Presenting the Self, the Social Body, and the Olfactory: Managing Smells in Everyday Life Experiences

Abstract

This article considers smell as a social intermediary with regard to the body, presentation of self, and social/moral order. Employing the trajectory of a sociology of everyday life, the data presented here are collected from narrative interviews conducted with twelve respondents. The study looks at how respondents react to bodily odors and how they go about maintaining acceptable bodily scents to facilitate social interaction. The discussion is framed within Goffmanian sociology on the interaction order and corporeal scholarship. The findings show that respondents equate foul odors with social and moral defilement, and this affects how they view social others, adopting attitudes and behaviors of social inclusion and exclusion. Managing bodily odors also points to the idea that instead of approaching the body as an object of analysis, the body should also be analyzed as an active and acting subject, located and influenced by sociocul-tural conditions. This article thus contributes to discussions on a sociology of the body by linking them with olfactory analyses and also aims to supplement the dearth of olfactory research in the Southeast Asian region by using Singapore as an empirical case study.