Remembrances of scents past

WHAT would life be like if we described the odors around us in a dichotomy: "mabango" (good smelling) and "mabaho" (bad smelling)? Simpler, yes, but oh so much more dull.

So in Tagalog we've come up with many more olfactory terms: "mabantot," "mapanghi," "masangsang," "malansa," "mahalimuyak" and many more adjectives. I'm not going to even attempt to translate those into English, inviting my foreign readers to ask Filipinos to describe the fine nuances around each term. Limiting ourselves to the "ma-" Tagalog smelly adjectives alone, we could easily generate more than 20. If we use "amoy" as a suffix, for example, "amoy-baby" (smells like a baby), the possibilities expand to infinity.

We tend to sniff and smell everything, from the food we pick up in the canteen to people around us. Having done that, we then resort to our linguistic arsenal to pass judgment on the smells. Certainly, we're not the only smell-oriented society in the world, but it's fascinating to look at how Filipinos deal with smells.

Social smelling

Smells divide and distinguish us from others. The upper classes use odors to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses (note the English use of that term, which comes close to being smell-oriented) as women do of men (and, not as rarely as you think, men of women). Filipinos are notorious, too, for using smells to put down other ethnicities. My students have mentioned, for example, "amoy Kano," "amoy Arabo," even "amoy Intsik." When I perk up and ask, in mock indignation, what amoy Intsik is, they beg off, saying it's difficult to describe. You know it's "amoy Intsik" when you smell it, I am assured, but I have not been able to decipher the term, at least not by sniffing myself.

Unfortunately, for all our self-consciousness around smells, we don't usually know what we smell like, except when we're truly exhilaratingly ... or abysmal. Smells are eminently social, becoming meaningful only when at least two people are involved. I said earlier that smells divide, but they bring people together, too.

Like the Americans, Filipinos practically shower in colognes and perfumes. For lower-income groups, heavily scented soaps are preferred since they substitute for the more expensive scents. The exaggerated smells seem to work as mating calls; several of my male friends claim they've been approached by women who ask, "Is that Paco Rabanne you're using?"

Now if you successfully snare someone with that olfactory pickup line, you might find yourself describing him later to friends with the superlative, oh he is so "mabangong mabango." I'm not sure it works out as appropriately in English, to describe the love of our life as "smelling so good."

Evocative smells

Let me repeat here that we're not the only smell-oriented culture. In fact, I'd say that all humans attach importance to smells, although the degree of cultural expression varies. If I can shift to biology here, across millions of years we gradually lost our sense of smell relative to many animals. Look at dogs: they use smells to locate food and friends, to mark territory (male urination), to find or attract a mate. With humans, as we developed our complex brains, the sense of smell became less prominent in our lives, giving way to sight and hearing.

Nevertheless, we would have gone extinct if we had completely lost our olfactory sense. Smells allow us to detect danger (I have no doubts that in our ancient hunting gathering past, our ancestors could smell the prey, as well as smell enemies from afar). Today in the 21st century, we still use our sense of smell for more mundane activities, like checking the food if it's spoiled.

The title of my column today takes off from French novelist Marcel Proust's "The Remembrances of Things Past." Smells are powerful in evoking memories, and in a very specific way. The smell of spoiled mussels for example reminds us of the explosive diarrhea we had when we ate something similar 20 or 30 years ago, warning us, "Don't eat."

It wasn't surprising that the 2004 Nobel Prize for medicine went to Richard Axel and Linda Buck for their research on the sense of smell. This is not the place to go into details but briefly, the two researchers discovered the gene pool containing blueprints for sensors in the nose. They were able to unravel the way we discriminate smells, the average individual able to recognize up to 10,000 separate odors.

Culture and smells

As an anthropologist, I'm fascinated by the way biology binds us together across cultures, so that certain smells are almost universally attractive or universally repugnant. At the same time, there's a whole multitude of smells that elicit different reactions in different cultures. Generally, new or unfamiliar smells seem to set off defense reactions. Before the cultivation of Mediterranean herbs became popular here, I took sprigs of rosemary to a class at the University of the Philippines and passed it around. Most of my students at that time reacted negatively, "Ugh, mabaho." These days, with the fad around aromatherapy and herbs, more Filipinos react positively.

Generally, Filipinos prefer strong scents in colognes and perfumes and in air fresheners. Which can be a problem for people like myself, who prefer more nuanced scents. I find air fresheners an assault on the sense of smell, especially the ones in cars, which I find too acrid, "amoy ihi" (smelling of urine). There really ought to be a law requiring public establishments to ask the permission of clients before they spew out noxious fumes, which are now known to be serious enough to cause migraines in people who are extra sensitive to smells.

My point is that there are cultural differences in the way we smell, and describe those smells. English is relatively poor in olfactory terms, using more similes ("You smell like..."). Despite this relative linguistic poverty, the power of scents still wafts through English. I never forgot an article in the International Herald Tribune describing the Paris Metro (subway) at the end of the day as "smelling of day-old sweat." The phrase has returned to haunt me many times late in the afternoon, at the most unguarded moments, when I'm on Manila's Light Rail Transit or in the lobby of Palma Hall at the University of the Philippines. Mind you, it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant, this day-old sweat smell, but it does evoke, for me, memories of good times with friends, of my own student days.

Maybe I'm being too ethnocentric in saying English is linguistically poor when it comes to odors. Whatever the language, a good storyteller, a good writer, should be able to draw on whatever's available to capture, even if only weakly, the scintillating, the sensuous, the sensual in our scents.