Aroma

Smell is a social phenomenon, invested with particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours, and can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. They attempt to break the "olfactory silence" of modernity by offering the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history (from antiquity to the present) and in a wide variety of non-Western societies. The topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America; and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity.

`One of the most common ritual uses of odour across cultures is to combat illness,' write the authors of Aroma' - Glasgow Herald`Aroma is a fund of stimulating stories and has obviously been well researched.' - Times Higher Educ Supplement

Constance Classen is the author of Inca Cosmology and the Human Body and Worlds of Sense; David Howes is the editor of The Varieties of Sensory Experience; and Anthony Synnott is the author of The Body Social.