Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats

Scent is a powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities that can transform social-sensory realities in contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. This multidisciplinary volume critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon. It conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally connected space of olfactory exchange, breaking down essentializing olfactory tropes and revealing how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 262 pages
Publication date: 05 September 2023
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

A remarkably potent symbol of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent possesses the remarkable ability to transcend previously established boundaries and reshape the social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume critically explores the realm of olfaction in Asian societies, aiming to unlock its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon.

Featuring contributions from esteemed international scholars with extensive expertise in the region, this volume conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally interconnected space of olfactory exchange. Through the use of compelling examples such as trade along the Silk Road, the diffusion of dharmic religious traditions out of South Asia, the waves of invasion, colonization, and forced relocation that have shaped the continent's history, and other "sensory highways" of contact, the contributors dismantle essentializing olfactory tropes and unveil the profound ways in which scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies.

Smell plays a pivotal role in shaping individual, collective, and state-based memory, as well as in shaping discourses about heritage and power. As such, it suggests a pervasive and powerful intimacy that contributes to our understanding of the human condition, mobility, and interconnection.

In addition to the editors, this volume features the insightful contributions of Khoo Gaik Cheng, Jean Duruz, Qian Jia, Shivani Kapoor, Adam Liebman, Lorenzo Marinucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Saki Tanada, Aubrey Tang, and Ruth E. Toulson.

Weight: 552g
Dimension: 159 x 237 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780271095417