{"id":10790,"date":"2023-03-07T07:00:37","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T06:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/?post_type=undoingraceandracism&#038;p=10790"},"modified":"2023-03-07T15:03:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T14:03:36","slug":"scented-entanglements","status":"publish","type":"undoingraceandracism","link":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/undoingraceandracism\/scented-entanglements\/","title":{"rendered":"Scented Entanglements"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<style>\n\t.dkpdf-download-icon { height: 1.5rem; }\n<\/style>\n\n\n\n\t<div class=\"dkpdf-button-container\" style=\" text-align:right \">\n\n\t\t<a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10790?pdf=10790\" target=\"_blank\">\n\t\t\t<img src='\/wp-content\/themes\/boasblogs\/dkpdf\/download_red.svg' class=dkpdf-download-icon'\/>\n\t\t<\/a>\n\t\n\t\t<!-- <a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10790?pdf=10790\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"dkpdf-button-icon\"><i class=\"fa fa-file-pdf-o\"><\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a> &rarr; -->\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Shortly before the first Corona lockdown in spring 2020, I was busy preparing for fieldwork in Turkey on a much neglected topic in the scholarly literature on beauty, namely the role of odours and fragrances. Reading up on the history of smell cultures and perfumes (ultimately unable to leave for fieldwork), I began talking to Berlin-based relatives, neighbours, and friends about the topic. A friend\u2019s mother who came to Germany among the first generation of Turkish so-called guest workers recalled how back in the early 1980s, her elderly German neighbour repeatedly told her that she \u201cstank of garlic.\u201d In spite of its transgressive intrusiveness, my friend\u2019s mother remembered this statement as being brought forward in a seemingly friendly, matter-of-fact way. Almost four decades later, she continued to be puzzled and troubled by these comments, because she had never even liked or consumed garlic. Another friend, Sibel, the daughter of Turkish immigrants born in Berlin, told me about her immense anxiety to be perceived as smelly. Sibel was well aware of the common stereotype that Turkish women, especially those with headscarves, \u201csmelled of sweat and kitchen,\u201d as she put it. Therefore, ever since she started veiling as a young adult she has taken great care to mask her body odours, taking an extra set of clothes everywhere she goes, always careful not to pick up bad smells in her routine as a nursery schoolteacher. Finally, otherwise amiable neighbours confided to me about their strong aversion of the presumably \u2018cheap\u2019 colognes worn by \u2018Turkish\u2019 or \u2018Arab\u2019 men in the neighbourhood in highly affective terms. Thus, what surfaced from my rather naive questions about scent preferences and dislikes were stories of racially charged scent repulsion and anxiety.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Accordingly, I began to wonder about the olfactory underpinnings of racism. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The rumour of racialized persons \u201csmelling of garlic\u201d opened up an entire imaginative space for me on sensory homemaking through cooking and commensurality, while it also clearly spoke of the sensual grounding of racist exclusion and devaluation. Sibel\u2019s anxiety to pick up undesirable odours or else appear as \u201csmelly\u201d carried important insights about the sensual marking of racialized bodies within hegemonic, seemingly odourless smellscapes. It implied that for some, a great deal of odour elimination work was seen as necessary to counter the notion of being \u201csmelly,\u201d with their bodies always already marked as such, whereas for others, including myself, such worries were of little relevance for their embodied everyday lives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-10795\" src=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Gemuse_Maybachufer-920x613.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"920\" height=\"613\" srcset=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Gemuse_Maybachufer-920x613.jpg 920w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Gemuse_Maybachufer-1440x960.jpg 1440w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Gemuse_Maybachufer-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Gemuse_Maybachufer-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Gemuse_Maybachufer-920x613@2x.jpg 1840w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 920px) 100vw, 920px\" \/><figcaption>\n<p style=\"font-size: 80%; line-height: 125%;\"><em>Vegetables for display at a market in Berlin-Neuk\u00f6lln (photograph: C. Liebelt, Jan. 2023)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In late spring 2020 I discovered a newly published book that helped me make sense of my research findings and observations: Drawing on a large archive of colonial writings, scientific and literary works, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Smell of Slavery<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> by Andrew Kettler (2020) delineates the history of olfactory racism in the Atlantic World. Kettler describes a process in which Western Europe in the Early Modern period transformed from a preoccupation with perfumes and smell \u2013an \u201caromatic past,\u201d according to Kettler \u2013 to a collective fantasy of inhabiting a deodorized modernity. In the process, Western Europeans emplaced odours upon the bodies of those they encountered, enslaved, and colonized \u2018in an ostentatious game of sensory imperialism\u2019 (ibid. 9), a form of \u2018olfactory othering\u2019 (ibid. 47). The rise of biological race theory, according to Kettler, was related to a sensual cosmology that conceptualized the odours of others as increasingly &#8218;embodied, uncanny, and persistent&#8216; (ibid.: 76). Long before the imperial era and the European post-war guest worker regime, poor odours were attributed to Jews. Kettler outlines how \u2018anti-Semitic tropes helped to establish \u2026 racial state[s] of the West, whereby racism asserted greater force through sensory feelings of disgust,\u2019 with the bodies thus singled out being \u2018increasingly understood as unable to be cleansed\u2019 (ibid.: 73).