Description
Book SynopsisA multidisciplinary collection of essays exploring the interconnections and disjunctures in Asian cultural histories of scent. Examines how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies.
Trade Review“Aromas of Asia is very much at the cutting edge of the field. Many books on smell engage in a battle with the straw man of ‘smell-as-neglected’ and ‘the West as ocular-centric.’ This book has moved way beyond such simplicities, and through its varied methodologies and diverse topics we emerge with a number of fresh perspectives on smell in Asia.”
—James McHugh,author of Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Scents, Sensory Colonialism, and Social Worlds in Asia
Gwyn McClelland and Hannah Gould
Part I: Poetics and Philosophies
1. On a Trail of Incense: Japan and Olfactory Thought
Lorenzo Marinucci
2. The Shifting Smellscape of Early Medieval China: Emperor Wu’s Strange Aromatics
Peter Romaskiewicz
3. The Poetics of Incense in the Lives of Medieval Chinese Officials
Qian Jia
Part II: Making Sensory Boundaries
4. A Whiff of Southeast Asia: Tasting Durian and Kopi
Gaik Cheng Khoo and Jean Duruz
5. The Aroma of a Place in the Sunshine: Breathing in Japanese History Through the Fiction of Endō Shūsaku
Gwyn McClelland
6. Words That Smell: Caste and Odors in Hindi Dalit Autobiographies
Shivani Kapoor
7. Love Is in the Air: A Study of Johnnie To’s Blind Detective
Aubrey Tang
Part III: Bodies–Life, Work, Death
8. Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Smell of Vulnerability in Lombok, Indonesia
Saki Tanada
9. Harnessing the Stenches of Waste: Human Bodies as Olfactory Environmental Sensors in Contemporary China
Adam Liebman
10. The Smell of a Corpse: Olfactory Culture in a Singaporean Funeral Parlor
Ruth E. Toulson
List of Contributors
Index
