Blog Archives - Philosophy & Science of Olfaction | A.S. Barwich

Philosophy & Science of Olfaction | A.S. Barwich

The moment you meet your academic hero...

12/19/2015

... and she's even more amazing in person than one could ever hope: Linda Buck!!

And suddenly you sit and listen to the dream team: Linda Buck and Stuart Firestein. And you have to suppress the desire to grin like an idiot. Olfaction for the win!

December 13: Best early Christmas present ever.

Visit to Andreas Mershin's Lab (Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT)

12/10/2015

I saw an electronic nose! Thanks to Andreas, Thras, Simmie and Jamie and the team for inviting me. Hopefully more to come.
Check out their stuff: http://cba.mit.edu
(8-9 Dec 2015)

Upcoming Talk (March 2016): "Vials and Vinaigrettes: The Manipulation of Odour in 18th-century French Science and Society" at the DBSECS-Conference “Flavours of the Eighteenth Century”in Brussels

12/2/2015

Co-Work with Donna Bilak: http://dbilakpraxis.com

Smells are a natural product that is recreated artificially in scientific and societal contexts. This paper considers 18th-century French theories of olfaction from the twinned perspectives of contemporary intellectual and behavioural structures to look at continuities and discontinuities in the production and use of odours. On the one hand, scientific views around the materiality of odours were changing: chemists such as Romieu, Prévost, Fourcroy, and Berthollet proposed and demonstrated that odours were elicited by volatile airborne particles. This signalled a shift in the material understanding of the chemical and psychological causality of smell. Its newly found corpuscular nature provided smell with an experimental accessibility that allowed for the investigation of smells as transmitters of infections and therapeutic remedies in public perception. While experimental ideas of control and purification started to characterise odour as a scientific object, this reification also led to a prolonged disassociation of research on the causal materiality of odours from studies of their psychological and merely subjective effects. On the other hand, the social role of smell in feminine ideals of beauty and behaviour drew upon popular understandings of the airborne nature of smell. In this context, the therapeutic manipulation of air was administered through objects of personal adornment like the vinaigrette, i.e. a small container with a perforated top containing pungent aromatic substances used as an inhalant to stimulate or restore consciousness – a physiological reaction that was enacted as a codified form of etiquette. Our collaborative exploration illuminates the blurred boundaries of smells as an epistemic and cultural object in this period. In what ways did popular conceptions of odour and air connect with contemporary scientific inquiry, or, conversely, limit it?