Page 115 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 12(2) (2024)

ing Roma (Agarin 2014; Cortés Goméz and End humans and animals, which has recently become
2019; Janko Spreizer 2022); antisemitism con- the subject of multispecies ethnography.
cerning Jews; approaches to gender studies; and Mojca Ramšak’s work also provides impor-
feminist anthropology to reflect on misogyny. tant insights into learning the olfactory imagi-
The issues of colonialism and developing capital- nary, or the socialisation of olfaction, from ear-
ism in the 18th and 19th centuries need to be ad- ly childhood onwards. For example, one of the
dressed in future with much more precision by studies cited above showed that children in kin-
anthropologists in Slovenia, as such debates are dergarten can discriminate between smells.
often still written from a perspective that is too Still, they cannot assign a value to smells; in-
insensitive to the racialisation and brutal capital- stead, they associate them with the question
ist exploitation of Western societies, from which of how familiar they are with cultural practic-
this part of the world was not exempt. It is hoped es typical of their home environments. The tes-
that future anthropologists will consider that timonies or mythologies of the so-called ‘wild’ 115
Slovenia’s present-day territory was included in or ‘wolf children’ are of particular epistemologi-
imperial history if they engage more deeply with cal value in insight into the socialisation of smell
olfactory racism. and olfaction. The accounts of wild animals sup-
The book systematically surveys the history posedly raising children suggest that these chil-
of medical-philosophical explanations of smell. dren did not have the habits of civilisation and,
It brings together the findings of early writers even in the presence of resocialisation in the so-
and classical physician-philosophers, such as Ga- cial environment of humans, could not fully de-
len of Pergamum, Celz and Dioscurides, who at- velop them. For example, in the case of Kasper
tributed foul body odours to diseases and their Hauser abandoned and imprisoned in Nuern-
symptoms. In addition to the thoughts of Greek berg in the 19th century and isolated from so-
philosophers and early physicians from antiqui- cial contact, it was impossible to inculcate him
ty, the monograph also outlines the conceptu- with the dietary regimes of the social environ-
alisation of odours relevant to medicine in ear- ment into which people tried to socialise him af-
ly Islamic and European medicine and medical ter he had been found. His ability to develop his Review of Anthropology of Smell (Antropologija vonja) by Mojca Ramšak
diagnosis from other cultures in a diachron- humanised senses could not develop, as his sens-
ic perspective. Of particular interest to the hu- es of smell and sight were atrophied.
manities is the treatment of smell in philosoph- The chapter on cultivating the sense of
ical thought, or rather, the conceptualisation of smell in literature is of particular relevance to lit-
the philosophy of smell. The chapter on modern erary studies. The author uses three iconic nov-
medical diagnostics is also particularly notewor- els – Patrick Süskind’s (1986) Perfume, Marcel
thy. Readers are given insight into the develop- Proust’s (2003) In Swann’s World, and George
ment of diagnostic procedures using new elec- Orwel’s (1937) The Road to Wigan – as a source
tronic sensing devices for smell and taste, such as of insight to address anthropological themes
the e-nose, and with the aid of animals, that is a such as savages versus the civilised, the impact of
relatively unknown field. In medicine, specially smell on memory, and class relations.
trained assistance dogs are involved in diagnos- The book also looks at the production of
ing medical conditions and can sniff out specific fragrance, the attraction of people through smell
diseases and medical anomalies in humans, e.g. and the commercialisation of scent. A cultur-
a drop in sugar in diabetics, an impending ep- al-historical approach shows that the use of fra-
ileptic seizure, and can also help diagnose can- grances and lubricants is also present in ancient
cers, impending Alzheimer’s disease, etc. There civilisations: for example, Cleopatra is said to
is no doubt that this chapter raises an important have smelled spicy-sweet to the Egyptians, pre-
question for studying the relationship between sumably of dates and spices. The turning point