Close and distant whiffs of reality
In my childhood and teenage years, I was hovering in between two realities. Most of the time, I was living in an urban environment, in a city where alongside a university, a pulp mill was a major employer. Almost every weekend and absolutely every summer I traveled, alone once I started school, to my grandparents’ home in a rural municipality.
At my urban homestead, I soon learned to associate certain sulphurous smells not only with the direction of wind but also certain individuals and especially their profession. In fact, I do not remember learning it, but rather taking it for granted. Those people just smelled like that because they worked there. Curiously enough, their children smelled like that too, as if the occupational odour was congenital and hereditary.
Likewise, I cannot really remember when I realised that the rural social relations as well were structured on the basis of smells. The realisation may have happened several decades after hearing continuous blabber how the poultry and pig farmers were in a stinky business, while nobody complained about the smell of the cow dung hills I encountered every time I visited my aunt’s and uncle’s estates. Certainly, I detected olfactory differences between the types of livestock and their maintenance, and learned to disdain the filthier managers, all without a good reason.
Now, actually, whilst writing this, it occurs to me it may have had a good deal to do with what I and my closest relatives put into our mouths. I cannot remember I had a single bite of beef at my granny’s, whereas I basically grew on pork chops; also chicken dishes were fairly rare until my late teens. Thus it appears that the more valuable the animal, the less gustatory and by implication olfactory weight is put on it, whether alive or on the table, and regardless of the qualitative differences. When one’s livelihood depends on a certain animal, one may not like to be reminded of its mortality, especially through retronasal olfaction.
A crucial distinction to be made here is that my relatives all herded milk cattle. My cousin continues the business, though as I have come to understand there is no direct access to the dung hills or even the cowhouse anymore, due to the criteria and standards of organic farming he has chosen to practice. Few years back, he built a new byre, a huge construct with robot milking machines and where he himself has to wear protective clothing, I was told. I have yet to visit his new farm.
I do not know of my cousin’s bottom line or what he eats for dinner, but the “final refinery of fattening cattle” Bullstop Ltd a mile or so away is one of the major farms in the country, and as such a beneficiary of sumptuous financial support from national as well as European sources. If my cousin’s construct is huge, theirs is humongous and beyond. But then again, maybe the proprietor is a vegan.
Much has changed otherwise, too, especially concerning smells. Certainly, whilst travelling through the countryside in the spring, the smell of dung slugde on the fields is often strong enough to get into the air-conditioned buses and train carriages. Yet to personally get a whiff of the hay fields of old is by all appearances lost – as my cousin, as a farmer, is an entreprenour, an employer and an outsourcer.
The last summer I spent there, amidst of stingy hay bales, stinky but strangly comfortable as such, it was my cousin who drove us to the field, me and his younger brother included, to do the job. At sixteen, my older couin had the license to drive a tractor on the road. Once we got to the field, he was the one to throw the bales in. I piled them up in the trailer, and the little one was driving the tractor. As I was the city cousin, I could have piled the bales a bit tighter, in their father’s assessment once we got back. Given that we did not drop or break one during our mission, I now take that as accurate as an evaluation as if he said: “you city boy, you just stink.” This is so regardless of the fact that he was one of the most appreciative male figures towards me I have encountered.
Unfortunately, he died before I realised I should have thanked him for his appreciation. He died at a relatively early age, and suspicions arose whether it had anything to do with pesticides used since the 1960s. Finland prides itself on three Nobel award winners, one of whom was chemist Artturi Iivari Virtanen, the inventor of so-called AIV fodder liquid, and the associated 30 litre canisters still abound. Lest anyone gets excited, there is no evidence that AIV liquid is hazardous. My uncle-in-law is yet not the only one agriculturally close to me who suffered a deadly disease: another one died five years later, and a real uncle survived prostate cancer. None of them smelled a rat in whatever they used in the field and barns. Yet the other uncles(-in-law) never were farmers, and none of them has suffered the same.
Even I, the city cousin, detected the olfactory difference between fresh hay and processed fodder. Mind you, it was not a value judgement, but merely a recognition of a difference, maybe mainly between equally pleasant sensations of freshness and sweetness. I never was subjected to the same amount of exposure, but did spend a fair amount of time in a fodder silo by leveling the substance as it pore down from a conveyor. Maybe when I am ninety or so, I get the whiff of it.
At that time, I did not think twice about the smelly things. The interest in the topic began at the late noughties. With a background in the cultural study of music and media, questions of multisensory multimodality and disciplinary divides had been a constant source of academic allure and anxiety for at least a decade already, but one day a colleague and I found ourselves musing over what music might smell like. Every now and then I have raised the issue in mostly informal collegial conversations, and as a response often getting sneering references to pungent sweat, teen spirit or allegedly girlish perfumes associated with female pop stars. Some of my academic comrades may roll their eyes, and rather than from within the ranks of music studies, it has been easier for me to find like-minded people with similar interests from functional food research. Admittedly, when collaborating with the chemists and other scientists in question, I frequently feel compelled to note that what they consider results constitutes a point of departure for a cultural scholar like me. But we have had fun.
The collaboration has yielded several research proposals about “olfactory cultural studies”. At the crux of the matter is the question about the role of smells in knowledge production and meaning-making, hence leading further to a critical investigation into sensory hierarchies, technological mediation and disciplinary politics. From the outset, the purpose of these proposals is simple: to take smells seriously as part of everyday being in the world. This entails recognising and investigating the role of olfaction in how people make sense of the world, thus going beyond conventional sensory hierarchies and their associated neuroscientific and technological paradigms.
As a matter of fact, the underlying motivation for this text is to pose, not really a fully-fledged argument yet, but a suggestion that there is a multi-tiered logic of distanciation at play when it comes to making sense of smells, whether scientifically or in any other way. As a scholar, my concerns are primarily academic, and thus I dare my fellow smelly colleagues, as it were, to prove my observations and assumptions wrong. I suggest there are at least the following modes of distanciation at stake:
1) Medical: whilst the profession in general is fixated on correcting what is perceived as abnormal, the emphasis on olfactory disorders is notable. At its worse, this leads to pathologising, with dubious criteria of normality.
2) Cognitive: the olfactory is reduced to the experimental and ephemeral, and then the attempt is made to explain it by neuropsychological examination. Much happens in the brain, certainly, and much of it can be mapped with a great degree of precision, yet there is more to smells than can be demonstrated with MRI scans alone.
3) Historical: the smelly tends to be represented as a thing of the past, whether factually or in fiction.
4) Anthropological: there is an outright belief in communities unaffected by modernity, mediation and technology. This foregrounds not only romanticist approaches but more crucially, exoticising tendencies concerning the olfactory.
5) The one yet unrealised.