This article looks at arguments concerning the supposed low status of smell in relation to the other senses to shed light on how smell has been perceived historically, across time. It also locates olfactory enquiries beyond scientific, biological concerns and argues for smell as a social medium present in our everyday life experiences. The article explores smell in the fields of history, anthropology, religion, gender and sociospatial analysis, enabling us to comprehend and critique theoretical/conceptual trajectories employed in social science research on olfaction. By looking at theoretical and methodological approaches towards an understanding of our olfactory capacities, ideas are developed about how one can ‘do’ a sociology of smell, where smell is perceived as a social intermediary that affects our ways of knowing, understanding and (re)creating social realities, premised upon the use of smell as a moral judgement of others. These ideas are exemplified through preliminary findings from an ongoing research project on the social construction(s) of smell in Singapore.

Sensory scholarship in the fields of sociology, anthropology, history and geography, among others, has proliferated in the last few decades. Sensory works in these disciplines argue for the senses as social, highlighting important insights that further our comprehension of selfhood, culture, and social relations. In this paper, I delineate five interrelated sections that inform how sensory works have developed over time. In the first section, I provide an adumbrated background with regard to the hierarchy of the senses, and call attention to the need to move beyond the hegemony of vision. The second section offers a discussion on how Sociology has contributed to sensory studies, addressed alongside other disciplines. Building upon these two sections, both theoretical directions and methodological issues will be deliberated in the third and fourth sections respectively. The last section locates the development of sensory research in organizational terms, by elucidating upon the various institutional efforts that have been pursued towards organizing sensory research and scholarly publications through different avenues. The article then concludes by putting forward the concept of sensory transnationalism as a suggestion for the next step forward towards broadening sensory research.Social science literature on the senses has proliferated in the last few decades, especially in the fields of sociology and anthropology. Departing from related works located within disciplines such as biology, psychology, and physiology, sensory studies argue for the senses as social, revealing important insights pertaining to selfhood, culture, and social relations. In this paper, I summarize this field in five interrelated sections. First, I provide a brief discussion of the 'hierarchy of the senses' and the need to maneuver beyond the hegemony of vision. In a second section, I discuss the contribution that Sociology can offer, alongside other (often overlapping) disciplines. The third and fourth sections examine (respectively) theoretical and methodological issues in sensory studies. Finally, a fifth section describes the various institutional efforts that have been pursued towards organizing and promoting sensory research. The article concludes with suggestions for the next step forward towards broadening the field of research, by focusing on the concept of sensory transnationalism.

While urban dimensions of landscapes and the physical environment are often regarded as built structures that relate to functionality in modern life, cities are also sites of human experience that comprise social relationships, memories, emotions, and how they are negotiated on an everyday basis. Embedded within these processes of sociality is how the senses mediate one's engagement with urban life, hence rendering insights into the multi-sensory character of urbanity. This article surveys a range of sensory methodologies that may be harnessed towards articulating the social life of the senses in urbanity such as smellscape walkabouts in order to explicate the doing of sensory ethnography in urban contexts. The aim is to elucidate how place, social actors, and sensory experiences come together in the production and analysis of urban ethnographic research, including the embodied constitutions of researchers in the process of data generation.

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta‐narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial‐bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis‐à‐vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self‐identity and social relations.

This article considers smell as a social intermediary with regard to the body, presentation of self, and social/moral order. Employing the trajectory of a sociology of everyday life, the data presented here are collected from narrative interviews conducted with twelve respondents. The study looks at how respondents react to bodily odors and how they go about maintaining acceptable bodily scents to facilitate social interaction. The discussion is framed within Goffmanian sociology on the interaction order and corporeal scholarship. The findings show that respondents equate foul odors with social and moral defilement, and this affects how they view social others, adopting attitudes and behaviors of social inclusion and exclusion. Managing bodily odors also points to the idea that instead of approaching the body as an object of analysis, the body should also be analyzed as an active and acting subject, located and influenced by sociocultural conditions. This article thus contributes to discussions on a sociology of the body by linking them with olfactory analyses and also aims to supplement the dearth of olfactory research in the Southeast Asian region by using Singapore as an empirical case study.