People’s Scents is a new concept that Mannigel has created and elaborates on throughout her practice. It is a term referring to the combination of people’s body scents and environmental scents generated by people.

Body Scents is a concept Mannigel has developed—which portrays a person’s olfactory identity as consisting of diverse aspects related to cultural practices, biology, and the atmosphere. Cultural practices pertain to the social interactions between people, which include leisure and work activities we engage in, the food we eat, the fragrant products we apply or come into contact with, as well as the built environment and landscape that we inhabit. The biological aspects of body scents encompass genetics, our microbiome, as well as the condition of our health. When referring to the atmosphere, she means weather-related conditions.

People-Generated Environmental Scents is a new concept that Mannigel is carving out. It comprises of the scents that people produce while going about their lives in relation to food they consume and prepare, hygiene practices, car culture, industrial production, etc. 

Mannigel understands Othering as a form of social exclusion based on the premise that a person or a group (or groups) of people is perceived as “different”. Therefore, individuals who have been Othered are not considered as a part of one’s own social group.

For Mannigel, the Aesthetic Potential of People’s Scents entails people’s olfactory perception and judgment about others’ body scents and environmental scents generated by humans. She uses her findings on the felt experience of others’ body scents to contribute to framing the aesthetic potential of body scents and to highlight the sense of smell in aesthetics. By aesthetic, Mannigel refers to a socially constructed cognitive process of assessing sensory experiences. Here, she draws from anthropologist Sharman Russel’s work which defines aesthetic as a socially constructed cognitive process of assessing an experience that entails personal associations that are attributed to past sensory experiences and how we re-enact them (1997).

For Mannigel, the Political Potential of People’s Scents implies that perceiving smells is political because it shapes and is shaped by social and cultural behaviors and structures. The way we perceive scents can become politically charged when people of different social and cultural backgrounds meet. As sensory scholars indicate, scents can threaten the border between self and other (Porteous 1985, Drobnick 2002, Classen et al. 1994). These processes accompany notions of class and ethnicity, as well as gender, moral, and racial difference (Le Guérer 2002; Reinarz 2014, 47–48)

References

Drobnick, Jim. 2002. “Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality.” Angelaki 7, no. 1 (April): 31-47, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250220142047.

Le Guérer, Annick. 2002. “Olfaction and Cognition: A Philosophical and Psychoanalytic View.” In Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, edited by Catherine Rouby, Benoist Schaal, Danièle Dubois, Rémi Gervais and A. Holley, 3–15. Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Porteous, J Douglas. 1985. “Smellscape.” Progress in Human Geography 9, no. 3 (September): 356–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913258500900303.

Reinarz, Jonathan. 2014. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Russell, Sharman. 1997. “The Anthropology of Aesthetics: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 28, no. 2: 177–92. https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso28_2_1997_177_192.pdf.