the social and moral order constructed and respected by the majority. We thus shift from the corporal plane via the ethical plane to the social plane. The individual body becomes a metaphor of the social body, of the corruption that settles in it and the danger this entails for the conservation of order. The perception is transferred and becomes a tool of control.

Conclusions

Like the other social sciences, anthropology has dedicated little attention in the course of its history to the sensory component, taking for granted and natural the classification and the view of the perceptive faculties present in western culture at least since classic Greek philosophy, since Plato and Aristotle. The ambition of anthropology of the senses is to show how, by so doing, non-secondary spheres of meaning are precluded: to relegate touch, taste and smell to a generic group of the senses of animality, differentiating them from sight and hearing—as happens, for example, in Kantian esthetics—means underestimating their fundamental aesthetic component and ignoring that any perceptive act involves more than one sense organ and should be thought of as a relationship between the body as a whole and the environment it happens to be in.
We have seen from this brief overview of examples of smell how, after being left virtually unexplored for so long, the sense has now been elaborated culturally in terms of representations, social relations, aesthetics and metaphor. Olfactory experiences, like the gustatory experiences linked to the sharing of food described by Paul Stoller (1989), act at a communicational and social relational level; this is the case, for example, of the rite of tea and coffee widespread in numerous areas of the Mediterranean. The senses, all the senses, are involved in our relationship with others and with nature; they tell us something about what surrounds us and tell something about us to those who are around us.
‘Olfactory silence’—by which I mean, as I have sought to clarify, the monotonous olfactory panorama poor in stimuli that we perceive in urban spaces—thus speaks of a society that is losing a non-negligible part of the sensory richness at human disposal. In summer, we close the windows, turn on the air-conditioning and isolate ourselves from the outside world; our relationship with the environment is limited and we only seek pleasant, evocative aromas in precise situations.
This is not all: in this way a society loses its capacity to communicate: by forgetting one or more senses it loses ‘sense’, and taste, in the broad meaning the term has come to assume in European history, dies out. Like Pamuk’s cinnamon rolls, behind the illusory façade our cities are insipid.
The sense of smell is also bound to taste in less metaphorical terms: the nose and taste receptors combine to create the ‘flavor’ of a food or a drink. Though Pamuk doesn’t say as much, his scentless cinnamon rolls were presumably not all that good. Moving to a less exotic example, the same can be said of tomatoes that give no responses to the nose when it seeks to get a whiff of their smell and imagine their flavor. There is little room for olfactory imagination in supermarkets aisles.
To rethink cities in terms of good living also means recovering spaces for sensory sensitivity. It is good to note that, among the prerequisites of excellence for cities to receive Cittaslow status, is special attention to the sensory panorama: from control of the quality of the air to the reduction of light and noise pollution, from taste education programs to programs ‘to maintain well-kept green spaces for people to enjoy’. Of course not all urban spaces can possess these prerequisites of excellence, but even the minor stratagems and an environmental and consumption policy that acknolwedges the importance of a sensorily stimulating environment can help improve our daily lives.

Notes

1) The expression ‘olfactory silence’ to describe the lack of smell in contemporary life was coined by the French historian Alain Corbin in Le miasme et la jonquille.

2) The notion of ‘olfactory panorama’ is used in various disciplines to indicate the variety of smells that characterizes an environment and becomes part of the landscape, which we no longer just look at but also experience in multi-sensory terms. Cf. Robert Dulau and Jean-Robert Pitte.

3) The anthropologist Kathryn Linn-Geurts suggested a definition of ‘feeling’ as the set of ways through which the body gathers information from the environment, thus extending the conception well beyond the traditional five-sense codification of freedom, not to be found in numerous extra-European contexts.
4) The expression was coined by Constance Classen in Worlds of Sense.

5) Okunukage refers both to a food that is well cooked and gives off a pleasant smell and to scents.

References

Classen, C., Worlds of Sense, Routledge, London-New York 1993.

Corbin, A., Le miasme et la jonquille, Aubier Montagne, Paris 1982.

Dulau, R. and Pitte, J.-R., Géographie des odeurs, L’Harmattan, Paris 1998.

Febvre, L., Le problème de l’incroyance au XVI siècle. La religion de Rabelais, Albin Michel, Paris 1968.

Firth, R., We the Tikopia. A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia. George Allen & Unwin, London 1961.

Howes, D. and Marcoux, J.-S., ‘Introduction à la culture sensible’, in Anthropologie et Sociétés, 30 (3), 2006.

Howes, D. (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1991.

Linn-Geurts, K., Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community, University of California Press, Berkeley 2003.

Matera, V. (ed.), ‘Antropologia delle sensazioni’, in La Ricerca Folklorica, 45, 2002.

Pamuk, O., Other Colors. Essays and a Story, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2007.

Rasmussen, S., ‘Making Better “Scents” in Anthropology: Aroma in Tuareg sociocultural systems and the shaping of ethnography’, in Anthropological Quarterly, 72 (2), 1999.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, G., ‘Desana Animal Categories, Food Restrictions, and the Concept of Color Energies’, in Journal of Latin American Lore, 4 (2), 1978.

Stoller, P., The Taste of Ethnographic Things, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1989.

Suskind, P., Perfume, Penguin Books, London 1992.

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