Between Aisthēsis and Colere: Sensoria, Everyday Improvisation and Ethnographic Reality

The individual experience of everyday city life is essentially an everyday improvisation among other people. It is in urban settings where socially structured formations of daily life meet purely individual situated experience in myriads of spontaneously created and shaped assemblages of everyday life. The visual perception of space, sonic orientation in a given place and olfactory plus tactile experience of the environment are the basic aesthetic performances in cultivating a common urban reality. The author discusses specificities of anthropological knowledge derived from first-hand experience of the life of other people in the field. To cope with the complexity of everyday urban improvisation, the author employs two ancient Greek terms to define the space of human interaction: aisthēsis, i.e., sensory perception, and the complex meaning of the Latin verb colere, from which the term culture is derived. The triangulation of everyday improvisation through the sensorial essence of everyday life complements the employment of two other ancient Greek terms, praxis and poiesis. The basic empirical materials used to discuss everyday improvisation in an urban environment are collected narrations of sensory perception and individual lives from sensobiographic walks in Ljubljana, Turku and Brighton. Historically, in the West, the dominance of the senses has shifted from sound, touch and smell, orienting people in orally designed cultural domains, to sight. Smelling is specific embeddedness in place. Its paradoxical position of sensing outside air deeply inside, integrated in breathing, but not always sensing anything special. At the crossroads of distant and close, inner and outer, olfactory experience is simultaneously existentially idiosyncratic and collectively shaped. The paper’s main point is that there are no clear limits between the experienced past and the present. However, both are aesthetically and culturally inscribed in specific registers of individual, social, cultural and embodied memories. The same stands for an ethnographic practice. Everyday life is a continuum of living, weaved together from many discontinuous contingencies. It consists of incongruent, incomplete and chaotic shifts. Repetitive social activities bring order into this everyday mess: rituals and work. For this reason, repetitive music is inevitable for establishing a common ground of the everyday. If ethnography ever touches reality, it is a continuous improvisation in everyday life, shared, collective, and peculiar individual improvisation.

Transcriptional adaptation of sensory neurons to GPCR identity and activity

Sensory adaptation is critical to extract information from a changing world. Taking advantage of the extensive parallel coding lines present in the olfactory system, we explored the potential variations of neuronal identities before and after olfactory experience. We found that at rest, the transcriptomic profiles of olfactory sensory neuron populations are already highly divergent, specific to the olfactory receptor they express, and are surprisingly associated with the sequence of these latter. These divergent profiles further evolve in response to the environment, as odorant exposure leads to massive reprogramming via the modulation of transcription. Adenylyl cyclase 3, but not other main elements of the olfactory transduction cascade, plays a critical role in this activity-induced transcriptional adaptation. These findings highlight a broad range of sensory neuron identities that are present at rest and that adapt to the experience of the individual, thus providing a novel layer of complexity to sensory coding.

Contextual variation and objectivity in olfactory perception

According to Smell Objectivism, the smells we perceive in olfactory experience are objective and independent of perceivers, their experiences, and their perceptual systems. Variations in how things smell to different perceivers or in different contexts raise a challenge to this view. In this paper, I offer an objectivist account of non-illusory contextual variation: cases where the same thing smells different in different contexts of perception and there is no good reason to appeal to misperception. My central example is that of dihydromyrcenol, a substance that can smell both woody and citrusy depending on what other odourants one has recently been exposed to. I first argue that the subjects’ apparently conflicting reports about the way dihydromyrcenol smells are best understood as comparative characterisations of a smell. Given this understanding, different reports can be correctly made in response to perceiving the very same smell. I then argue that the phenomenal difference between the experiences subjects have across contexts can be explained compatibly with Smell Objectivism. On the account proposed, subjects perceive the very same smell but different qualities, notes, or aspects of it are salient to them, depending on the context of perception. I then consider how the proposed defence of Smell Objectivism can be adapted to other cases where the same thing is reported as smelling different in different contexts.

A Study on How the Five Senses Are Affected When Tourists Experience Towns with Forest Characteristics: An Empirical Analysis Based on the Data of Fujian, Guangdong and Sichuan in China

Senses are the primary channel by which travelers enjoy tourism, and the sensory experience of tourists is very important to the quality of their tourism experience. In this study, 385 questionnaires were distributed to tourists visiting the first batch of characteristic towns classified by the China National Forestry and Grassland Administration as national towns with forest characteristics. SPSS software was used for regression analysis to test the differences in the impact of sensory experience on the experience quality and future loyalty of forest town tourists. The results show that: (1) vision makes the highest contribution to the quality of tourist experience; (2) olfactory experience makes the lowest contribution to the quality of tourist experience and has no significant impact on it; (3) auditory experience has a significant impact on the quality of tourism experience but has no significant impact on the loyalty index. The study further confirms that, when a single sensory experience of tourists is insufficient, satisfaction can be achieved through the other senses. It is of great significance for forest town managers to design a sensory landscape according to the combined components of a destination’s characteristics and the tourists’ physical identities.

Smelling Disease and Death in the Antwerp Church of Our Lady, c. 1450-1559

Early modern societies were pervaded by smells and odours, but few traces have survived that offer a glimpse of the olfactory experience. This essay reconstructs this lost early modern ‘smellscape’, focusing on the smell of disease and death in the late medieval Antwerp Church of Our Lady (c. 1450-1559). Bustling cathedrals and parish churches could be a minefield of life-threatening odours, as there was a strong interaction between externally perceived body odour and a person’s inner sweetness. Through devotional objects and liturgical rituals, however, it was possible to protect oneself from the stench of both living and dead parishioners. Exemplary markers for the shared discourse of smell on a medical and spiritual level were aromatic prayer beads and purifying incense.

