Aroma

This text argues that smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. It attempts to break the "olfactory silence" of modernity by offering an exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history and in a wide variety of non-Western societies.
Smell is a social phenomenon, invested with particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours, and can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. They attempt to break the "olfactory silence" of modernity by offering the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history (from antiquity to the present) and in a wide variety of non-Western societies. The topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America; and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity.