And We're Off!

So, I started a blog on I-Web. Then I realized that I couldn't quite figure out how to publish the website and still be able to update the blog frequently, so I've moved to this one until such time as I have a great revelation in the web-publishing arena.

Welcome to olfactocentrism, my blog about my new coolest interest, the sense of smell - its history, culture, and technology. I'm sure I'll talk about other things too, this is my blog and I can do that if I want. But mostly it will be a place to stick current research and musings on smell and all its fascinating components.

I have read and re-read the introduction of Jim Drobnick’s The Smell Culture Reader. I’ve already learned so much from it, and begun to ponder the possibilities. Here are my favorite points so far:

* The sense of smell is “mired in paradox” (1)
* While information technologies tend to dismiss smell as “vestigial and obsolete”, new media really opens the opportunity for smell to be explored more completely (1)
* Smell has been predicted to be a sense that will disappear, because of the continual threat of “disembodiment” in digital technologies and cyberworlds, to the extent that some have even proclaimed “the senses have no future” (Moravec 1997), but “it is in precisely the field of technology that olfaction is gaining widespread applicability” (2).
* There is an urgent need for a broader understanding of smell in order to critique and direct new technologies, especially because the technologies are either controlled and completely dominated by the developers, or made “subject to hyperbole in the popular press” (3)
* There is “strategic value” in what Drobnick calls “olfactocentrism”, or isolating the sense of smell. Immersion into a olfactory world forces us to consider how perception and thought change (3)
*Contemporary literature about smell essentially began in 1982, with Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant, which focused on the influence of odor on major social, political and cultural events in 18th and 19th century France (3)
* Smell has an amazing interplay and diversity - it mediates so many contrasts: object and subject, the material and the physiological, the world and the perceiver, culture and ideology, stimulus and symbol, matter and meaning, material and social, sensation and perception - Alfred Gell calls this contradictory status “semiological ambiguity” (5). This, coupled with the “paucity of vocabulary concerning smell”, forces any study of smell to be interdisciplinary and innovative.
*Attention to scents can make us “rethink the idea of what constitutes culture” (6).