Re: Aroma: The Cultural History Of Smell
Tanja Freeze
Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.
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Constance Classen,David Howes,Anthony Synnott
Limited preview - 2002
Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell
Constance Classen,David Howes,Anthony Synnott
Limited preview - 1994
Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell
Constance Classen,David Howes,Anthony Synnott
Limited preview - 2002
(function () )();References to this bookLefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics
Rob Shields
No preview available - 1999
Global Semiotics
Thomas A. Sebeok
Limited preview - 2001
All Book Search results About the author (1994)Classen is an Independent Researcher in the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Research Council of Canada.
Our knowledge of the past is odourless. Yet, smells play an important role in our daily lives: they affect us emotionally, psychologically and physically, and influence the way we engage with history.
In this work, we propose that smells are part of our cultural heritage, and that a structured approach to researching them is required. Several aspects allow us to explore the connection between olfaction and heritage. We will define heritage smells and argue their importance, by focusing on the following: (1) a theoretical review of olfaction and odours in heritage, including (a) the consideration for smells in heritage documents and guidelines, leading to the identification of smell as part of cultural significance of a place or object and (b) the use of smell in a heritage context as a means to engage and communicate with the audience; and (2) techniques for identifying, analysing and archiving smells and therefore enabling their characterization and preservation. These techniques can be approached from two complementary angles: firstly, the chemical analysis of the source of sensation, in our case chemical analysis of the compounds that lead to perception of the smell. Secondly, sensory characterization of that smell in terms of human perception. In the case of historic smells, this dual approach can contribute to a holistic understanding of what the odour represents in terms of the nature, history and state of the object.
The significance of olfaction in the context of cultural heritage, evidencing that smells can be fundamental in shaping who we are, where we belong and how we experience encounters with different cultures, has been recently examined in several case studies. They show that odour can be part of the local identity through history [1]; that a central place for olfactory experiences in a culture results in a much wider vocabulary to discuss smells [2] and that travel and tourism offer an opportunity to approach the world with our noses [3]. However, the role of smells in our perception of and engagement with the past has not been systematically explored.
In the heritage context, experiencing what the world smelled like in the past enriches our knowledge of it, and, because of the unique relation between odours and memories, allows us to engage with our history in a more emotional way [10]. Odours are also powerful cues to remember an exhibition, as demonstrated by Aggleton and Waskett [11] in their work at the Jorvik Viking museum in York, England. In the case of a gallery, the presence of point-of-scent components heightens the enjoyment of the public, in comparison to experiencing the same displays without smells [12].
However, unlike some food and culinary practices, smells are not recognized in the definition of intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO. In spite of sharing a relation to other aspects of intangible cultural heritage, such as language, industries, and tourism [14], the olfactory world is hardly discussed or documented.
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