The social construction of smells

This paper deals with olfactory perception and its experiential correlate, smells. Olfactory perception, olfaction, and olfactory sense are often used synonymously with the perception of smells. The sense of smell is particularly interesting because in occidental philosophy it was considered a lower sense, an animalistic sense, and was therefore consistently skipped. The human was instead characterized by the higher senses, namely the sense of sight and the sense of hearing. Previous empirical social research also followed this time-honoured tradition. This chapter is divided into five parts: (1) The phenomenology of olfactory perception explores smelling as a sensual experience and distinguishes between the pre-linguistic and the linguistic level: smelling is not the same as talking about smells. (2) Olfactory experts I: What kind of insights does olfactory research provide from a scientific point of view (chemistry, biology, neurology, medicine)? (3) How great is the social and cultural variability of smell perception from an anthropological, sociological and cultural-historical point of view? (4) Sensory ethnography: how are urban smellscapes explored by means of smellwalks? (5) Olfactory experts II: smell designers and their creation of scents. The conclusion is that both the ability to perceive odours in a differentiated way and the corresponding vocabulary to name them linguistically are distributed very differently in society. What challenges does this pose for empirical social research?