‘Scent and the City: Exploring, Documenting, and Preserving the intangible Heritage of Smell in the Spice Market Quarter of Istanbul’
On behalf of my co-author, Dr. Lucienne Senocak, and I, I would like thank you all so much for asking us to be here. Dr. Senocak is very sorry she could attend. The study of the senses has risen in prominence in the field of cultural heritage, particularly in the past decade. The sensory experience of smell affords opportunities for us to connect to the present and past while contributing to our understanding of the lived heritage of people and places. In particular, smell represents a created, manipulated, and significant part of the material world, which can be expressed and preserved as intangible heritage and memories. The sense of smell is also a unique medium through which urban history and living heritage can be investigated. This paper explores the intangible heritage of smell in the historical market quarter of Eminönü, Istanbul , a quarter of the historical peninsula of Istanbul, located on the Golden Horn ( map here) , which is included in the world heritage site boundaries . It investigates the theoretical and practical challenges associated with researching, documenting, managing, and preserving the olfactory heritage of an important historical quarter in a world heritage city. The sensory experience as a whole has become a way to study and connect to the present and past while contributing to the lived heritage of people and places. The sense of smell is a unique medium with which to explore history but until quite recently it has been largely ignored, with vision and sound being prioritized, But we can analyze interesting changes in the past and by looking at history through the other senses; ultimately this gives us a more varied and richer understanding of societies and cultural practices . In general ,smell is not valued by modern society; indeed places are often considered ―clean‖ and ―better‖ when they lack smells. However, our desensitized and deodorized world is a rather recent phenomenon. Before the
modern era, the other senses were often considered to be just as important, if not more so, on many occasions. Both smell and odorlessness can define time and space,1 and each can be used to represent societal values and ideologies. Smell was, and still is, a created, manipulated, and significance part of the material world, and by extension, cultural heritage. This sensory approach has led to the term ―smellscape‖—a term coined in 1990 by geographer J. Douglas Porteous, in his book ‗Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Senses and Metaphor--- which ―suggests that, like visual impressions, smells may be spatially ordered or place-related,‖ ---and it describes the environment around us through both odors individually and in their totality. 2 smellscape was.‘ Ancient people thought a lot about the senses. We possess a large body of material from the antique world regarding a sort of sensory philosophy and education.3 For centuries, people thought about and acted on ideas about the sensory experience. The ancient Greeks, for example, ordered the senses, and categorized them in higher and baser groups as a recognition of the role they play in the bodily experience.4 Much like the approaches of later societies, this bifurcation is a rather oversimplification of the complicated relationship between the body and the environment. Our experiences are built around all the senses, and then remember (reexperienced) on a spectrum of sensorial memory. 5 The rise of sensory studies as a whole originated as a reactionary movement to the primacy placed on vision by the Western scholarly tradition.6 As visual observation became the method through which people discovered, categorized, and understood the world, an ―objective‖ 1
Mark S.R. Jenner, "Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories," The American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 341. 2 J.Douglas Porteous, "Smellscape," Progress in Physical Geography 9, no. 3 (1985): 359. 3 Constance Classen, Aroma: The cultural history of smell (Routledge, 1994). 4 Richard Jütte, A history of the Senses: from Antiquity to Cyberspace (Polity, 2004). 5 Jenner, "Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories," 349. 6 Mark Smith, Sensory history (Berg Pub Ltd, 2007).
