Olfaction in a hunter-gatherer society: Insights from language and culture

Olfaction in a hunter-gatherer society: Insights from language and culture Ewelina Wnuk (ewelina.wnuk@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Asifa Majid (asifa.majid@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Abstract According to a widely-held view among various scholars, olfaction is inferior to other human senses. It is also believed by many that languages do not have words for describing smells. Data collected among the Maniq, a small population of nomadic foragers in southern Thailand, challenge the above claims and point to a great linguistic and cultural elaboration of odor. This article presents evidence of the importance of olfaction in indigenous rituals and beliefs, as well as in the lexicon. The results demonstrate the richness and complexity of the domain of smell in Maniq society and thereby challenge the universal paucity of olfactory terms and insignificance of olfaction for humans. Keywords: olfaction; language of perception; smell terms; Maniq; Aslian. Introduction For centuries, great thinkers and scientists have underestimated the sense of smell in humans. Olfaction is often singled out as the least useful perceptual sense, whose role in life is negligible. “Of all the senses it is the one which appears to contribute least to the cognitions of the human mind” (Condillac, 1754/1930, p. xxxi). Darwin (1874) deemed it to be “of extremely slight service” (p. 17), while to Kant (1798/2006) it appeared as “the most dispensable” (p. 50) of the senses. It has also been claimed that olfaction is of “little special value across cultures” (Gardner, 1993, p. 61) and that man “has left the world of smells” (Burton, 1976, p. 109). Neuroscientists have expressed the belief that smell is insignificant for humans and that, in fact, it is “extremely rudimentary” (Grinker, 1934, p. 313), vestigial (Pinker, 1997), or as Stanley-Jones (1957) phrased it, the human rhinencephalon is “untenanted” (p. 594). Hand in hand with these ideas came the popularization of the belief that olfactory language is impoverished. Dan Sperber (1974/1975), a co-author of the cognitive approach to communication known as Relevance Theory, wrote: Even though the human sense of smell can distinguish hundreds of thousands of smells and in this regard is comparable to sight or hearing, in none of the world’s languages does there seem to be a classification of smells comparable, for example, to colour classification.… There is no semantic field of smells. (pp. 115–116) According to Henning (1916), “olfactory abstraction is impossible” (p. 66), while Kant (1798/2006) remarks on a margin of his manuscript: “Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense” (p. 51). In spite of the fact that smell is either devalued or ignored in the accounts of many fields of science, there is a growing body of literature which attempts to bring to the fore the importance of smell across cultures (e.g. Classen, Howes, & Synnott, 1994). However, to date there are relatively few studies providing detailed descriptions of olfactory vocabularies in various languages. The current article is intended as a contribution to filling that gap by providing a description of the olfactory lexicon in the language of the Maniq, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers living in southern Thailand. At the same time, it adds to the knowledge on olfaction of the larger linguistic group of Aslian (belonging to the Austroasiatic family), which is a locus of considerable olfactory elaboration in the cultural and linguistic realm (Burenhult & Majid, 2011). The Maniq data challenges the view that olfaction is of little value to humans as well as the idea that olfactory lexica are necessarily impoverished and lacking in abstract terms. This is important evidence, since the generalizations cited earlier are made primarily on the basis of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) communities (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) and we know that even apparently basic processes such as visual perception may vary across populations (Segall, Campbell, & Herskovits, 1966). In order to give as comprehensive account as possible of the complex domain of smell in the Maniq language and culture, the topic was explored with the use of multiple methods: ethnographic observation and interview, linguistic elicitation and experimentation. We begin by providing a cultural background to the role of olfaction in the beliefs and practices of the group. We then go on to discuss Maniq smell terminology and, finally, turn to the analysis of speakers’ similarity judgments of Maniq smell terms with the use of multidimensional scaling. The Maniq and their Language Maniq [maˈniʔ] is spoken by 240-300 people living in scattered groups in the Banthad mountain range of southern Thailand (more specifically, in Trang, Satun and Phatthalung provinces). Maniq people belong to the larger ethnographic cluster of Semang with a traditionally mobile lifestyle and hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. Despite