boasblogs " Scented Entanglements
Scented Entanglements<br>On olfactory racism and the ‘forgetting’ of odours and scents in the anthropological study of ‘race’
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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’s 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 “stank of garlic.” In spite of its transgressive intrusiveness, my friend’s 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, “smelled of sweat and kitchen,” 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 ‘cheap’ colognes worn by ‘Turkish’ or ‘Arab’ 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.
Accordingly, I began to wonder about the olfactory underpinnings of racism. The rumour of racialized persons “smelling of garlic” 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’s anxiety to pick up undesirable odours or else appear as “smelly” 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 “smelly,” with their bodies always already marked as such, whereas for others, including myself, such worries were of little relevance for their embodied everyday lives.
Vegetables for display at a market in Berlin-Neukölln (photograph: C. Liebelt, Jan. 2023)
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, The Smell of Slavery 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 –an “aromatic past,” according to Kettler – 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 ‘in an ostentatious game of sensory imperialism’ (ibid. 9), a form of ‘olfactory othering’ (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 ’embodied, uncanny, and persistent’ (ibid.: 76). Long before the imperial era and the European post-war guest worker regime, poor odours were attributed to Jews. Kettler outlines how ‘anti-Semitic tropes helped to establish … racial state[s] of the West, whereby racism asserted greater force through sensory feelings of disgust,’ with the bodies thus singled out being ‘increasingly understood as unable to be cleansed’ (ibid.: 73).
Olfactory racism lives on and continues to inform immigrants’ and racialized persons’ experiences of discrimination and self-representation. Seconding my friend’s mother’s experiences, immigrant songs speak of everyday olfactory racism, for example as those who ‘stink of garlic’ in post-war Germany (Cem Karaca, ‘Willkommen’ [Welcome], 1984; see also ‘Songs of Gastarbeiter,’ Vol. 1, CD/Vinyl/MP3, Trikont 2013). Similar to Sibel’s 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 ‘smelly immigrant trope’. In 2017, one of the UK’s biggest buy-to-let landlords issued an instruction not to let his...