Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture
From 1690 to 1800 texts printed in England linked racial difference and foul odour through understandings of occupation, food, cosmetics and sweat. Even by the end of the eighteenth-century racial odour was represented as a labile, culturally and environmentally determined characteristic. This article traces how the social ‘use’ of olfactory stereotypes, particularly their links with cosmetics, food, and odorous spaces, determined the mobilization of explanations for and attitudes to racial scent. It argues that ideas of race should not be considered monolithic or described in terms of narratives that posit a divide between the body/culture, but that racial stereotypes should be understood as collections of traits, of which smell was one, with distinctive histories.
In 1802 the natural historian Lorenz Oken elaborated a typology of race which, born of frustration at the inability of skin colour to serve the purpose, distinguished between races by associating them with specific bodily senses. The white European was the ‘eye man’ whilst various other races were classified as ‘ear’ (Asian), ‘nose’ (Native Americans), ‘tongue’ (Australian), and ‘skin’ (African) men.1
1. Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London, 1847), p. 651.
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Throughout the eighteenth-century, the senses had played an important part in constructing ideas of ‘race’. The supposed sensory sagacity of Native Americans and the insensitivity of African skin provide two such examples.2
2. Isacc Weld Jr., Travels Through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2vols (London, 1799), II, 249; A. J. Rotter, ‘Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters’, Diplomatic History, 35:1 (2011), p. 15.
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Understanding the role of smelling, both transitively and intransitively, also has important implications for our understanding of the social experience of, and ideas about, race.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14780038.2016.1202008
