Scent and Scent-sibilities: Smell and Everyday Life Experiences
Author: Kelvin E. Y. Low
Date Of Publication: Mar 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0215-4
Isbn: 1-4438-0215-8
Smells are distinct and ubiquitous. They envelope us, enter our bodies, and emanate from us. Yet, they remain relegated to the background of everyday life experiences. This book attempts to highlight the social salience of smell in social actors’ day-to-day encounters where issues involving morality and social othering, presentation of self, and personhood intertwine with analyses of smell as a social conduit. These encounters include the experiences of anosmic individuals, which capture non-olfactive social worlds that are rarely addressed hitherto. Further deliberations on olfaction in relation to social memberships of race, class, and gender, elucidate upon social boundaries of inclusion and exclusion constructed vis-à-vis smell as a social marker. Olfactive adjudications of race and class are then expanded upon through the author’s discussion of various smellscapes in the context of Singapore. Olfaction, sanitary discipline, and olfactive simulacra are also expounded upon, thereby underscoring the control and manipulation of scents in the contexts of modernity and postmodernity. Smells therefore offer insights into the workings of social relations and power structures in society.

By predicating analyses on empirical data procured from Singapore, along with case studies from the region and beyond, this study draws much needed attention on smell which has been a neglected sense in the wider literature. In addition, the concurrent employment of the other senses will also be explicated, which therefore demonstrates the social character of smell and other sensory modalities through historical and contemporary milieux. This book is a pioneering effort in offering sociocultural interpretations of scents based on primary and secondary data analysed using the trajectory of sociology of everyday life.

Kelvin E.Y. Low is a teaching member of the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include social memory and historiography, sociology of the senses and everyday life, and migration and transnationalism. Kelvin has published articles on the senses in internationally-refereed journals and is preparing a co-edited book based on the senses in Asian contexts.

"The author takes us on an odouriferous journey through current scholarship and fascinating ethnography of the meaning of smell in society. More than a contribution to current interest in exploring cross-cultural "scent-scapes", Kelvin E.Y. Low provides an argument for the centrality of smell to the key processes of identity formation and differentiation, thus placing the senses at the heart of contemporary social science."

- David Sutton, author of "Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory" (2001); Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Southern Illinois University

"Smell matters centrally to the construction of others and presentation of self in everyday life in Singapore. Kelvin Low brings a highly refined and discerning nose to bear on the social dynamics of scents and stenches in this bustling Asian capital. By breaking the smell barrier, he adds an important new chapter to the sociology of the senses. This book will also be of key interest to geographers for its olfactory cartography of Singapore.”

- David Howes, author of Sensual Relations and co-author of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell teaches in the Department of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal.

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

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