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Olfactory racism lives on and continues to inform immigrants\u2019 and racialized persons\u2019 experiences of discrimination and self-representation. Seconding my friend\u2019s mother\u2019s experiences, immigrant songs speak of everyday olfactory racism, for example as those who \u2018stink of garlic\u2019 in post-war Germany (Cem Karaca, \u2018<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=OKUvoBvTImc\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Willkommen<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019 [Welcome], 1984; see also \u2018Songs of Gastarbeiter,\u2019 Vol. 1, CD\/Vinyl\/MP3, Trikont 2013). Similar to Sibel\u2019s anxiety of being (mis-)recognized as smelly, Martin Manalansan (2006) found that Asian Americans in New York City compromise their food preferences and invest in exorbitant house-cleaning efforts to evade the \u2018smelly immigrant trope\u2019. In 2017, one of the <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">UK&#8217;s biggest buy-to-let <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">landlords issued an instruction not to let his properties to \u2018coloured people\u2019 because the smell of their curry \u2018sticks to the carpet\u2019 (cf. Buettner 2008). Until today, one of the standard categories of scents in modern \u2013 that is, French \u2013 perfumery is called \u2018oriental,\u2019 in use for perfumes based on animal substances such as musk, castoreum, civet or ambergris \u2013 anal or sperm secretions now commonly replaced by synthetics for animal protection. According to one of modern perfumery\u2019s basic references, oriental perfumes have \u2018strongly erogenous fantasy complexes\u2019 (Jellinek 1997 [1951]: 76) and they include perfumes called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Shalimar<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Obsession<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, or <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Opium<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (see Calkin and Jellinek 1994: 123-128). This categorization assembles a multitude of racialized assumptions in a rather disturbing textbook case of Orientalism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-10791\" src=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Curry_Maybachufer-920x613.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"920\" height=\"613\" srcset=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Curry_Maybachufer-920x613.jpg 920w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Curry_Maybachufer-1440x960.jpg 1440w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Curry_Maybachufer-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Curry_Maybachufer-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Curry_Maybachufer-920x613@2x.jpg 1840w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 920px) 100vw, 920px\" \/><figcaption>\n<p style=\"font-size: 80%; line-height: 125%;\"><em>Asian streetfood at a market in Berlin-Neuk\u00f6lln (photograph: C. Liebelt, Jan 2023)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Against this background, the \u2018active forgetting\u2019 of odours in relation to race theory (Kettler 2020: 9) is indeed striking. This includes anthropological theory, which has only just begun to conceptualise the senses, most importantly vision and sound, but rarely smell. In classical anthropology, according to Constance Classen (1992), the sense of smell, olfactory symbolism, and its relation to racism remained \u2018overlooked and uninvestigated\u2019 (ibid. 133) Classen relates anthropologists\u2019 reluctance to recognise the importance of smell with its marginalization as a so-called \u2018lower\u2019 sense in the classical hierarchy of the senses, as well as with \u2018the racist tendencies of an earlier anthropology to associate [it] with the \u201clower\u201d races\u2019 (1997: 404f.). In spite of the fact that many anthropologists today are proud of their discipline\u2019s anti-racist traditions, much is left to be tackled and changed in the anthropological study of racialization (cf. Anderson 2019). For example, what kind of insights into the actual making of \u2018race\u2019 and the affective workings of racism may we gain by looking into the racialization of bodies as smelly and undesirable? What might be the role of sensual ethnographic research in the endeavour of analyzing and ultimately, undoing race and white supremacy? We may certainly gain by looking at the ways olfactory racism and \u2018smelly immigrant\u2019-tropes impact the formation of racialized subjectivities, olfactory anxieties, and fragrant practices; also, by analyzing the differing experiences and representations of first-, second- and third-generation immigrants with respect to olfactory anxieties and the management of (body) odours; by inquiring the role of aromatic practices for sensory well-being as well as resistance and anti-racist struggle; and finally, by questioning how all this relates to the history and the archives of white supremacist structures and Euro-American colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-10793\" src=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Essenzen_Maybachufer-920x613.