Smells and Bells

When I was seven years old, I nearly bit off part of my tongue. Since this is not a terribly common experience, allow me to set the scene (don’t worry, I won’t get too descriptive): There is a little girl sitting in the back of her mother’s car. They are driving home from a dentist appointment. It was a cavity filling, her first one, and it’s the first time she has been given Novocain. Being naturally anxious, the little girl has many tics that she does to try to keep herself comfortable. One of these is biting her tongue. Unfortunately, with the Novocain, she can’t feel when she’s biting down too hard.  The boy next to her – a kid who her mother often babysits – says “Miss Jen, Jordyn’s mouth is bleeding.” Initially, her mother brushes it off, but the boy informs her “It’s bleeding a lot.” So she has the little girl open her mouth and looks in the rear view mirror to examine the damage. There is a rough slice through part of her tongue. When they get home, she jams a rag in her da...

 It struck me as funny, just how much Classen talks about how misogynistic the Church is during the Middle Ages. The way the Church said "if ... 'men could see beneath [women's skin]' then they would be safe from the temptations of touch, since 'how can we desire to embrace such a sack of dung'" (76) is hilarious. They get points from me for creativity, at least.  A centuries-long history of homophobia within the Catholic Church seems almost ironic amidst these claims of how horrible women are--a disclaimer here is that I am a lesbian and grew up Catholic, though I no longer am. I sort of jokingly thought while reading a good majority of Classen's 'A Woman's Touch' chapter, "If they hate women that badly, why didn't think they think being gay is okay?" You know, women are "sack[s] of dung" (76) on the inside, so... just stop encouraging heterosexual marriage. Of course, I'm not serious about that, it's just s...

Another aspect of Classen and touch that I want to “touch” upon besides what I mentioned in our group presentation (the necessity of touch through Harlow’s monkey experiment and how fun games are when we include touch and not sight) is the noticeable omission of tactile experiences in museums. Exploring history through touch makes the past come alive. While reading, I was reminded of when my family visited Graceland and went to the Elvis Presley museum. Part of the VIP tour included holding Elvis’ microphone, jewelry, etc., and this is so important, not only for die-hard Elvis fans, but for everyone to experience because “when we allow historical figures to be of flesh and blood, we make it possible to relate to them as fellow beings and, therefore, to make meaningful comparisons between their lives and situations and our own.” I believe touch is one of the best ways that we can understand the past, and it should be implemented in history lessons more. (Pictured here is my sister about...

       Don't you wish you could see your favorite celebrity, just once? Even if just for a second, look at their house, maybe even just stand in the spot where they stood, see something they looked at with their own eyes? Although it is intended to be used in a religious context there is a word in Indian Hindusim,  " Darśan" that refers to this kind of seeing. In  Darśan: seeing the divine image in India , Diana Eck explains that religious seeing or  Darśan is a sort of worship that happens by looking upon holy items, places and people. For example Eck states that Hindus often go on pilgrimages to different sacred locations as "sacred sightseers" just to look upon the home of a god or goddess, a statue, a blessed city, and so on. Eck's description of the way people used to flock to Mahatma Gandhi just to "take his d arśan" (Eck 5) is what reminded me of modern day celebrities. Society has deemed celebrities important and even getting the chan...

     In  Women, The Recited Qur'an and Islamic Music in America Rasmussen discusses the differences between conventional Indonesian music and Qur'an recitation. The author explains that reciting the Qur'an is not considered to be music and these distinctions give it a more divine sound, and bring the listener and reciter closer to God. In her book Rasmussen provides two terms that are used to describe different ways of interacting with sound and states that the Qur'an is an active manifestation of these terms in everyday life. There is, " Aurality"  which implies that the listener is not only listening but "taking it to heart" she explains that it is a multisensory and kinesthetic way of experiencing the sound. Which I thought was really interesting because we all have probably gotten goosebumps before when listening to a song we like, or have been able to describe a song in a way that doesn't relate to sound, which could be called multisensory a...

 In Kitchen, food, and Family by Elizabeth Perez, she includes some field notes about a guy giving a woman he loves oxtails after she requests them of him. After he says I love you to her.  Whenever I bake my Mom always asks me why I would put in so much work for something that I could buy at the store. I like it doing the work is always my answer. But that's not the whole truth, it's also about who I'm baking for. Whenever I bake it's always for family and friends. The other reason I enjoy baking is because it is my way of telling people I  love and appreciate them being in my life. I don't think I could ever run a bakery because I would have to bake for strangers and rude people and I know I couldn't do that.

