Download or read book The Anthropology of Smell written by Mojca Ramšak and published by Springer. This book was released on 2024-09-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the meaning of smell from a socio-cultural perspective and brings important considerations of smell and olfaction beyond anatomy and physiology in an erudite, reader-friendly style. It addresses ideas about smell and odor in culturally diverse contexts; pays attention to the subtle ways in which smell is expressed; treats smell as part of memory, prejudice, rumor, and sexuality; offers insights into the role of smell in religion, literature, film art, intangible cultural heritage, and museum practices, with particular attention to the challenges posed by historical smells; describes the legal regulation of smell and the background to scent marketing that seeks to influence consumer buying habits, adding a unique and practical dimension to the content. In addition to philosophical and medical historical aspects, the book offers insights into the evolution, diagnosis and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the human sense of smell and illustrates how our environment and societal influences shape our sensory perceptions and thus our attitudes and interpretation of the olfactory world around us. From an anthropological perspective, the book looks at olfactory heritage, cultural traditions, and the symbolism of the nose in different societies. Overall, it offers a comprehensive and thought-provoking cultural examination of the sense of smell — a sense that is often underestimated — while broadening our understanding of the world of smell and its role in our lives. “Ramšak’s research provides valuable insights into the relationship between smell and culture, including its influence on identity, memory, social interactions, cultural practices, and beliefs. The book is a valuable resource for sensory anthropology, olfactory and intangible heritage.” Prof. Dr. Katja Hrobat Virloget, University of Primorska, The Faculty of Humanities, Department of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Koper, Slovenia “The remarkable depth and breadth of the subtle connection between smell and culture is testament to Ramšak’s deep engagement with the subject and her exceptional understanding of the global patterns of cultural connotations associated with smell.” Prof. Dr. Sophie Elpers, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Meertens Institut, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Download or read book The Anthropology of Smell written by Mojca Ramšak and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Aroma written by Constance Classen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its 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. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.
Download or read book Marketing Scents and the Anthropology of Smell written by Brian Moeran and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Past Scents written by Jonathan Reinarz and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-03-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he 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, Reinarz shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. With chapters including "Heavenly Scents," "Fragrant Lucre," and "Odorous Others," Reinarz's timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.
Download or read book Sensing the World written by David Le Breton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn – seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.
Download or read book Nature and Society in Central Brazil written by Anthony Seeger and published by . This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Money Has No Smell written by Paul Stoller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 1999 the tragic New York City police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed street vendor from Guinea, brought into focus the existence of West African merchants in urban America. In Money Has No Smell, Paul Stoller offers us a more complete portrait of the complex lives of West African immigrants like Diallo, a portrait based on years of research Stoller conducted on the streets of New York City during the 1990s. Blending fascinating ethnographic description with incisive social analysis, Stoller shows how these savvy West African entrepreneurs have built cohesive and effective multinational trading networks, in part through selling a simulated Africa to African Americans. These and other networks set up by the traders, along with their faith as devout Muslims, help them cope with the formidable state regulations and personal challenges they face in America. As Stoller demonstrates, the stories of these West African traders illustrate and illuminate ongoing debates about globalization, the informal economy, and the changing nature of American communities.
Download or read book Body Odor and Biopolitics written by Nat Lazakis and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally rooted in stereotypes about race and class, the modern norm of bodily odorlessness emerged amid 19th and early 20-century developments in urban sanitation, labor relations and product marketing. Today, discrimination against strong-smelling people includes spatial segregation and termination from employment yet goes unchallenged by social justice movements. This book examines how neoliberal rhetoric legitimizes treating strong-smelling people as defective individuals rather than a marginalized group, elevates authority figures into arbiters of odor, and drives sales of hygiene products for making bodies acceptable.
Download or read book Olfaction An Interdisciplinary Perspective from Philosophy to Life Sciences written by Nicola Di Stefano and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a broad and timely perspective on research on olfaction and its current technological challenges. It specifically emphasizes the interdisciplinary context in which olfaction is investigated in contemporary research. From aesthetics to sociology, from bioengineering to anthropology, the different chapters discuss a wide variety of issues arising from olfaction research and its application in different contexts. By highlighting the overlaps between different areas of research, the book fosters a better communication between disciplines and leads towards a better understanding of the role of olfaction in human perception and cognition. This inspiring read is of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in psychology, philosophy, bioengineering, and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Scented Ape written by David Michael Stoddart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-11-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both men and women devote time and effort to removing natural body odour and replacing it with sexual attractant odours derived from plants and animals - we seem to need to smell of something other than people! Yet of all the apes, we are the most richly endowed with scent producing glands. This book examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals. Odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behaviour in animals and there are claims that odour can play the same role in humans. The place of odours and scents in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis serves to illustrate the link between the emotional centres and the brain. The book presents arguments to explain the way in which our ancestral past has given rise to our modern day olfactory enigmas. The material is presented with as much explanation of the technical detail as possible to make the book accessible to a wide readership.
Download or read book Art Scents written by Larry E. Shiner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An overview of the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by the contemporary olfactory arts, which range from gallery and museum sculptures and installations, through the enhancement of theatre, film and music with scents, to the ambient scenting of stores and avant-garde chefs' use of scents in cuisine. Special attention is given to the aesthetics of perfume and incense and the question of their art status, as well as to the role of scent in the appreciation of nature and gardens. Ethical issues are discussed regarding ambient scenting, perfume wearing, and the use of smells in fast-food marketing. Because of the traditional neglect and denigration of the sense of smell and its aesthetic potential by philosophers from Kant and Hegel to the present, and by Darwin's and Freud's view of the human sense of smell as a near useless evolutionary vestige, the first parts of the book counter that tradition with both philosophical arguments and evidence from current evolutionary theory, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, history, linguistics and literature. Although the focus is on Western olfactory arts, the book draws on non-Western examples throughout. The book is aimed at both philosophers and general readers interested in the arts, and develops positions that should stimulate further discussion"--
Download or read book The Taste of Ethnographic Things written by Paul Stoller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologists who have lost their senses write ethnographies that are often disconnected from the worlds they seek to portray. For most anthropologists, Stoller contends, tasteless theories are more important than the savory sauces of ethnographic life. That they have lost the smells, sounds, and tastes of the places they study is unfortunate for them, for their subjects, and for the discipline itself. The Taste of Ethnographic Things describes how, through long-term participation in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, Stoller eventually came to his senses. Taken together, the separate chapters speak to two important and integrated issues. The first is methodological—all the chapters demonstrate the rewards of long-term study of a culture. The second issue is how he became truer to the Songhay through increased sensual awareness.
Download or read book Sensing the World written by David Le Breton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn – seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.
Download or read book How to Think Like an Anthropologist written by Matthew Engelke and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process, anthropology has done more than any other discipline to reveal what culture means--and why it matters. By weaving together examples and theories from around the world, Matthew Engelke provides a lively, accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to anthropology, covering a wide range of classic and contemporary approaches, subjects, and practitioners. Presenting a set of memorable cases, he encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world--from culture and nature to authority and blood. Along the way, he shows why anthropology matters: not only because it helps us understand other cultures and points of view but also because, in the process, it reveals something about ourselves and our own cultures, too." --Cover.
Download or read book The Smell Culture Reader written by Jim Drobnick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Culture and the Senses written by Prof. Kathryn Geurts and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-01-09 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.