Gender identities in e-shop perfume descriptions

Perfume descriptions serve as an important persuasive tool in fragrance advertising. Scents traditionally elude clear verbal description, yet perfumes are nowadays frequently sold online, with no direct olfactory experience on the part of the consumer at the point of purchase. The products are thus often represented by metaphorical means depicting a desirable experience or portraying attractive identities of wearers, including stereotypical images of men and women. This article analyses 80 e-shop fragrance descriptions equally divided among adverts targeted at males and females. The sample texts were collected randomly from British and American e-shops, with the primary research objective to determine how male and female identities are reflected in these descriptions. The method of discourse analysis was applied and the AntConc 3.4.4 toolkit was used to calculate the frequency of words and their collocations. It was found that current female perfume descriptions on e-shops generally suppress gender stereotypes quite successfully, while gender stereotyping is more prominent in male perfume descriptions. The possible causes as well as ramifications of this disparity are also discussed.

An Experiential Education Approach to Teaching the Mind-Body Problem

This article shows how the mind-body problem can be taught effectively via an experiential learning activity involving a couple of classroom props: a brick and a jar of ground coffee. By experiencing the physical properties of the brick (shape, weight, length, width) and contrasting them with the olfactory experience of coffee (seemingly dimensionless, weightless, etc.), students are introduced in a vivid way to the well-known difficulty of explaining the mental in physical terms. A brief overview of experiential learning theory and its connection to philosophy is also provided.

Nasal airflow engages central olfactory processing and shapes olfactory percepts

Binding of airborne odour molecules to olfactory receptors at the top of the nasal cavity gives rise to our rich olfactory experience. Whether airflow plays a role in human olfactory perception beyond the transportation of odorants is scantly known. Combining psychophysical measures with strict controls of nasal flow parameters, we demonstrate in four experiments that the perceived intensity of a unilaterally presented odour decreases systematically with the amount of contralateral nasal airflow, in manners that are independent of odour flow rate, nasal pressure, perceived sniff vigour or attentional allocation. Moreover, the effect is due to the sensed rather than the factual amount of nasal flow, as applying a local anaesthetic to the contralateral nostril produces the same effect as physically blocking it. Our findings indicate that nasal flow spontaneously engages central olfactory processing and serves as an integral part of the olfactory percept in humans.

The sublime in scent: a comparative study of Japanese Kodo and Chinese incense tradition in the 21st century

PurposeThe sublime in scent refers to the use of language and description that excites thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary olfactory experience, and I would like to borrow this literary concept to explore the recent development of incense traditions in Japan and China from a sociocultural perspective. In order to understand how olfactory characters of incense have been verbally expressed, we can start by looking into the sublime in scent through the articulation of relevant subtle approaches since ancient times.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explains how the description of scent experienced by individuals has been associated with thoughts and history and why the sublime in scent is more complicated than the aroma people can tell. The data collected for this research is mostly based on observations by participating in various events and conversations with different people.FindingsIn Japan and China, the use of incense has a long history, and relevant scent cultures have been developed not only for offerings in religious practices, but also as a kind of scent appreciation together with a poetic presentation. Again, it is important and significant to discern several interactions of incense traditions in these two countries, since the transformations became obvious in the last two decades, while Japanese Kodo participated more in international exchange, and the Chinese people's view of intangible cultural heritage has become more important in their daily social practices.Originality/valueAs a way of showing how the study of scent can enhance ethnographic writing and the understanding of changes in the appreciation of incense, this paper hopes to contribute to the study of art and tradition.

Brief sensory deprivation triggers plasticity of neurotransmitter-synthesising enzyme expression in genetically labelled olfactory bulb dopaminergic neurons

In the glomerular layer of the olfactory bulb, local dopaminergic interneurons play a key role in regulating the flow of sensory information from nose to cortex. These dual dopamine- and GABA-releasing cells are capable of marked experience-dependent changes in the expression of neurotransmitter-synthesising enzymes, including tyrosine hydroxylase (TH). However, such plasticity has most commonly been studied in cell populations identified by their expression of the enzyme being studied, and after long periods of sensory deprivation. Here, instead, we used brief 1- or 3-day manipulations of olfactory experience in juvenile mice, coupled with a conditional genetic approach that labelled neurons contingent upon their expression of the dopamine transporter (DAT-tdTomato). This enabled us to evaluate the potential for faster changes in neurotransmitter-synthesising enzyme expression in an independently identified population of neurons. Our labelling strategy showed good specificity for olfactory bulb dopaminergic neurons, whilst also revealing a minority sub-population of non-dopaminergic DAT-tdTomato cells that expressed the calcium-binding protein calretinin. Crucially, the proportions of these neuronal subtypes were not affected by brief alterations in sensory experience. Short-term olfactory manipulations also produced no significant changes in immunofluorescence for the GABA-synthesising enzyme GAD67. However, in bulbar DAT-tdTomato neurons brief sensory deprivation was accompanied by a transient drop in immunofluorescence for the dopamine-synthesising enzyme dopa decarboxylase (DDC), and a sustained decrease in TH expression. Careful characterisation of an independently identified, genetically labelled neuronal population therefore enabled us to uncover experience-dependent changes in neurotransmitter-synthesising enzyme expression that are more rapid than previously appreciated.