Fragrance-Smell Culture-Introduction

In everything we smoke, all perception would be by smell. (Heraclitus qtd in Davenport 1990 )

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself. ( Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler`s Ninth Symphony)

The sense of smell is mired in paradox. Considered earthy and animalistic, scents have nevertheless served asa long-standing component in spiritual practices. Enigmatically lacking a well-defind or extensive vocabulary, odors are unmatched in catalyzing the evocation of distant memories and places. intensely visceral and emotional, fragrances are, however, the subject of an increasing degree or rationalization by the multi-billion-dollar perfume  and flavour industry. Dismissed as vestigial and obsolete in an era dominated by information technologies, the sense of smell is now considered one of the means by which visual media`s alienating effects can be mitigated.

Often delimited as a mere "biological"  sense, scents are, on the contrary, subtly involved in just every aspect of culture, from the construction of personal identity and the defining of social status  to the confirming of group affiliation and the transmission of tradition. There is a tendency to regard smells purely  on the level of phenomenological immediacy, yet the manners and reasons people engage with the sense of smell are influenced by numerous cultural factors relating to the constructs a society creates integrating the environment, the bodies of its citizens  and its symbolic world view.

 In short, no act of perception  is a pure unmediated event; each society inflects and cultivates sensory practices according to is needs and interests. Societal influences, however, are not all-determining; individuals may challenge as well as conform to a reigning sensory regime. By examing a desparate array of Western aand non-Western cultures, The Smell Culture Reader  seeks to foreground some of the diversity of the historicial and contemporary practices of scent  and form a context for continuing research analysis. Why should scent be the subject of an anthology, and why now? for a variety of reasons, the sense of smell is poised to break free from many of its assumed deliminations.

The mystery of how smell works, for instance, has defied scientific understanding for centuries. However, with the award of the 2004 NoblePrize in Physiology  or Medicine  to neuroscientists  Richard Axel  and Linda B. Buck, the basic code by which scents are perceived  and cognitively processed seems to be on the verge  of being cracked (Nobelprize org 2004). Another delimitation concerns that of smell`s inconsequentiality .

In astudy done in the early 1990`s, smell was deemed the less valuable sense and the first one people would sacrifice  if forced to chooose among the senses (Synnott 1993: 183-4). However, given the recent effugence in olfactory  products  and practices-oxygen bars, aromatic  cookbooks, scented consumer items, custom-made perfumes, aromatherapy, designer room sprays, herbal spa treatments and toiletries, senuous gardening,  odor-enhanced entertainments  and theme parks-it seems that smell is now the first and most popular sense people wish to indulge. Not only are individuals apparently  unthreatened by smell`s  negative reputation, scents are being actively sought out to revivify overtly sanitized environments and provide richer, more complex,sensory experiences (see Rose and Earle 1996; LaSalle and Britton 2003; Pink 2004;67-9; Drobnick 2005).

Even the concerns about air pollution, second hand smoke (passive smoke) and scent bans, which seem to perpetuate olfactory stigmatation, evidence a heightened awareness about the physiological and psychological power of smells that in the end can promot a more responsible and conscious appreciation of olfactory effects.

Another transitional point resides in the realm of technology. Smell is often predicted to be a sense that will eventually disappear in the progress of human evolution, eclipsed in the apotheosis of pure mentality ( Bradshaw 1982). When the advent of digital technologies and the cyberworlds, complete disembodiment is theorized to be such a foregone conclusion that it is confidently claimed that" the senses have no future" (Moravec 1997).

But as developments  since the mid-1990`s have shown, it is precisely in the field oftechnology  that olfaction is gaining widespread applicability. Environmental  fragrancing, odor biometrics, electronic noses, artifical fragrances and flavours, militarized  smells, olfactory marketing - these are only some of the innovations, demonstrating that smell is now in the process of becoming  instrumentalized, that is, it is attaining scientifically verified, commercially commodified and legally patented utilizations (see Davies, Kooijmanb and Warda 2003; Pearce et al. 2003; Field 2004; Korotkaya n.d.). Continue Reading

Reference:The smell Culture: Jim Drobnick