The Broken Cycle: Smell in a Bangkok Lane

In our programmatic paper on the sociology of smell, Uri Almagor and I broach the idea of "the cycle of smell’as a heuristic device through which the structure of the totality of smells in a simple society could be understood. ¹ We argue that smells associated with fertility and birth, at the beginning of the cycle, are generally considered pleasant, smells associated with maturation and ripeness, are also well-liked, though they tend to become unpleasant as they intensify into smells of over-ripeness; smells of putrefaction, decay and death, and the associated smells of refuse, garbage and excrement, particularly of human excrement, are considered repellent. However, as substances bearing such smells are used to produce new life, e.g. as fertilizers, they tend to become more pleasant again. Hence, we further argue, the experience of smell ought to be understood emically, in terms of its meaning within the cultural context, and cannot be fully grasped etically, i.e. merely from the olfactory characteristics of the smelling substance. As the meaning of the smell varies according to its location in the olfactory cycle, so does its appreciation. Hence, the smells of animal dung or urine may be appreciated when used, e.g. as symbols of fertility or birth (Almagor 1987); elsewhere, when these same substances are perceived merely as animal excrements, their smell will be experienced as repellent. This argument extends, in fact, the conception that human attitudes to, and actions in, the environment are mediated by culturally determined "environmental orientations” (Cohen 1976), into the area of the anthropology of smell.