visual approach became the only academic position. The baser senses, taste, touch, and smell, were not only considered inferior by the academic elite, but utterly primitive. Non-white, nonEuropean societies cared about these baser senses, and therefore they were relegated by European elites to insignificance. However, the twentieth century brought new scholars and points of views that embraced sensory research as a means of understanding societies and individuals. In the 1990‘s, major theoreticians such as David Howes and Constance Classen began to focus exclusively on sensory theory, and sensory anthropology became a discipline in its own right. The establishment of sensory anthropology as its own field is still quite new, and its potential applications in the world of art, architecture, and museums are still being explored. Classen summarizes these possibilities, saying ―the value of sensory perception lies not in itself, but in its ability, when culturally coded, to lead one away from the material world of the senses to the timeless, abstract world of ideals.‖7 The critique of and backlash against visual primacy can be found outside the fields of heritage studies, art history, and anthropology. For example, sociologist Richard Sennett bemoans modern architect and urban planners as being too concerned with visual aspects of the environment as he writes about ―the sensory deprivation…the dullness, the monotony, and the tactile sterility which afflicts the urban environment.” Urban planning for at least a century has worked diligently to remove odors from the built environment. Things that may produce odor, such as landfills and factories are moved away from populated areas, and particularly smelly components of city life, such as restaurant areas and public transportation systems are equipped with as much ventilation as possible, or deodorized through sophisticated waste management
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Constance Classen, World of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993). 134.
systems. In some places, cities even attempt to mask negative smells by producing more pleasant ones with scented cleaning fluids. And invariably, when I talk about researching smellscapes, people always bring up the disgusting nature of pre-modern cities; the lack of waste management must have made for some very ripe-smelling environments, at least in our minds. Pre-industrial towns and cities were often filled with organic matter such as excrement, mud, de-composing animals, meat, alcohol, and blood. Industrialization, characterized by burning coal, metal furnaces, and steam-polluted air not only significantly changed the smellscapes of both cities and homes, but also strengthened beliefs that foul-smelling air was the source of diseases. Therefore, even as early as 1873 inventors were creating odorless water closets in order to help cities clean the ―poisonous air.‖ And even though our urban landscapes have gone through massive amounts of sterilization, people still wish that we could get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke, garbage containers, transportation exhaust, and many other things. Anthropological research supports the notion that smell is quite important in defining and evoking individual and communal memories. The answer to why it is so important, however, lies in other fields. The literature regarding smell from the fields of psychology and neurobiology is vast. Studies show that all five senses (sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound), when triggered, allow people to recall short term and long term memories. Some senses do it slightly better than others, but difference is minimal. The more important distinction is that smell, more than any other of the senses, brings back stronger emotions connected to the memory.8 Emotions are an important aspect of rituals, memories, and identity, and therefore smell is frequently thought about, discussed, and manipulated, in order to be most advantageous.
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R.S. Herz and T. Engen, "Odor memory: Review and analysis," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 3, no. 3 (1996).
Another idea I would like to present to you it concept that smells are socially and culturally constructed. It seems that we generally all agree on what smells ―good‖ and what smells ―bad,‖ which has led to common misconception that there is a scientific or biological basis for why bad smells smell bad, and good smells smell good. In reality, just like in every other area of our lives, these signifiers of ―good‖ and ―bad‖ in association with smell are taught and learned. There have been studies done with infants where the babies exposed to something we consider good smelling, such as vanilla, and something we consider bad smelling, such as BLANK. When exposed to the scent of vanilla, most babies scrunched their noses and moved away in distaste. However, by the time they start school, most of them will have become conditioned to smell vanilla as good. How this process occurs, exactly, is something still being studied. One option is that it is simply taught – when, as children, we hear our parents say that something smells nice, and remember that. Additionally, I