Organizer: Manon Raffard (Université de Bourgogne, France)

Discussant: William Tullett (History, York University, UK)

This multidisciplinary online panel proposes to focus on non-human olfaction in an interspecies perspective to foster critical and interdisciplinary collaborations across the humanities and especially amongst ECRs. The panel’s main objectives are to 1) put forward nose-first histories at the margins of the traditional anthropocentrism of smell studies and 2) to explore olfactory perception as a medium for complex interspecies interactions with diverse environmental, political, scientific and cultural consequences. In a presentation provisionally titled “Mughal Perfumes in Early Modern South Asia: Olfactory Geography and Aromatic Mobility”, Dr. Amrita Chattopadhyay uses a textual corpus of early-modern Mughal aromatics’ recipes to demonstrates how ancient productions practices interlink plant, animal and human lives all the while altering the environment on an extensive scale, notably through the trade and displacement vegetal and animal aromatics. Through her study of 21st-century Francophone dystopian fiction, Chanelle Dupuis analyzes experimental narratives characterized by their decentering of hegemonical anthropocentric olfactory perceptions to unveil the dire interspecies consequences of environmental warfare. In the most conceptual of our three presentations, Sofia Livi and Emanuele Capozziello develop the eponymous notion of “Ecological plasticity”. Using the human olfactory microbiome as a support for their argument, the authors explore the possibility of a dynamic eco-affective ontology, in which traditional conceptual categories, such as human and non-human, subject and object, blur. The panel will be chaired by the organizer as well as William Tullett (University of York).

Amrita Chattopadhyay (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Timely Histories’ Project, Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)

Mughal Perfumes in Early Modern South Asia: Olfactory Geography and Aromatic Mobility

The presentation primarily focuses on the early modern Indo-Persianate olfactory regimes in Mughal South Asia (16th-18th centuries). It studies a corpus of textualized recipes and technological methods followed for the preparation of diverse forms of perfumes in this period. Highlighting the minute and meticulous listing of ingredients with specific quantities and qualities, I will show how this craft was dependent on agrarian and pastoral practices, and especially their non-human products. Embedded in the variant topographies and landscapes, the primary raw materials for perfume-making were sourced from plants and animals suitable to specific climatic regions. Catering to courtly ceremonial observations, religious practices and elite consumption patterns, the perfumes in varied material forms such as paste, powder, liquid, soap and incenses were employed as aesthetic-cultural artefacts with complex relationships to their non-human sources. Materialised into exquisite perfume-containers manufactured at the Mughal factories/karkhanas, the olfactory regime of the period signaled the heightened craftmanship preceded by an efficient method of acquiring aromatic raw materials from various regions of the subcontinent and beyond. This was supported by dynamic trade-networks for sourcing and distributing these nature-dependent aromatics in their raw and processed forms as high-valued perfumes. The presentation thus highlights this co-relation between non-human lives, scenstscape and aromatic mobility during the early modern period in forging a unique human-nature relationship permitted by the olfactory modality.

Keywords: early modern perfumery, natural aromatic raw material, interspecies early modern industries, material culture, smell studies

Chanelle Dupuis (French and Francophone Studies, Brown University, USA)

Flies and Eagles: Nonhuman Smells and Nonhumans Smelling in 21st Century French and Francophone Dystopias

What are the smells of the future? French and Francophone dystopic texts imagine ravaged landscapes and broken atmospheres as the future we can expect. From worlds shifted by human-caused alterations to the climate to civilizations destroyed by chemical warfare, dystopias stage new relationships to environments, and more importantly, new ways of viewing nonhuman lives. These nonhumans are described in great detail as beings that suffer from human actions and beings that must strive to escape the conditions they are in. Of interest to me is the relationship between nonhumans and smell. How are they described as smelling? What do they smell? What are their smells? And why do these descriptions matter? In Mireille Gagné’s Frappabord (2024), the fly challenges the idea of a human protagonist and becomes the central character of the book. The fly’s dependence on smell is shown as it uses its sense of smell to track humans and nourish itself. The fly’s voice is especially important as it speaks to the humans and blames them for the destruction of the environment. Similarly, Lutz Bassmann’s Les aigles puent (2010) considers the eagle as the bearer of a toxic war of chemicals, that can be traced through the sense of smell. The eagles are described as carriers of a great stench, but the characters of this novel come to find that the odors of the eagles aren’t natural, but the result of chemical warfare. These two dystopias stage interesting relationships between humans and nonhumans to question environmental change and bring to focus the olfactory lives of other beings. Smell cultures, and smellscapes, as we know them, are shifted away from the human and towards something more inclusive, more informative. It is in this focus on flies and eagles that my paper situates new relationships to smell, and new ways of smelling.

Keywords: dystopias, Non-humans, Toxicity, French and Francophone Studies, smell studies

Sofia Livi ∆ & Emanuele Capozziello (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy)

Ecological Plasticity

In this presentation, we introduce the concept of ecological plasticity and develop it through the case study of human olfaction and its reliance on its own microbiome for functionality. Extending the model of plasticity to the ecological discourse, we define ecological plasticity as a principle of systemic relationality according to which an agent takes on a form by interacting with a complex affective reality while, reciprocally, giving it a form. The concept of form is here conceived as a synthetic unity that encapsulates the possibilities of existence, sensibility and interaction of an agent immersed in a complex world of other agent-forms. An agent is always aesthetically and affectively immersed in a complex or ecological system: a body is that which is affected and assumes form within a complex affective reality, which is, in turn, co-formed in this process. This perspective, in contrast with static morphology, contributes to configuring a dynamic eco-affective ontology without a clear distinction between activity and passivity, subject and object. Those concepts are crafted with reference to olfactory perception, an embodied and reciprocal field of co-affection. The anthropocentric point of departure is here deconstrued by focusing on the role of the microbiome. The human ability to sense odorants in the environment depends on the richness and composition of the microbiome in the nose, illustrating how olfactory perception relies on a complex network of interactions that plastically morph and define surfaces, questioning the idea of biological enclosure. Via the perception of smells, bodies make sense of their environment, and this shaping cannot take place without the same bodies being touched, affected, and thus renegotiated.

Keywords: eco-affective ontology, plasticity, systemic relationality, anthropocentrism, smell studies