Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture. Its 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. Constance Classen is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies, Montreal. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Constance Classen, author of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. mell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures.
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