Making Better "Scents" in Anthropology: Aroma in Tuareg Sociocultural Systems and the Shaping of Ethnography

Abstract

This essay explores an under-represented area of anthropological analysis: aroma, the least appreciated of all senses on the cultural sensorium. Aroma is the most difficult of the senses to represent - especially in English. Here I examine the aromascape of the Tuareg of Niger, West Africa, in two interconnected dimensions of communicative experience: the meanings and uses of aroma in overlapping fields of everyday sociability and more formalized ritual. My purpose is to analyze how scents and the idea of aroma play important evocative roles in human-to-human and human-to-spirit communication, in situations not only of boundary definition and re-definition, but also of indeterminacy. Aroma, I argue, opens up boundaries and suggests alternative ways of interpreting experience, in its central features of ambiguity and deniability. The essay contributes to studies of ritual, symbolism, and African studies, as well as to efforts to move toward more evocative and reflexive ethnographic writing about the senses and emotions. [ethnography, anthropology of the senses, Africa, culture, ritual]

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