Weathering violence: Atmospheric materialities and olfactory durations of ‘skunk water’ in Palestine

Abstract

This paper examines a particular technique of weaponising smell – the spraying of ‘skunk water’, a crowd control tool originally developed by the Israeli Police to disperse Palestinian protests – and the olfactory atmospheres of moving matter it extends its violence through. It focuses particularly on ways in which skunk water spraying operates by ‘weathering’ the air with a stench that sticks on bodies, objects and spaces, often for considerably long periods. By elaborating the two entwined aspects of weathering – the weaponising and the meteorological – the paper shows how skunk water spraying engenders malodourous olfactory durations that move and through their movement extend their violence through meteorological fluidities and moving bodies/objects. The violence of skunk water, we so argue, contains lingering tempos that through material morphoses (water, mist, droplets, dried powder), reactivating/intensifying weather conditions (rain, heat, humidity, wind), and material kinetics (moving bodies, objects and air) spatialise proximities of atmospheric stench, hence targeting the way breathing bodies are immersed in their olfactory environments. By comprehending weathering as weaponised ‘matter in motion’, the paper offers a novel way of thinking about atmospheric violence through non-linear movements and lingering proximities – namely, as a weaponisation of an olfactory duration of a stinky matter that moves.