Alabastron is available.

Approximately 3,300 years ago, a Theban scribe named Ani was buried with an exquisite

copy of the Book of the Dead. In it, the god Anubis serves as his psychopomp and

advocates for Ani before the forty-two divine judges of Ma’at. Anubis urges leniency

for his charge. He does so on the grounds that Ani’s deeds on Earth made him worthy

of the afterlife. Ani’s innate belonging to the Land of Du’at is expressed through his

odor. As Anubis says, ‘When I smell his odor, it is even as the odor of one of you.’ Ani

smells like he belongs.

Olfaction’s importance in our lives is not merely to warn us of fires and spoiled

food. Our sense of smell helps us navigate the world, deciphering home from parts unknown

and family from strangers. Olfaction allows us to traverse the geography of physical

and social space. It steeps us in a cultural architecture of odor, the existence of which

we may not realize unless we achieve distance and perspective. It is like growing up with

smokers and coming home a decade later. The sudden re-enculturation is overwhelming.

You lay awake in your sepia-stained childhood bedroom, wondering how the haze

of cigarette smoke became aromatic white noise to you as a kid, or worse, how it could

have ever been associated with your personal odor.

This volume, The Scent of Identity: Olfaction’s Role in Culture, Community, and the

Formation of Self, explores the olfactory sense of self through research, embodied narratives,

fiction, and poetry. These are complex lived experiences, and no single writing

mode can fully encapsulate them. Instead, we come together in these pages across professional

distinctions to present a multi-perspective approach to sensory discourse.

We are profoundly interested in the alignment of people, sensations, and geography

that form the beautiful and profound states we celebrate in scent culture. We examine

elements of this in the chapters Culture & Heritage and Community-Space-Self.

Yet, we also strive to understand when misalignments occur, when scent becomes taboo.

These misalignments and prohibitions can fester into the olfactive prejudices and exclusions

that also inform our scent cultures. We explore olfactive othering as well as its

defiance, decentering, and reclaiming in the chapters Beyond Aromatic Othering and

Fragrant Codes.

In these pages, you will find academics, artists, perfumers, and community members

all navigating a path not dissimilar to Ani so long ago. They all seek to understand

the smell of belonging.

- Nuri McBride, Alabastron co-Editor

Alabastron is a journal that bridges the gap between academia and the public to explore aromatic history and culture. Our aim is to create diverse and accessible learning environments in which to discuss how olfaction, Scent Culture, and aromatic trades shape the human experience. 

Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have sought to control their sensory environment and express their values aromatically. They have augmented their olfactive habitat and realities for diverse reasons: cultural, religious, sociological, psychological, personal, commercial,  and political, to name a few. Their motivations for doing so emerge from a complex web of personal, communal, and sensorial stimuli that reveal elements of universal human experiences. 

We at Alabastron wish to explore these topics in a way that honors sensorial experiences and embodied knowledge. We believe that collaboration and dialogue among people with different skill sets and backgrounds create a richer tapestry of human experience. We strive to bring a diverse collection of voices together and elevate those rarely given deference when discussing Scent Culture and fragrance. To achieve this, we are guided by the principle of accessible discourse. We must bring the conversation down from the ivory tower and out from behind paywalls that separate it from living communities and embodied experiences. Accessibility, for us, means striving to remove barriers, checking for blind spots, and listening. Finally, while commercial perfumery receives a disproportionate amount of attention in olfactive discourse, it represents a relatively small and recent segment of the diverse ways in which people scent their worlds. Alabastron aims to move the discourse around scent away from commercialisation and into the domain of human cultures.

Guiding principles:

• Intersectional dialogue
• Accessible discourse
• Celebration of the diversity of sensorial experiences
• Knowledge beyond Academia 
• Experience beyond conventional commercial perfumery 
• An excellent read