A LAUGH OF JASMINE: THE AESTHETICS OF SMELL

The chapter explored how olfactory codes are translated into practice through being enacted in

ritual contexts and their function to serve in expressing as well as creating meaning for people.

For examples:

1. The cattle raising Dassanetch of Ethiopia, find nothing more attractive than the odour of

cattle, a scent which carries notions of fertility and social status for them. Dassanetch

men, consequently, decorate themselves with cattle bones and hides and even wash their

hands with cattle urine, as well as smearing their bodies with cow manure. Dassanetch

women rub their heads, shoulders, and breasts with butter in order to advertise their

fertility and make themselves attractive to the men by their scent.

2. For the Dogon of Mali, the loveliest fragrance is that of the onion. Young Dogon men and

women will fry the onion plant in butter and rub it all over their bodies as a perfume. By

contrast, among the Tamils of India, it is said that ‘you can infuse an onion with many

fragrances, but it will never lose its stench’. There, sandalwood and aloewood are

favourite scents.

3. The African Bushmen: they have elaborated numerous folktales around the sweet,

seductive scent of rain, to which, they say, no other fragrance can compare.

The concepts of fragrance differ among cultures, so do the modes of employing it. In the

Trobriands, mint is boiled in coconut oil while a spell is pronounced over it in order to create

a love charm. The inhabitants of the South Pacific Island of Nauru, for their part, believe that

by drinking a perfume potion of scented coconut milk, one’s body and breath will become
 irresistibly fragrant. Another perfumery technique employed by the Nauruans is that of

steaming one’s body with scent.

Fragrance, in many cultures, is not only a matter of using perfumes to augment one’s personal

attraction, however. It is also a means of enhancing the aromas of one’s food, possessions and

living space. For the example the aesthetics of smell in the United Arab Emirates. The purpose

behind using perfumes in Arabia, therefore, is not to mask unpleasant body odours. Rather, their

use is aimed at making the body agreeably fragrant. When guests participate in a meal in the

UAE, the visit ends with a round of perfumes. A meal is not considered complete unless there is

this offering to the nose, as it were. Bringing in the perfume box is a sign that the visit has come

to an end, and when the perfuming ritual is over the guests say their farewells and depart. Guests,

therefore, arrive wearing their best perfumes in order to honour the hostess, and leave re-scented

with the best perfumes of the hostess, showing that they, in turn, have been honoured. Indeed, the

odour of the perfumes will linger for hours after a visit, prompting admiring comments from

others: ‘You must have been somewhere. You smell nice. Where were you?’ The higher the

quality of the scents, the more the absent hostess is praised. These examples of aesthetic uses of

smell indicate both the pleasure many people take in fragrance and its importance in establishing

social ties.

CIGARETTES FOR THE GODS: COMMUNICATING WITH THE SPIRITS THROUGH

SMELL

The Muslim inhabitants of the United Arab Emirates, for instance, say that: ‘A dirty, smelly body

is vulnerable to evil, the scented person is surrounded by angels. Similar beliefs are found in
other Arabic cultures. In Morocco, for example, foul odours are closely associated with evil

spirits

In such cases it is evident that maintaining oneself in good odour is not simply a means of being

personally attractive or socially nice, but a matter of sanctity and sin, life and death.

The Chewong, an aboriginal people of the Malay Peninsula, for example, consider odour the

fundamental means of interaction with the spirits. Chewong children wear a piece of wild ginger

tied to a string around their necks in order to keep harmful spirits away by the pungent smell.

Good spirits, in contrast, are attracted by and ‘fed’ with an incense of fragrant wood, ritually

offered to them every night. During this rite the Chewong shaman takes some of the incense

smoke in his fist, puts his fist to his mouth and blows in four directions, after which he prays to

the spirits for divine protection. The smoke is believed to carry the shaman’s words up to the

spirit world. On no account must this incense offering be neglected as this would interrupt the

communication with the spirits and endanger the Chewong community

SANDALWOOD, SUGAR AND CROCODILE CLAWS: OLFACTORY RITES OF PASSAGE

Rites of passage—that is, rituals which transport a person from one condition or social status to

another, such as the rites of birth, puberty, marriage or death—are often occasions of olfactory

symbolism. Babies, for example, come into the world in a gush of natural smells and need to be

socialized into the odours of culture according to some customs. To accomplish this, the

inhabitants of the Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia traditionally ‘smoked’ a newborn child over the

household fire for the first few weeks of life. Odour symbolism surrounding puberty, similarly,

typically centres on a ritualized olfactory passage from nature to culture. However, in this case,

the symbolism usually differs according to the sex of the ritual subjects. Among the Suya of
Brazil, boys are supposed to lose the strong asocial smell of childhood and attain the ideal bland

smell of adult men after undergoing the male puberty rituals. This olfactory transformation is

emphasized by the bland smell of the nut oil with which adolescent boys paint themselves. Girls,

however, are believed to become even more strong-smelling and asocial as they reach puberty,

for their incipient fertility allies them with the forces of nature.

why do odours tend to be emphasized during such rites of passage? The reason would seem to be

that there is a widely perceived or intuited intrinsic connection between olfaction and transition.

To begin with, it is in the nature of odours to alter and shift, making them an apt symbol for a

person undergoing transition. Consider the situation of the initiate at a male puberty rite. The

initiate is no longer a boy but not yet a man. He is ‘betwixt and between’ the conventional

categories of social perception. In a similar way, smells are difficult to classify, and even more

difficult to contain. Their ‘out of placeness’ thus corresponds to the ambiguous status of the

subject of the rite of passage.

The ‘in between’ condition of the subjects of a rite of passage makes them particularly vulnerable

to the effects of the odours they come into contact with at this time. The wrong odour—for

example, a smell of menstruation during a male puberty rite—can prevent the ritual participants

from making the necessary transition. The right odours, however, can help guide them across

from one stage to the next. In the case of a funeral rite, for instance, the spirit of the deceased

might be thought to rise up from earth to heaven with the smoke of burning incense.