In a strange way, every human is connected by pain. We all avoid because, for lack of a better word, it's painful. However, before I read Constance Classen's The Deepest Sense , I was not truly aware of how the Church used pain as a form of reforment during the Middle Ages. I was already aware that torture was a part of the judicial system in the Middle Ages, but I simply thought it was because those accused of crimes needed to be made examples of. I never knew that someone's conviction in court could easily change while being tortured. But more often than not, torture was used before execution as to strengthen the collective social body and seperate the deeds of the offender. Such was the case for the Spanish Inquistion. On a seperate but similar note, upon reading Classen's section on torture, I was reminded of a scene from Mel Brook's History of the World Part 1 , in which the horrorific and brutul treatment of the jews was portrayed as a light-hearted broadway...

 I have a fear of going blind. Not, like, greatest fear of all time, but easily in my top three. This is both a reasonable and fully ridiculous fear as (1) I do have a medical issue that affects my eyes but (2) it has never affected my vision, nor would it have ever made me go blind, but I was 14 when I was diagnosed, assumed it was a possibility, and did not bother to confirm that for long enough that I internalized it. It's also the only sense that I'm "good" at, as little sense (haha, sense ) as that makes. My sense of smell is awful as I've said before, I never hear things right (though that's less a hearing issue and more a focus issue), and though it's hard to quantify touch as a skill, I certainly would've been bad at the touch group's guessing game from their presentation. My sight, on the other hand, is perfect (Technically better than, since my vision is 20/15 and "perfect" is 20/20). I'm the only person in my family to not ...

    

 

The concept of darsan, or “seeing” the divine image, is fascinating to me. I often return to comparisons to Catholic practices and beliefs, not because I’m a practicing Catholic, but because it’s the environment that I was brought up in. I also found the reference to Western perceptions of idols and the references to Western attitudes toward pilgrimages interesting. The comparison jumps out to me because the role of images and the centrality of sight in Hindu tradition seems completely antithetical to what I learned in the context of Catholic tradition. In this tradition there was always a strong emphasis on having “faith.” Faith, by definition, requires a lack of tangible evidence. Of course there are images and objects such as crucifixes that are included in prayer, but they aren’t necessary for prayer. The call in Catholicism is to believe rather than to see.  This also made me think of a few stories from Exodus that involve “seeing God.” The first is of course the burning bush,...

When seeing examples of Qur’an recitation, I could not help but think of my own experiences with contemporary Christian worship music. The concept of Aurality is incredibly interesting to me. The thought of  an encompassing experience with worship and music. Beyond just the sound or lyrical composition, but a complete participation in the practice. With this distinction in mind, it often, in my experience, feels as if some Christian worship music works through the channel of “Orality” rather than “aurality.” This became even more apparent to me when watching the videos of the Qur’an recitation in the Indonesian tradition. I could see this channel of Aurality and this idea of “taking it to heart” rather than just hearing. As the Qur’an recitation is placed in the framework of a melodic and timbred performance, it becomes musical.  To me, music is not just heard but is felt throughout the entire body. Rhythm and movement are inextricably connected to music and without it, the e...

There are a number of things that Diane Ackerman writes about in this chapter that I find interesting, but there was one quote in particular that reframed my entire perspective on the sense of smell:  “Breaths come in pairs, except at two times in our lives—the beginning and the end. At birth, we inhale for the first time; at death, we exhale for the last. In between, through all the lather of one’s life, each breath passes air over our olfactory sites. Each day, we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air. It takes us about five seconds to breathe—two seconds to inhale and three seconds to exhale—and, in that time, molecules of odor flood through our systems. Inhaling and exhaling, we smell odors. Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us. We live in a constant wash of them.”  At first this came across to me as a dramatic, romanticized characterization of what I considered to be a usually fairly mundane sensorial experience. I’...

Diana Eck's description of the richness associated with Hinduism was one of the most interesting reads for me. Reading the manner in which she described the opulence and relevance that goes into the preparation and viewing of holy sites and statues in India made me view my own origin in a new light.  I feel like sometimes when you're reply engulfed in a particular surrounding it somehow takes you father from appreciating its nuances, however looking at it from someone else perspective allowed me to see the beauty in practices that to me have to an extent lost their luster as I have been accustomed to them for so long. I found the way she spoke about there being an air of divinity not just in the idol but also in the location that holds it, when she talks about the process of "taking darshan" very interesting. This is something I have experienced countless times my life, as the belief is that the location that houses a specific idol has meaning to itself which in some ...

