Some of the Faces of Smell (Nick Ramirez)

Compared to the other senses, smell is not used as often as vision, hearing, or touch. Due to our daily reliance on the senses, we deem smell as a pretty unimportant sense but, it's a monumentally important tool in order to perceive the world. Smell is a very unique and nuanced sense; Green "The function of aroma is organized around contradictory characteristics as well, such as employing fragrance for utilitarian or pleasurable purposes and its own spatial relation of inside and outside," (141).

Imagine spending the night at a friend's house and the friend does not notice that the entire house smells musty. Not only do people become acclimated very quickly to smells, but this acclimation may lead to most people not noticing the smell they emit. As a visitor to a cornucopia of smell, we notice the nuances of smell that a resident might not be keen to. Oftentimes I feel more or less comfortable in a house I am visiting depending if the smell is pleasant or not. I actually avoid eating some foods if the smell is too bad in my opinion such as: pickles and olives. The topic of smell is also interesting because of smell's pathway in the brain, "We seem to have emotional reactions to scent far more quickly than we can articulate them," (7). The rapid nature of smell linked with emotional reactions can lead to smell being used to influence social behavior (especially onset behavior). As we talked in class with Professor Eskine, bad smells can lead to stricter moral judgments which is the same with bad tastes. Smell is a subtle and important piece to flirtation and seduction so many people use perfume or cologne to have consistent fragrance of their choice. The sensual dominion of romance is strongly tied with fragrances because perfumes and colognes are extremely popular. Though we may not take note of smell all the time, we are subconsciously aware of them all the time.



Smell is used to describe the "other" in addition to olfaction being used to describe more abstract, profound, and religious experiences. The "other" describes anyone that is part of the outgroup and does not socially belong for whatever reason. Deborah Green reviewed descriptions of the "other" in the rabbinic texts through the sense of smell and she states that "the male 'other' is described as stinking, while female 'others' are commonly associated with the pleasant scents of various spices, such as myrrh and cinnamon, or with the incense used to fumigate garments or lit at festive meals," (129). It is interesting that the "other" is deemed a disgusting quality for men, but the female "other" is almost fetishized as exotic through smell. The characters of the "other" seem to be already decided and its reinforced by the words to describe their smell.