Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell
Jonathan Reinarz
Abstract
This book offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, it shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop—what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that defin ... More
This book offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, it shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop—what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, the book shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. The book is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.
Keywords:
smell,
olfactory sense,
scent,
European Christians,
nose
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780252034947 |
Published to Illinois Scholarship Online: April 2017 |
DOI:10.5406/illinois/9780252034947.001.0001 |