Alison Gerber
Docent | Universitetslektor
‘Everyone’s Annoyed’ : Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others
Författare
Summary, in English
A growing literature illuminates the limits of claims made on the basis of sensory perception in scientized, rationalized, and bureaucratic contexts. How to understand exceptions to the rule – cases where claims based on sensory experience are taken at face value, even without corroborating evidence? Here, I focus on one such exception, in which citizen complaints about the smell of a small shantytown functioned successfully as both demands and justifications despite a lack of the kinds of instrumentally and technologically enabled corroboration that the literature would suggest are necessary to strengthen such claims. I show how complaints slotted neatly into a specific cultural structure, an olfactory cosmology in which ‘bad air’ that endangers health can be identified by smell and requires ongoing management and amelioration, and where adherence to hygienic norms is required for full moral citizenship. The case suggests ways that the apparent weaknesses of olfactory claims might allow them to be uniquely weaponized in social and political life, and shows how such claims can exploit shared norms, values, and meanings to enroll others in the demand for action.
Avdelning/ar
- Sociologi
Publiceringsår
2022
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
338-357
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Cultural Sociology
Volym
16
Issue
3
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
SAGE Publications
Ämne
- Sociology
Nyckelord
- hygiene education
- olfactory claims
- public culture
- science and technology studies
- senses
- sensorial citizenship
Aktiv
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 1749-9755