Other Cultures and Smell

I finally got one of the books I've been looking for since last fall - The Cultural History of Smell by Connie Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. They were part of a research project called The Varieties of Sensory Experience in Montreal from 1988-1991. They were also funded by the Olfactory Research Fund - I wonder if it still exists. Maybe they'll give me some money.

The book seems great, with sections on the meaning and power of smell, a history of smell from the Middle ages to modernity, odour and power, and commercialization. I'm looking forward to reading it - if I ever have time.

The part that jumped out at me right away, however, was a chart (or several, actually) that outlined how some other cultures view smell. One of the biggest problems with smell in Western cultures is the fact that there is such a limited vocabulary to describe it. Often, we can only use other senses to describe smells, or say that something smells like something else. I'll bet if we had a better smell vocabulary, we'd be a culture much more in tune with the importance and significance of smell.

Here are some of the cool new words I've discovered:

The olfactory classification system of the Kapsiki of Cameroon (forgive the missing accents, I don't feel like figuring out how to do that):

1. Medeke: the smell of various animals
2. Verevere: the smell of civet
3. Rhwazhake: the smell of urine
4. Urduk'duk: the smell of milk
5. Shireshire: the smell of faeces of various animals
6. Ndrimin'ye: the smell of spoilt food
7. Ndaleke: the smell of rotting meat or of a corpse
8. Duf'duf: the smell of white millet beer (mpedli) - I wonder if Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, knew that "Duf" was a word for BEER SMELL!
9. Hes'hese: the smell of roast food
10. Zede: the smell of edible food
11. Kalawuve: the smell of human faeces
12. Kamerhweme: the smell of old grain
13. Rhweredlake: the smell of fresh meat
14. Dzafe: a fleeting smell of any kind

Inca olfactory terms

1. Mutquini: to smell something
2. Mukacuni: to smell a good odour
3. Aznacuni: to smell a bad odour
4. Mutqquchacuni: for a group to smell something together
5. Mutqquchini: to make someone smell something
6. Mucacumuni or mutqquimuni: to secretly sniff out what is being planned
7. Aznachicun: to have oneself or let oneself be smelled
8. Camaycuni: to come across a food odour, to inhale, to inspire

These two paragraphs are pretty cool, too:

"We find in the languages of other cultures a greater variety of olfactory terms than is available in English, or indeed any of the other languages of Europe. There is a general tendency, however, for odours (like flavours, but unlike colours) to be classified according to a division of pleasant/unpleasant. This points perhaps to the primordial importance of smell as a means of discriminating between what is safe and enjoyable, and hence pleasing to the human organism, and what is dangerous and hurtful, hence displeasing. There is also a tendency for odour terms to refer to the sources from which odours emanate - as in "tapir odour" - and not to some essential quality of the odour itself, such as pungency. The reason for this would seem to be the widely perceived intrinsic association of odours with their sources.

...it is important to realize that a limited olfactory vocabulary does not preclude extensive olfactory symbolism. Although there may not be many ways to speak about odours, an immense number of odours can still be recognized, charged with social and emotional content, and remembered. In fact, it may be that odours tend to be processed in a direct, non-verbal way by the brain and so elude expression through language. This means that to undertand the role of odour in different cultures, one must go beyond language and explore the realm of practice" (113).

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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).

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