Why Smell? Nobody Nose

 

This is gonna be a short one cuz I genuinely don’t have much to say. I haven’t had many experiences with smell and religion and can’t think of many examples of how it is utilized in religion. That fact alone is interesting though so let’s chat about that for a bit.

First of all, when I say I can’t think of many ways in which smell is utilized in religion, that’s not entirely true. I want to make it clear that there are many situations in which smell plays a major role in a specific religion’s culture. All five (or six) senses are utilized to a certain extent and that’s the entire point of this class. That being said, I do feel as though smell is actively put into practice the least. Or at least, people perceive smell as being put into practice the least, and I’m curious why this is. We know from Deborah Green’s book that smell can be and is incredibly important, so why is it that we see so little of it in religion?

My best answer is that we think about religion primarily from a western perspective. I noticed that in Green’s book a majority of the examples she gave came from eastern religions, or at least non-Abrahamic religions. Given how Americans and Europeans tend to have a… let’s say “narrow perspective”, it's unsurprising that people would perceive smell as the least important sense to religion when in actuality it plays an incredibly large role. Green’s book was the most surprising to me in terms of its content and the stories she told, and perhaps this explains why. From a personal standpoint, it shows me that I need to get out and explore the world of religion and smell more, and from a broad perspective, it shows that us Westerners need to broaden our horizons and stop turning our nose up towards practices we’re not familiar with.