Smelling an Exhibit

In today’s society we find distinctions betweens social classes, races, genders, etc. mainly by seeing these things with our eyes. Did you ever stop to consider that smell is also a factor in these distinctions? According to Mark M. Smith and his book Sensing the Past he describes in his chapter about “Smell” that we do and people have for hundreds of years classified things, objects, people, and events according to smell. Here is an example to better understand this notion. Imagine you are walking in a park and you smell garbage the entire time you are there. You might not stay long at the park and you might assume that the park is not kept clean due to the fact that the neighborhood/town it is in does not have a lot of money. Therefore the up keeping of the park is poor. Now imagine that you are in the same park and you smell flowers instead. This would probably cause you to stay longer and to assume that the neighborhood/town has money to keep the park clean. Without consciously realizing it these smells have caused you to associate social/economically issues in the surrounding area of the park and assuming things because of a smell.

Odors that are pleasant to smell are usually associated with wealthier people. Whereas odors that make you want to hold your noise or even gag are associated with the lower class. These distinctions have been going on for years. We don’t often think about it but when we do carefully we can see how we often judge others and create stereotypes depending on what we smell.

It would be pretty neat if we could find a way in our exhibit that created a smell to relate with each object or the exhibit as a whole. You could take that many different routes to this approach. Perhaps you can have the smell of the event or place the person was wearing the object at. You could also have the smell of the place they purchased it at. It would be pretty interested to somehow incorporate a smell or smells in the experience of an exhibit. In the case of my dress since it was worn by Fianna Grube who lived on a farm the smell would probably unfortunately be manure. However luckily for the exhibit the wedding was in January and most likely you wouldn’t be able to smell anything on the farms.