  Right off the bat, I’ve got to disagree with Scarry: in my experience (having never been tortured), pain doesn’t disconnect you from reality, but anchors you to it. For example, I tend to pick at my lips as a nervous habit, because even if they start bleeding and are always chapped, cracked, and as my ex once told me, “kinda unkissable” (fuck you, Lark), being able to feel something that’s really, physically there, even if it’s painful, helps ground me and get me ‘out of my own head.’ It's weird to think about how touch (specifically pain and, like Melzack proved, pleasure) is used in metaphors ‘both ways,’ so that mental experiences are phrased in terms of physical experiences (Glucklich mentions chewing, swallowing, and digesting ideas), while physical experiences like pain and pleasure are phrased in emotional or mental terms (tiring, punishing, torturing). Also interesting how pain metaphors consistently don’t refer to the actual sensation of, say, being shot, burnt, or gna...

I was raised in the Lutheran Church. The idea that God had allowed Himself to be embodied in the form of Jesus was omnipresent. He was not merely physical, though, He was human, and He had human experiences. Thus, He “could be approached as a broken body on a cross, as a baby nursing at his mother’s breast, or as a young man embracing a friend” (29).  I never fully grasped what this could mean because Jesus is no longer a physical presence in this world. His body was, in fact, minimized. As Protestants, the image of the crucifix, the Jesus who is in the midst of his agony, was not what we were taught to prize. Rather, we should venerate the empty cross. A pastor once said in a sermon that “Jesus isn’t on the cross anymore. Why dwell on Jesus’s suffering? What matters is that he rose again!” We were taught to see him as his spiritual self – his God self – not his human self. In my current pagan practice, my understanding of the deities is far different. They are not completely physi...

 It is no surprise that touch has been an important factor in well-being throughout history. The lack of physical touch, especially as a child, has been shown to lead to oversensitivity, hostility, depression, loneliness, and more. There is a reason that most newborn babies are placed on the stomach after birth—it provides comfort to both parties, allows the infant to become familiar with the scent of its parents, allows for a smooth transition into breastfeeding, and also releases oxytocin. Touch is a nurturing interaction between individuals, and it provides a strong ground for bonding and communication, as well as affirms social bonds, for example, receiving a handshake from an employer, or high-fiving a teammate after a game. It can also yield negative social bonds, as Constance examines in  The Deepest Sense, with pain being used to enforce religious expectations.  Physical touch can be as intimate as a handshake or a clasp of the shoulder, to kissing or sex. The int...

I first read the title for Glucklich's Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self , I was immediately reminded of the movie, The Campaign (2012). There's an especially humorous scene where in order to appeal to more voters, Will Ferrell attends a snake-handling ritual at a church. On top of making me laugh, I did question why some christians would want to handle a snake. It turns out that those particular Christians see snake handling as a rite of passage and that they believe God will protect them from the likely event of being bitten. What I read is similar to that she describes pain as being "unique among human experiences in being entirely objectess; the instruments are metaphorical inventions, an effort to conceptualize a subjective experience that has no external objective features"(391). I was already somewhat aware of how many religions view the concept of pain, but I did enjoy the oppurtunity to learn more. Pain is what distinquishes our world from the world beyond...

  The New York Times article by Priya Krishna reminds me of how holidays can sometimes make isolation, like quarantine, even more apparent. Holidays are meant to be enjoyed with our loved ones, and when we can’t physically celebrate with those loved ones, the holiday is almost unrecognizable to the one we’re used to. I personally did not grow up in a large family, so holidays were never a big community-oriented get together. I also did not grow up in a religious family, so I don’t have any holidays that are especially important to me. Having to celebrate holidays by myself across the country from my family while at college, however, always reminds me just how far from home I am.  I am not a religious person, but there’s something so lonely about having to “celebrate” Easter alone. When I was a kid, I would decorate eggs with my parents, go on egg hunts, and make a large dinner with my parents at the end of the day. If I was back home, I probably would not go on egg hunts and w...

    In Religion in the Kitchen , Elizabeth Pérez discusses the practices and rituals of the Lucumí people, particularly their use of speaking and cooking in devotion to their gods (called orishas). In this Afro-Caribbean religion, each orisha has their own particular tastes and preferences when it comes to food offerings made by devotees. Use of the senses in these rituals is crucial; smell, touch, and sound specifically are significant in the process of preparing food. Pérez argues that the acts of feeding and speaking to the orishas makes them real. She draws upon her many years of “observant participation” in a Lucumí community to illustrate her points. Pérez discusses these rituals as “micropractices,” that is, “routine and intimate sequences of operations that can be broken down into more minute units of activity” (9). Essentially, these micropractices are small activities that aren’t always seen as religious or important because of their seemingly small scale. Image...

 There is a certain way that Hindu temples are supposed to look, a certain way the "idols" are supposed to look. There may be some flexibility, but, in the end, they should look like at least one other temple or "idol" that has come before.  There is power in this system. Knowing that you are seeing something that has a long history, and knowing that history as well as a practitioner of Hindu is likely to know their religion, provides a deep sense of connection with those who have come before you. Let me provide a non-religious example. Schönbrunn Palace was once the imperial residence of the Habsburgs, the ruling family of – what else? – the Habsburg Empire. Its life began as a simple hunting lodge, but was quickly elevated to the primary summer residence of the imperial family. Dozens of babies were born in its rooms, dozens of the sick and elderly died. A young Mozart played for the imperial family, an equally young Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna – perhaps better ...

