Why shouldn’t smell be a valuable study?

Ackerman and Green both make the same claims about the importance of scent in our daily lives, depicting our difficulty in describing smells to others without making a reference to something else, and arguing that studying smell is just as important in understanding culture as studying sociology and anthropology. As a natural scientist, I was skeptical about Green’s arguments—how could smell, something unable to be measured or quantified, be as important as objective, scientific theory? But as I read further, I began to resonate with this argument; scent’s subjective nature means that we cannot recover past articles of it. Our difficulty in describing them makes understanding their connotations difficult, especially when the only archaeological evidence we have are containers and jars for perfumes and topical oils. What did certain scents mean to ancient civilizations? Are there any patterns between how we react to smells and how they reacted to those same smells? Answering these questions may hint to the social mechanisms that may compel us to connote certain emotions with smells as these connotations change over time.

(Photo: Outflow Pipe from a Mill on the Androscoggin River, from the National Archives by Charles Steinhacker, 1973.)

In Maine from 1940 to 1970, rapid industrialization bringing new paper and pulp mills severely polluted the Androscoggin River, causing widespread complaints from town residents about the putrid smells coming from the river. As it turns out, these odorous “rotten egg” smells were coming from the decomposition of organic waste, rich in sulfites, being put into the river by the mills. To tackle this problem, the local government put a chemistry professor, Walter Lawrance, in charge of fixing the issue. As a chemist, Lawrence took a strictly objective, scientific approach, rating the intensity of the river’s odors each day on a 1-10 scale. He also used his chemistry background to dump nitrates in the river, supposedly combating the sulfites in the organic waste to reduce odors. But, probably to Green’s chagrin, this scientific approach failed; although the chemistry of the rivers was balanced, reducing the odors temporarily, the reduced oxygen levels from decomposition of polluted waste continued to decimate aquatic life and water quality. Observers reprimanded Lawrance for failing to get at the root of the problem–polluting mill operations. This historic account is an example of how subjective opinions, such as those of the Maine residents, may oftentimes be more important than objective data.

With Green’s opening example of the rabbi whose odorous breath attracted students who were curious about his teachings, the power of scent and the subjective becomes apparent for its ability to spread knowledge of the Torah. This raises the question, if the senses are such a powerful mechanism to move and educate people, why shouldn't the study of the senses be considered an important part of academia?

For more on Maine's battle over the Androscoggin: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/envhis/ems019