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The Dialectic of Deodorization

Chapter 5 begins by recalling the central role that incense and perfumes once played in religion, medicine, and social relations throughout Western history, from ancient Egypt through the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter looks at the “dialectic of deodorization” over the past two centuries, involving the narrowing of the uses of incense and the gradual discrediting of the medical uses of both incense and perfume, in part through the great sanitary campaigns to rid cities of the stench of human excrement and various noxious industries, leaving incense to mostly religious and perfumes to mostly aesthetic uses. The chapter concludes that this historical turn may have exacerbated our natural tendency to be unaware of smells and have encouraged intellectuals to view the sense of smell as of little importance, despite evidence of a certain “reodorization” from the mid-twentieth century on.