think there is another way that ties back to my previous comments regarding smell, emotion, and memory. As a child begins to associate vanilla with his grandmother making cookies, or birthday cakes, or whatever the case is, the good memories and happy emotions that remain begin to become associated with the smellscapes, and during that process vanilla changes from a bad smell to a good one. The reality is probably a mixture of being taught and associating things with good experiences. One of the major problems with studying smells, and using smells to look at history, is that it is rather hard to access the original smells, or create an olfactory-authentic smellscape. In much the way that the color ―blue‖ can actually mean a whole range of colors, identifying the specific chemical mixture that results in smells is problematic. We can come very close to smelling similar ―pure‖ aromas, such as coals being burned, but identifying the exact composition of spice mixtures, perfumed oils, and total smellscape of all a city‘s scents
combined is quite difficult. External factors, such as wind strength and humidity also greatly affect the amount that can be smelled at any one time. OTHER RESEARCH In addition to the theoretical work done by prominent scholars such as Classen and Howes, the past few years have seen an increase of smell-related research, fieldwork, and other sorts of explorations in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. Similar work is being done in Manchester by Victoria Henshaw, a professor at the University of Sheffield. She focuses on how contemporary cities smell, and the interplay between modern architecture and smell. In addition to hosting workshops where students and researchers come together to experiment with ways to investigate smells in the city, she has produced a guided smell walk of Manchester, which takes people by smells such as ventiliation odors in Chinatown, mashed potatoes and gravy, the canal, flowers, and dust odors from construction sites. She also provides blank maps for people to create their own smell routes, and a place for people to leave tips about new scents. Looking specifically at smell and heritage, Rosabelle Boswell, a South African social anthropologist, has studied the intangible heritage implications of recent rennovations and changes to the ancient city of Zanzibar after it was declared a World Heritage Site. She views fragrance as an expression of identity and a source of importance for the locals, though it continues to remain unnoticed by the heritage community. Significantly, Boswell argues that scent is neither tangible nor intangible, which problematizes our interactions with it as researchers. Though the smells wafting through the air are certainly intangible, and almost impossible to capture and preserve without advanced chemistry, the objects which produce smells are very tangible. This idea that the sensory world inextricably links the intangible and
tangible puts scholars in the gray area between the two, but also opens a lot of opportunities for research and theorizing. WORKSHOP The fieldwork for this paper was conducted as part of a workshop entitled ―Urban Cultural Heritage and Creative Practice: Senses and the City, Istanbul Smellscapes" which was sponsored by Koç University and Brown University in June 2012 . The workshop brought together art and urban historians, artists, neuroscientists and cultural heritage specialists from six universities in Turkey, Hong Kong, America, Ireland, England, and South Africa. The research conducted during this workshop concentrated on how the intangible heritage of scent in the Spice Market quarter of Eminönü, Istanbul-- a district in Istanbul‘s historic peninsula associated traditionally with myriad smells, familiar and exotic--could be better understood and documented through multi-disciplinary approaches ranging from the creation of a scent walk using an iPhone application, to oral histories of merchants in the market-place, to archival research on the historical practice of perfuming sacred spaces in the Ottoman past. ISTANBUL I would like to quickly introduce you to Istanbul and the Spice Market area. Istanbul is a massive city, almost 5,400 square km (2062 square miles) with a population of over 15 million. The Historic Peninsula has been a World Heritage Site since 1985, and Istanbul was the European Capital of Culture in 2010. Eminonu is a fascinating and very vibrant part of Istanbul – it the location of the Spice / Egyptian market, which forms a part of a larger mosque complex called the Yeni Valide Cami complex, or the New Queen Mother‘s Mosque complex. The market –mosque complex was
