Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution

How are smells invested with meaning and how do those meanings structure interactions and group relations? I use cultural theories of meaning-making to explore these questions, situating my inquiry in the world of commercially marketed perfumes. Using blind smell tests in focus groups, I examine how individuals make sense of certain fragrances absent direction from manufacturers or marketing materials. I find that most participants can correctly decode perfume manufacturers' intended message, target users, and usage sites. I unpack the role of culture in these initial classifications of smells, and later, in how participants apply those evaluations to reify social boundaries and reproduce social relation-sespecially with reference to race and class. I also identify two cognitive mechanism-sembodied simulation and iterative reprocessing-illustrating how these mechanisms facilitate a dynamic interaction between practical and discursive modes of consciousness in deciphering smells. Finally, I elaborate the role of sociocultural location in olfactory meaning-making. People in all locations may be familiar with public olfactory codes, but social position influences how participants think about, interpret, and apply those codes in meaning-making.