  The first time I ever had alcohol outside of a church was Tuesday, October 10th of 2017, the night after my grandfather’s funeral. My siblings and I sat in our parents’ kitchen and they gave me tablespoons full of whatever they were drinking to find out what I liked. When my brother gave me some of his spiced rum, I smiled, licked my lips, and my sister cheered: “She likes it! She’s like us! She’s a pirate!” before high-fiving my brother. That moment spiraled from that one drink to a sort of competition between my siblings. Whoever I shared the most similar taste with must be the sibling I was closest to. While rum is a distilled rather than fermented alcohol, this moment reminds me of the idea of ‘shibboleths.’ My siblings felt more confident that I was “like them” since I showed a preference for the same drinks. This moment couldn't have happened if it hadn't have been for my grandfather's funeral. In our grief, we had to find ways to know that we were alike. That we we...

  Deborah Green's “ The Aroma of Righteousness” addresses the erotic and appealing nature of scents in the context of rabbinic texts in a very eye opening way and I was quite drawn to her statements on women and smell. It was and still is common practice for women to use perfumes in order to have an appealing smell to them, even a bit expected of them. The consequences of patriarchal societies are seen in all kinds of historical texts and in Greene writings you can really see the impact that this has on women and how they are depicted and seen in a religious context. Women are expected to smell good, though when that smell is recognized and thought to have a seductive pull, those women are now viewed as erotic temptations that test and wickedly trick mankind. It was surprising to see how such suggestive texts can be seen in religious contexts, but the ways that these are often used against women was not as shocking to me. This can be seen in current society just through beauty prod...

The women reciters in Rasmussen’s The Recited Qur’an have an undeniable degree of power. They can become leaders and politicians on the strength of their recitations alone – through their literal voice. It must be noted, however, that many of them reject traditional femininity (or at least the Western concept of femininity) in their recitations – “it is men who indulge in the freedom to display virtuosic showmanship and creative emotionality. During the moment of performance women opt for modest confidence over dramatic showmanship, which is the territory of their male counterparts” – where men are allowed to be emotional, women tend to be more withdrawn. They are given the chance to intellectualize their recitations, to display their knowledge. I can’t say that I understand this perfectly, but I do know that the moments in my life when I have felt the most power have been the times when I’ve embodied a more authoritative character on stage. Typically a man.  My older sister introd...

     One thing I found interesting in Diana Eck’s reading was the differences between Western monotheistic religions and Hinduism, specifically in their views of images in worship. In the West, the use of images is often seen as idolatry, that is, the worship of an object or something other than God as if it were God. As Dr. Dale Tuggy points out in his video lecture on Eck’s book, Western ideas and beliefs are often applied to Hindu devotion, claiming that the use of images, or idols, is wrong or bad. As mentioned in the video, the term idolatry is actually an outsider term, meaning that it has been used to describe Hindu practices from a Western viewpoint. I would argue that this goes against the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, norms, and values From a comparative religious perspective, I think it’s important to keep cultural relativism in mind and try not to compare ...

  Whenever I think about touch I am always reminded of the touch and feel books I had as a kid, however this one sentence in Constance Classen’s book The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch “ It seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds” has made me realize that I have never actually felt a real duckling’s down feathers because I’ve always been told not to touch the ducks so I don’t know if they actually feel soft or not, by the look of them I imagine they do, but I don’t know.  Image link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006U3RNEW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 It made me realize just how many things we are told not to touch in our lives mostly for our own benefits like fire or a wild animal, but it also made me realize that people are often embarrassed to admit that they did things like burning themselves on a hot stove because they think its stupid that they did so. even if i...

As an English major, one would expect me to be used to Freud by now. Even after all these years of Freudian readings, it is still daunting to see his sex obsession here, in the pages of Diane Ackerman’s book. As she discusses scent, it is nearly impossible for her to sever it from sex. Every other page seems to forge a new link between the two. Scent helps us to identify our ideal mates. The names of strong-smelling animals are nicknames for sex workers, or, vice-versa, nicknames for sex workers are given to strong-smelling animals. A perfumer fantasizes about creating a perfume that would make a woman entirely irresistible to men, suggesting that scent, particularly towards potential sexual partners, has truly frightening levels of control over the human mind. None of these things can be totally denied. People often wear perfume in order to heighten their sex appeal. it still has an isolating effect. As an asexual person, I can’t draw those same connections in my own mind. I can’t nec...