Olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self, senses and society

• Published in: The Sociological review (Keele) Vol. 61; no. 4; pp. 688 - 708
• Main Author: Low, Kelvin E. Y.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.11.2013; SAGE Publications; Wiley-Blackwell; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Aesthetics; biography; Culture; Discourse analysis; Embarrassment; embodied identity work; Emotions; Ethics; Happiness; Identity; Memory; Morality; Nostalgia; Personality. Social role; Qualitative Methods; Self; Senses; smells; Social interaction; Social psychology; Social relations; Sociology; Space and Time; embodied identity work; memory; biography; smells; senses; Memory; Sensory Systems; Biography; Personal identity; Smell (Sense); Social Interaction; Society; Embodiment; Emotions
• ISSN: 0038-0261; 1467-954X
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12078

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta-narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial-bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis-à-vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self-identity and social relations.