founded in 1661 by Hadice Turhan Sultan, an imperial Ottoman woman who had been captured in Russia at age 12, grew up as a concubine in the Ottoman harem and eventually bore a son, the future ottoman sultan Mehmed IV. As the Queen Mother , or valide Hadice Turhan acquired both the legitimacy and financial resources to endow this large market structure and the entire mosque complex which also included fountains, a primary school and her tomb. Prior to the construction of the mosque and market complex in Eminonu , this section of the city had been a largely Jewish merchant quarter; Sitting on the shores of the Golden Horn, and the location of the Ottoman customs houses, it was an ideal place for various specialized markets which now comprise one large shopping area (though remnants of the specialized areas certainly remain). The specific area of markets we focused on were the original 17th Spice Market, —built by this business minded Ottoman queen mother . From a more tangible heritage aspect, this whole section of the city is actually targeted for a big restoration project, and the interior garden area of the L-Shaped Ottoman market structure was cleared of its local tea gardens and given a large fountain- ( something which never was part of the original complex) by the municipality in time for this section of the market quarter to be used as a filming location for the latest James Bond movie and academy awardwinning Argot. .Now, and in the near future, the Egyptian market will become a much more sterile and clean environment. Restorations in Istanbul tend towards that direction, unfortunately. When we look at what is projected for the conservation for the area and how it will affect the historical skyline and environment, our smellscape research becomes quite relevant. If you have followed UNESCO discussions for the past few years, you will see that Istanbul is always almost put on the list of heritage in danger. But there are some really imminent projects of
restoration, as well as skyscrapers that are popping up behind the historical areas that will affect the way we look at Eminonu. There is a big bridge project – now almost complete--which will drastically change the viewscape of the Golden Horn. Part of our research is moving from the Ottoman to the contemporary and looking at how people are actually going to feel about the really dramatic changes that will be happening. Ottoman historical texts mention that people had jobs such as perfumers of places like mosques and marketplaces. Also there were people who were in charge of perfuming the mosques, fumigators, who used incense burners filled with amber and other aromatics, mosque lamps filled with olive oil, and many other scents which must have been quite pungent. Gardens were also part of the market and tomb structures, animals such a donkeys and camels would have been present for trade transportation
and the cemeteries were were filled with different
sorts of plants. We know a lot from the Ottoman archival documents about what types of goods came in and out of the spice market – various kinds of coffee, tea fish, jute, perfumes, incense , spices. We have textual documentation for all this information, as well as illuminated manuscripts from the Ottoman periods and so we have a well grounded historical component to our research about what could have constituted the historical smellscape of Eminonu PEOPLE From Koc University, there were 3 professors, 6 graduate students, and 4 undergraduate students. The 3 professors set the original course for the workshop, defining it as a sensorial urbanism project, researching the Ottoman past through smell. This fit nicely in with their backgrounds and research interests. My co-author, Lucienne Thys- Senocak, is an Ottoman architectural historian whose doctoral thesis focused on the history of Eminonu and the Ottoman
queen mother who built the market quarter we are working in . Nina Ergin is also an Ottoman Art Historian, and focuses on 16th century Ottoman soundscapes. Both Nina and Lucienne had very good bases in the archival and historical (textual) backgrounds of the city. Finally, Ilgim Alaca is a graphic artist and professor who works on panoramas and layers of Istanbul as we were interested in how to incorporate creative practice into the study of heritage in the city of Istanbul. The professors were incredibly important both in organizing and in helping us get necessary permissions from places such as the Istanbul Trade Office and the Eminonu Spice Market merchants association. To help guide us a little, we had two smell experts join us for the two weeks. First, Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian smell artist and research chemist introduced us to her artwork and research, and gave us some great tips about how to start thinking about smell in an academic context. Her work has been featured throughout Europe and America, and is lauded for its daring and creative approaches to art and smell. In 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s List Visual Arts Center hosted an exhibition called ―the FEAR of Smell — the Smell of FEAR,‖ created by artist Sissel Tolaas. Tolaas collected the sweat of nine men that suffer from acute, chronic fear. With an updated scratch and sniff technology, she infused paint with the sweat, and painted the walls white. People walked around scratching at the wall and smelling different scents of fear. Our other guest was Dr. Rachel Herz, a neurobiologist at Brown University. She studies the biological and psychological aspects of smell, and is the author of many of the studies I have mentioned. If you are interested in the topic, she has two books that I highly recommend, one about the scent of desire, how smell affects our relationships and sexual choices, and other about social construction of ―good‖ and ―bad‖ in regards to smell.
