Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell

3. Odorous Others

3 odorous others Race and Smell As outlined in chapter 1, throughout human history scents have often functioned to unite people with their deities and other worshipers in religious rituals. Yet smells have also effectively divided populations and were regularly invoked to oppress certain groups. The Roman concern with “foreign stench” was only one of many ancient and openly expressed anxieties associated with the perceived corruption caused by outsiders.1 As scent began to play a less important role in modern European society, Western travelers remained aware of traditional, “archaic” beliefs in rural and traditional communities, which either prioritized smell or produced unfamiliar aromas. Anthropologists also became more sensitive to and interested in the place occupied by smell in non-Western cultures. This was not always with the intention of elevating the sense of smell, as Classen, Howes, and Synnott have argued, but rather as part of strategies to devalue societies whose members continued to rely on scent to structure their daily lives and orient themselves in the wider world. In most cases the central role of smell among “primitive” peoples was interpreted as “one more proof of their lower status on the evolutionary scale of civilization.”2 Different odors also marked one out as distinct. Writers emphasizing the relative nature of smell preference also regularly drew on racial examples, often regarding “less civilized” outsiders as being more tolerant of dirt and decay. Notions of cleanliness and uncleanliness, as British anthropologist Mary Douglas observes, “did not evolve primarily for their efficacy to prevent disease, but rather for their role in producing cultural meaning.”3 To characterize a group of people as foulsmelling was to “render it repellent at a very basic physical and emotional level, not simply at a cognitive level.”4 cs 86 . CHAPter 3 In general, non-Western societies have regularly been denigrated as malodorous . Aroma has been an important element in the cultural construction of this difference and inequality. In contrast with the transitory reek associated with the natural cycle of renewal and decay, the cultural embeddedness of racial scents underscores the absoluteness of social boundaries .5 The permanence implied by such value judgments has historically stimulated spatial and social exclusion and minimized contact with groups that threatened contamination. Even so, acceptance did not follow the symbolic and material fumigation of immigrants, processes that are intended literally to transform them into “odourless and modern entit[ies].”6 While such narratives have become commonplace in a globalized world and are replayed with each new wave of immigration and migration, material sensations regularly appeared in early travel literature when Westerners (in most cases) first confronted culturally diverse others. At such moments of initial contact, fragrance was associated with markets—food, in particular—and was subsequently transferred to the people themselves. In those cases where immigrants entered a new culture, it was with such scents that migrants were associated. Integration therefore often involved eradicating odors, whether or not deemed harmful by official gatekeepers, such as immigration officers. However, as most immigrants would quickly learn, the smells of difference were not easily eliminated; such associations were often so embedded that integration was not always the logical conclusion of fumigation processes.7 This has prompted some scholars to suggest that perceived stench is simply part of broader strategies employed by those who wish to avoid outsiders.8 Despite scientific challenge, the concept of racial odors persists, even in modern academic studies of scents and smell, and not only those that deal with physiological issues.9 This chapter draws out examples of this concept from a few existing historical studies focusing on the Jews, Chinese, and Irish, groups that previously have been conferred moral identities based on the odors they allegedly emitted. It then concentrates on blacks and the concept of race, a subject that has rapidly assumed a place at the forefront of sensory history.10 In the case of black Americans, reference to bad smell was not only used to cast aspersions on a racial group but was also integral to the manufacture of racist ideology. Smell, and not just sight, was central to the construction of racial difference. Compared to such simplistic attempts to label persons as either foul or fragrant, the meanings of scents in other cultures appear remarkably rich. The chapter therefore concludes by examining some of the pioneering anthropological work that has been undertaken on the cultural role of smell in certain rACe And Smell...