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"920\" height=\"613\" srcset=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Essenzen_Maybachufer-920x613.jpg 920w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Essenzen_Maybachufer-1440x960.jpg 1440w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Essenzen_Maybachufer-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Essenzen_Maybachufer-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Essenzen_Maybachufer-920x613@2x.jpg 1840w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 920px) 100vw, 920px\" \/><figcaption>\n<p style=\"font-size: 80%; line-height: 125%;\"><em>Oil-based perfumes at a market in Berlin-Neuk\u00f6lln (photograph: C. Liebelt, Jan. 2023)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fleeting and ephemeral in their materiality, scents are transgressive in the way they intrude on the bodily boundaries that we create for ourselves; they may linger on in the form of sensations and may haunt us as the mediators of subconscious memories. They are part of our moral and material boundary work, operating on strong affective grounds to create proper, respectable bodies on the one hand, and filthy and pungent ones on the other. Noses contributed to the processes of racialization long before race was written as science and became ingrained in the presumably deodorized institutions of Western modernity. According to Kettler (2020: 213), \u2018[t]he racist mind cannot simply be told that race does not exist, because racist knowledge is not entirely conscious. Rather, racial familiarity is embodied to such an extent within racialist perceptions that the experience seems to be biological.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Time and again we have seen the inadequacy of liberal anti-racism in dismantling white supremacy and for effecting structural decolonization<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Studying the sensual and affective underpinnings of white supremacy, I argue, likewise illustrates the limits of liberal anti-racism, which tends to turn a blind eye to the embodied affects and ongoing effects of Euro-American colonialism in structural racism. The task then is to take seriously the embodied experiences of those affected by structural racism and relate these to not only the (written) history of racism, but also to the sensual restriction of our (disciplinary) archives as well as our own bodily <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">hexis<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Analysing the affective and embodied underpinnings of structural racism and white supremacy requires a multisensorial and relational ethnography in the spirit of abolitionist anthropology (Jobson 2020), an anthropology that is interested in the \u2018patchy\u2019 entanglements of our own embodied becomings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>References<\/strong><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-indent: -2em; padding-left: 2em;\">\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Anderson, M. 2019. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From Boas to Black Power. Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Buettner, E. 2008. \u201c\u2018Going for an Indian\u2019: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain,\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Journal of Modern History,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> 80(4): 865-901.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Calkin, R. R. and J. St. Jellinek. 1994. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perfumery: Practice and Principles<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. New York et al.: John Wiley &amp; Sons.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Classen, C. 1992. \u201cThe Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories,\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethos<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, 20: 133-166.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Classen, C. 1997. \u201cFoundations for an Anthropology of the Senses,\u201d<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> International Social Science Journal,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> 153: 401\u201312.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jellinek, P. 1997 [1951]. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Psychological Basis of Perfumery<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, edited and translated by J. St. Jellinek. London et al.: Blackie Academic &amp; Professional.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jobson, R. C. 2020. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201c<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019,<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">American Anthropologist<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, 122: 259-271.\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/aman.13398\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/aman.13398<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kettler, A. 2020. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Manalansan, M. F. 2006. Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City. In J. Drobnick (ed.), <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Smell Culture Reader<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (pp. 41-52). (Sensory Formations). Oxford, New York: Berg.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em><strong>Claudia Liebelt<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the FU Berlin. Her research foci are in the Anthropology of the Body and the Senses, Gender and Sexualities, Political Anthropology and Religion in the Middle East and Turkey. She has authored <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in Urban Turkey<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (Syracuse UP, 2023) and <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Caring for the &#8218;Holy Land&#8216;: Filipina domestic workers in Israel<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (Berghahn, 2011).\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"autor":[340],"class_list":["post-10790","undoingraceandracism","type-undoingraceandracism","status-publish","hentry","autor-claudia-liebelt"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/undoingraceandracism"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10798,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10790\/revisions\/10798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=10790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}