Odours and scents are fleeting and ephemeral, which poses methodological challenges in terms of articulation and representation. And yet, they are also material, effective, and, most importantly, constitutive of relationships, which require scholarly attention. By focusing on olfactory media, inherently out of focus, our contribution highlights an often-neglected sensory impression, while also recognising its entanglement with other senses.
Our main aim with this intervention is to create a scentful, reflective space for audiences to contemplate the social life of smells and their capacity to engender politics. Whether evoking memories, inspiring a field poem as a pathway to other worlds, embodying the precarious labor of migrants in the global perfume market, or manifesting hygiene in pandemic times, scents and smells, we argue, are important to think with in sensory ethnography, but also for the critique of contemporary power structures.
Our respective case studies investigate different dimensions of this: Mayıs Tokel’s ethnographic research in Berlin investigates scents and smell in relation to memory, migration and questions of belonging and othering. Ilke Imer’s research in Turkey follows the (im)materiality of rosely scents and their widespread use for affective governing by opposing socio-political actors. Claudia Liebelt’s multi-sited research on the perfume industry traces the transforming meanings and consumption of scented products, such as kolonya – Turkish for Eau de Cologne – in Turkey and its diaspora. We aim to engage the audience by using a rose-scented oil diffuser and displaying research materials, including one ethnographer’s multisensory field diary, and a selection of fragrances. We also wish to raise methodological questions: How to sense and articulate our own and our research partners’ olfactory affects and memories, often overlooked in everyday life? How to make sense of olfactory affect as the invisible resonance of unruly odours?
Caption: Page from M. Tokel‘s ethnographic plant diary. (Photo: M. Tokel, 2024)
İlke İmer is a PhD candidate in social and cultural anthropology at Free University Berlin and a practitioner working across diverse artistic fields. Her current research is part of the DFG-funded project “Olfactory Belongings: Contested Scents in Urban Publics” within the CRC Affective Societies. It explores olfactory governance in public spaces and the otherworldly, with a particular focus on the circulation and everyday use of rose fragrances in Turkey. She is the author of the book “idrakrizi” (On the Edge of Perception, Lando Press 2025).
Claudia Liebelt is professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University Berlin with research foci in the body and the senses, experiential religion, and gender and sexualities in the Middle East and Turkey. Her current research as part of the CRC “Affective Societies” focuses on fragrant substances in relation to affect, biopolitics, and notions of beauty. She has authored “Istanbul Appearances: ‘Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey’” (Syracuse UP, 2023) and “Caring for the 'Holy Land': Filipina domestic workers in Israel” (Berghahn, 2011).
Mayıs Tokel is a doctoral researcher in social and cultural anthropology at the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies” at the Free University Berlin. They are currently part of the research project called “Olfactory Belongings: Contested Scents in Urban Publics”. They work in the fields of migration, smell studies, and sensory ethnography.
