What is it about?
This paper explores how we bring meaning to smells and then use those meanings to reify social boundaries and reproduce social relations—especially with reference to race and class. The process emerges from three things: cultural codes, cognitive mechanisms and the placement of our bodies in social space.
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Why is it important?
This article provides a model for exploring sense-making and meaning attribution in the understudied area of smell. It shows how we use nonverbal data to decipher, rank, include and exclude those in various social locations.
Perspectives
This paper helps us better understand the role of the socialized body in typification, evaluation, classification, and perception. In a broader sense, the findings empirically address the links between individual, micro-level meaning-making and macro-level cultural dynamics.
Karen Cerulo
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution, American Sociological Review, March 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0003122418759679.
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