ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche once noted that no one had yet written a philosophical treatise on the social and moral significance of the human nose. Yet, in recent years, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest across the humanities and social sciences in matters to do with smell and olfaction, as these impinge upon forms of social relationships and modes of social organisation. Smell has become a ‘hot’ topic in disciplines as diverse as cultural history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, geography and literary studies. 1 The focus in all of these areas has been on the sociocultural mediation of smell, regarding it, not as a biologically ‘hard-wired’ human universal, but as contingent upon variant modes of social and cultural ordering. The olfactory dispositions of particular sets of people located in particular times and places are viewed as functions of the specific olfactory orderings of their social and historical contexts. Quite simply, then, the emphasis in recent work has been on how the odorifically ‘foul’ and ‘fragrant’ are radically historically and socially context-specific. The task has been to identify differing modes of olfactory dispositions and to explain why particular sociohistorical circumstances produce particular sorts of olfactory practices.