METHODOLOGY When we convened in Istanbul, the other organizers and I had some guest lectures and events prepared, but we tried to keep the schedule fairly open and flexible. Part of the decision to bring together so many international scholars, artists, and students was to foster a more creative environment. Therefore, we didn‘t really have a plan on how to start studying smells. After a bit of orientation, we let them wander and think. Within a few days, and after many group discussions, many common threads of inquiry became apparent, and informal groups formed on their own. I am now going to go through some of the methods we tried. Collecting the sources of scents As we wandered Eminonu, we tried to collect items that produced the scents we were smelling. Using mainly glass jars (plastic containers would affect the smell), we created a smell collection and database. People gather items like teas, oils, meat, cheese, flowers, dirty water, washcloths from the famous Turkish baths, mothballs, coffee, cigarettes, animal food, and many other things. After the workshop finished Lucienne and I decided not to keep most of the actual scent producing objects ( some included water from the Golden Horn and other items that could be a health hazard while decaying, but we have kept a record of all items collected. Notably, once the smells were removed from their context, some seemed to become insignificant, while others evoked strong reactions and memories from the participants. Interviews A large number of participants chose to approach the historical and contemporary smellscapes through interviews and oral history practice. While many of the shopkeepers speak enough English for their business, there was a language barrier for in depth interviews among the
non Turkish participants. We only had a small number of native Turkish speakers in the group, and we did not want simply to use them for their language skills. We interviewed shopkeepers, residents (both of Eminonu and Istanbul), and tourists. We provided a set interview form, in both English and Turkish, as well as disclosure waivers. We asked questions such as: Where are you coming from today? Do you work or live in Eminonu? What does Eminonu (or Istanbul) smell like to you? Are there any smells no longer here that you miss? If you could bottle a smell, call it Eminonu (or Istanbul), and save it for the future, what smells might you pick? These basic questions brought out a number of fascinating ideas and threads. Put together, we not only arrived a social, but a somewhat political, commentary on the nature of change and the globalization of scent. While I am hesitant to use the term nostalgia to characterize what the shopkeepers and Istanbul locals felt, many people missed many of the same things, most notably the smell of certain flowers and trees. At the same time, a lot of people highlighted the work that the current government has done in the past 20 years to clean up the streets and water. In addition to language, we came another rather large barrier to interviewing, and that was that people had a real fear of signing the waivers. The waivers themselves were not complicated, we just asked permission to use possibly use the interviews in some sort later exhibition or publication. I‘m sure many of you are aware of the events that happened over the summer in Istanbul, and that should give you the idea that there is, and has been for a long time,
some tensions between the ruling governments, police, military, people, and political parties. In the 1980s in particular, following a harsh military coup, lots of people simply went missing and to this day there is a fear among people of somehow ending up on a list. So we had some wonderful interviews where people were more than willing to talk, and gave verbal permission to both record and use their comments, yet ultimately refused to actually sign the waiver. Be a Dog for a Day We all spent the first days of the workshop getting acclimated to the surroundings and ―being a dog for a day.‖ We were advised to take this ―canine-centered‖ exploratory approach by smell artist/ research chemist Sissel Tolaas to try and ignore visual cues, and simply walk where our noses led us. Instead of turning when you see something, turn down a street when a new smell passes by. These first few days of smell-exploration allowed people to really think about how they wanted to approach the idea of studying urban smells. Intensive Walking Another quite fun method was scent driven walking. One participant organized walks through the Spice Bazaar with people blindfolded, and they had to call out the names of whatever smell they sensed. If you try this at home, you‘ll find how much your nose actually relies on your vision and taste to tell you what smells you are noticing. Another participant took a much braver route, and walked around Eminonu all day in a pair of white socks. The socks were then presented as a record of the smells of the area. Believe it or not, they did not smell as awful as you might think. Photography
