Claire Fan - Week 4: You Smell How You Act: Politics of the Olfactory
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| Sometimes I feel bad for Voldemort because he's probably perpetually congested. |
Have you thought about your nose at all lately? Smell has the strongest association with memory and emotion because smells, according to Harvard Medicine, travel “to key areas of the brain involved in learning, emotion, and memory,” and connects directly to the amygdala (in charge of emotions) and the hippocampus (which stores memories).
I recently read a study called “The scent of attraction and the smell of success: crossmodal influences on person perception” published on the National Library of Medicine (NIH), which asserted that “the presence of odour can indeed influence person perception through a range of mechanisms from mood-induction to crossmodal affective/semantic priming, and changes in arousal.” In other words, the way you smell has a strong impact on your perception of others. This conclusion checks out: when I drive past Dumbarton Bridge on my way to the Stanford shopping center, the pungent sulfuric smell never fails to make me crinkle my nose in distaste.
It’s also generally pretty clear what smells denominate which gender: floral, sweeter scents are typically perceived to be more feminine, while leathery, muskier scents are typically ascribed to the masculine. When I walk past a bakery or into a cafe, smells of pastries and milk tea make my mouth water.
Of course, those were all more positive feelings that scent is capable of evoking. On the other end, unpleasant scents have often been associated with groups in society viewed as less than or discriminated against. For example, hundreds of years ago during the transatlantic slave trade, African-American slaves were said to not only have disease but also emit a repulsive smell. This was due in part to the arid, hot climate in Africa, and led to further dehumanization and justification for turning “what [Europeans] understood as wasted land of an improvident and stinking peoples into cleanly European spaces of progress,” according to The Smell of Slavery by Andrew Kettler.
The idea that unpleasant smells are associated with the lower class and the “undesirables” persists today, and this is partially due to the fact that rot also tends to have a rather acrid odor. Homelessness, poverty, and even certain racial groups are subject to this stereotype as well.
Despite all this, smell continues to be rather underrated in comparison to other senses like sight or touch (despite being more vivid than both!). I’ve been trying to appreciate my nose lately for all that it does for me. As it turns out, stopping and smelling the flowers is quite therapeutic.
Sources:
magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/connections-between-smell-memory-and-health
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8233629/
doingsts.com/smellworlds/pdf/Andrew%20Kettler---The%20Smell%20of%20Slavery_Olfactory%20Racism%20and%20the%20Atlantic%20World(smell%20and%20race--smell%20and%20purity--colonial%20sensorium--smell%20and%20subjectivity).pdf
Hi Claire! Thank you for this nostril-opening blog! I never really noticed how much smell really does impact how we perceive our surroundings. As I’m writing this response, I’m paying attention to every scent I come across and cherishing every breath I get to take, because seeing Voldemort’s nose definitely makes me appreciate my nostrils. Now that I think about it, smell really does connect with memories, because I typically associate my friends with their smells. One of my friends always smells so strong of perfume that I can smell her in a 6 feet distance. That’s how I typically find her through a crowd, as weird as it seems, because I can usually smell her before my eyes get to her. What makes me really intrigued is the fact that everyone has their own favorite scents and perfumes. While there are common favorites, I feel like there is really no two people who have same exact opinion on their ideal scents. That’s why there are so many perfume stores and lots of scents for consumers to choose from– and I think that does reflect something about our brains in a way. It’s so fascinating how our noses can also act as our own IDs.
ReplyDeleteScents are so incredibly underrated—it’s always so fun to be able to smell something and try to guess what it is before the item falls into my line of sight. To me, it’s comforting when the familiar scent of a close friend suddenly wafts over and you know exactly who is going to tap you on the shoulder. There’s also the negative side; as someone who gets easily nauseated, sometimes just the smell of dinner makes me lose all my appetite. However, although certain scents can be incredibly overwhelming, I find the sudden feelings that permeate my thoughts from how emotionally provocative nice to experience, like I’m living life to its fullest. Who wouldn’t be overjoyed by the smell of new books or petrichor (well, maybe not the latter, but I personally enjoy it)?
ReplyDeleteRegarding your point about racial groups being discriminated against for their smell, unfamiliar scents are also often recognized as “disgusting” because it’s much easier for people to try to avoid things rather than familiarize themselves with something new. People of different cultural backgrounds consuming different foods and using different items like incense and candles would associate the smell of something completely foreign to racial groups. There’s often more to what meets the eye, and so much more to what meets the nose 👃.
Hi Claire! I 100% agree with you, smell is such a cool sense; it’s just microparticles entering your nose, but they can create such wide varieties and meanings of the scents around us. Your blog also reminded me of a fact I read about a while ago. Originally, Febreeze was branded as a non-scented air freshener, but customers didn’t believe its effectiveness because there was no immediate cue that it had worked. So, they started adding meaningless scents to their products, and now their products are so widespread that the brand has become the standard when referring to all air fresheners. However, after reading the section in your blog about unfavorable scents being associated with the lower class made me think of this situation in a different light. Maybe these customers wanted to either mask undesirable smells in their homes or add a nicer smelling one–both are a result of the influence of the American Dream and capitalist ideals, where ascending class should be one’s goal in society.
ReplyDeleteHi Claire! I remember learning about something similar in a class I’ve taken before: the sense of smell directly connects to our perception of external stimuli, including the memories that we associate with those stimuli. However, I never really realized that certain positive or negative smells were associated with societal groups, such as the “repulsive” smell that is said to be related to the transatlantic slave trade, and I never considered that something like a scent could be used to label people. I think it’s very interesting how our sense of smell, something that we barely ever take the time to think about, can have such a deep and important connection to both history and identity. Your blog makes me wonder what other senses we might subconsciously associate with certain groups of people or particular experiences, without even actively realizing it. If smell is capable of influencing how people can perceive other people or memories, then bias can easily form without us knowing it.
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