The team from China created a wonderful visual archive of the Spice Bazaar. This technique, known as photostocktaking was visually driven but added to our overall sensory data bank for the project. They did a particularly interesting investigation into the circulation of tea throughout the market and followed abandoned tea glasses—an icon of Turkish hospitality – to see where they disappeared to and reappeared from---in what appeared to be a seemingly endless flowing social lubricant. Mapping Another group worked diligently on mapping scents, producing two great projects. I am sure many of you have heard of Turkish coffee, which comes in little cups with thick grounds at the bottom which people use to tell fortunes. The best coffee beans, while coming from outside of Turkey- Yemen and other coffee producing countries, are ground and sold in Eminonu, and stores compete for popularity. The team charted coffee locations – specifically where coffee was sold, and where it was ground and roasted. Then, they did walking tests over several days to see how far the coffee smells travelled, ultimately creating a map of the effective radius of the coffee aromas of Eminonu. They supplemented this work by interviewing people waiting in line to buy the roasted coffee grounds. Not surprisingly, many of the people in line were there on impulse – they walked through Eminonu, smelled the coffee, and couldn‘t resist buying some. The mapping group also mapped every shop in the spice bazaar by type. This provided us with an easily understandable visual record of the different types of stores, based on the main sources of smell. This data complemented our larger data-recording process, where we logged, on a massive wall map, all the smells we encountered and collected. Smell Walk
Another interesting project explored the idea of a smell walk, something I‘ve already mentioned in the context of the Manchester explorations, but something we didn‘t know about at the time. Though not an explicit goal of the workshop, we hoped that in the process of the workshop, we would find some way to connect the area which we were based in, Beyoglu, with our research area, Eminonu. Though both tourists destinations, and only about 2 kilometers apart, or an easy tram ride away, there is little in common between the two areas and populations who frequent them: Beyoglu is an area where wine bars, dvd stores and blue jean stores flourish – the other – Eminonu --targets a customer looking for a more traditional product—or more exotic and ―indigenous‖ one: spices, perfumes, even leeches. One way we tried to work through this problem was creating a smell walk between the two areas. This was additionally part of a larger vision where we would have a smellscape exhibition at our research center , and then people could walk across the bridge spanning to Golden Horn to the Spice Bazaar, where there might even be a small exhibition. We found that ultimately we did not have the proper tools at the time, such as smart phones and GIS mapping programs, to really create a final project. This is a topic that I am working on now in my doctoral dissertation work. Exhibition Ideas The final part of the workshop focused on generating exhibition ideas and part of the reason why I am interning this semester at the Smithsonian Institute. There are precedents for using smells within museum exhibitions, most notably in places geared for children and museums that attempt to recreate a historical setting, such as the Jorvik Viking Cultural Center in England. The perfume industry, something which I did not really touch on in this talk, has also
been the subject of exhibitions, especially with the opening of the New York Museum of Arts and Design‘s ―The Art of Scent, 1889-2012.‖ Curated by Chandler Burr, journalist and author of two books about the perfume industry, this museum exhibition is dedicated to exploring the design and aesthetics of olfactory art through perfume. We hope to create something very different from both of these. We would like to design an exhibition that importance and role of scent and smellscapes to societies, cultures, memories, and individuals. Another large part of my dissertation work is grappling with larger theoretical questions that people in the museum community have posed, such as ―can scent be an avenue ‗learning‘ and ‗discovery‘? What is the correlation between scent and interpretation? How would visitors connect to an experience that is primarily olfactory in nature? How would visitors know what to do or how to engage?‖9 On a logistically level, figuring how to present the scents and the objects and trying to maintain the integrity of the smells and organic material is highly problematic. In conclusion, I hope I have given some sense about the endless possibilities in researching smell as intangible heritage. I think that our choice to study Eminonu specifically made the research even more interesting because it is such a bustling, historically important, layered place and really a good marker of the changes happening in Istanbul. Renovations and changes happen so quickly and so frequently result in a nicer, organized, and sanitized environment for tourists that areas lose their identity. We hope the by studying somewhattangible, and somewhat-intangible smellscapes, we can help document and preserve a fascinating aspect of Istanbul‘s urban history and present landscape.
9
Jamie Glavic, "Please Sniff the Exhibition: Olfactory Art," http://museumminute.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/please-sniff-the-exhibition-olfactory-art/.