The “Sensory Turn,” Smell, and Sport History

An emerging “sensory turn” in history and heritage studies emphasizes the role of the senses and emotions in understanding the past.1 While sport historians have engaged to some degree with this sensory turn, particularly with emotions, there is little sport history research focusing on sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch (and other senses). This article considers this absence, focusing on smell. My argument, following the line of historian Mark M. Smith and anthropologist David Howes, is that delving into the senses offers more than an opportunity to evoke the past; it also offers possibilities for interpreting the past in new and interesting ways.2The sensory turn is evident in a spate of scholarly work, including publications, conferences, doctoral dissertations, projects, and exhibitions.3 In 2022, for example, the American Historical Review published a forty-eight-page “conversation” titled “Smell, History, and Heritage,” with participants including historians, other scholars, and heritage professionals.4 Among the initiatives discussed are Odeuropa, a “major online interdisciplinary research and innovation project dedicated to excavating the cultural history and heritage of smell in Europe from the 1760s to the 1920s,”5 and the PastScent Group Library, a Zotero database containing links to over eight hundred works on smell and history curated by historian William Tullett.The American Historical Review conversation was published in the AHR History Lab, an initiative to “feature collective projects that seek to reimagine how we approach historical practice in terms of content, form, and method.”6 The voices in that stimulating forum caused me to pause, sniff the air, and consider whether and how sport history has engaged the sensory turn, and with smell in particular. Sport historians have not overlooked the senses completely. Barbara Keys, in her Journal of Sport History “Forum” essay from 2013, “Senses and Emotions in the History of Sport,” notes the broad neglect of the “sensorial and the emotional” and calls for greater “systematic attention to the role of senses and emotions in shaping perceptions of and meanings derived from sport.”7 Historian Matthew Klugman has comprehensively tackled the emotions; Anthony Bateman and John Bale have engaged compellingly with music; and sport and the visual have been subject to much analysis.8Smell sits apart, not ignored by sport historians exactly but overlooked relative to the other senses and emotions. There is some call for evoking the senses as a way of bringing sport “back to life,” exemplified by Dennis Brailsford in his social history of boxing. He writes: “We have to breathe again the all-pervading smells of sweat, embrocation ointments and brandy, the smoke of cigars and pipes, the horse droppings, the mown hay and pollen of the summer fields, the sharp tang of December hail and snow, the stale breath of man and beast, and the lurking awareness of blood and death.”9 Beyond such calls for evoking the past, however, and adjectival use of smell to enrich description, there has been little attention paid to odors of the past. In terms of smell, the sensory turn in sport history can best be characterized as a turning away rather than a turn toward. There are no entries for sport or sport-related terms in Tullett's 800-plus articles on smell and history, for example.Keys, in her JSH Forum essay, evokes the “scent of fresh-cut pine . . . mingled with the odor of tobacco, mud, and sweat” experienced in the arena by spectators at the world heavyweight boxing championship between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921 as a way to emphasize the possible role of the senses in understanding historical meanings.10 Ultimately, however, she downplays the potential of smell, along with taste and touch, because they “leave few traces in the historical record.”11 Mark Bradley, professor of classics, adds to this assessment: “Smells are vapid and elusive and disappear quickly from the historical record.”12 While Bradley's framing of the elusiveness and dissipative nature of smell echoes Keys, his reference to “vapid” suggests that something else may be going on—smell as vacuous, dull, and insipid.What I think Bradley alludes to here is epistemology. Smell is often considered one of the “lower senses” along with taste and touch, while seeing and hearing are considered higher order.13 What does that mean? Smell is seen by some philosophers and historians as “animalistic and irrational.”14 This is culturally centered, however, perhaps truer in English-speaking societies than in some others. Boxing historian Kasia Boddy has argued, referencing the work of early nineteenth-century English philosopher and essayist William Hazlitt: “English empiricism is, in Hazlitt's terms, less concerned with what John Locke called secondary qualities (colour, taste and smell are, Hazlitt maintained, of more interest to the French), than ‘the heavy, hard and tangible’ primary qualities.”15Whether due to this built-in bias of English empiricism or not, there is little doubt that sport historians have privileged the visual and aural over color, taste, and smell. Yet, as the French historian Alain Corbin argues in his foundational work on smells and history, it would be “an overhasty move to exclude the sense of smell from the history of sensory perceptions simply because of the infatuation with the prestige of sight and hearing.”16I agree with Corbin but also recognize epistemological and practical issues. I first became interested in sport and smell many years ago when I was researching the history of swimming at Sydney beaches in the late-nineteenth century. While visiting those sites, I tried mentally to conjure up the beach scenes I was researching. The visuals eluded me, obscured by urban development. Likewise, the sounds—cars, radios, and speaker music—blocked out the whispering winds and squawking seagulls. I thought I could capture something of the smell—the brine and sea air began to evoke the past I was grasping. But, of course, I was deluded. Sydney beaches were open cesspits of offal and sewage in those days, a smell now (largely) absent. And the smell of swimmers’ bodies in a pre-deodorant age, and the wet-wool pong of their swimsuits, is gone.But even if we could replicate the smells of Sydney beaches in, say, 1900, I wouldn't experience them in the same way that locals did at the time. Odors that were commonplace and probably unnoticed would strike me hard, I'm sure, and possibly repel me. This is another problem with smell. Many heritage museums, or living museums, persevere with recreating smells.17 Steaming piles of horse manure, for example, often feature in reconstructed historic villages and farms. But smell is not objective and unchanging, as Smith argues: “Historians who quote a nineteenth-century observer's characterization of immigrant homes as reeking—‘The filth and smell are intolerable’—leave the impression that the description was objectively and universally ‘true.’ What we really need to know is whose nose was doing the smelling, how the definition of ‘smell’ changed over time and according to constituency (did the people living in the ‘filth’ agree?) and how the characterization was used to justify actions by middle class reformers.”18As Smith argues, we need to distinguish between the production and the consumption of the senses.19 Producing and reproducing smells like horse manure might capture popular interest, and it might attract visitors to heritage sites because of the perceived verisimilitude, but this does not tell us how those smells were consumed or experienced in the past. Analyzing consumption, representation, and meaning is an opportunity for historians.Drawing on research on smell as a constitutive factor in historic constructions of race, gender, and class, I'd like to consider possibilities for gleaning new insights into the past through “sniffing out” written references to smells. Keys and Bradley may be correct in observing that smells do not always linger in the historical record, yet, as Smith argues, “sensory history should not give up too quickly on print.”20 But what can printed references to historic smell offer us?One possibility is the political associations of descriptions of historic smells, as Smith alludes to above. Keys reminds us, “Sensory ‘regimes’ are intimately tied to political orders and to the constructs of race, gender, and class.”21 In terms of gender, think of the old saying, “Horses sweat, men perspire, and women glisten,” which offers as many opportunities for historic deconstruction as it does linguistic. Historian Andrew Rotter, referring to the gendering of the senses, notes by way of example the long-held notion that “Men ‘see reason’ while women ‘sniff things out.’”22 Without doubt, much work can be done on gender and smell in sport history.Because my current research focuses on racial issues in sport, I am especially interested in the intersections of smell and race, particularly the ways that smells have been used to “Other.” As Tullett writes, “Suggesting that people who are not ‘us’ stink has a long history.”23 Two examples from my research come to mind. The first is a claim concerning Douglas Nicholls, later Sir Douglas, an Australian rules football player in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s and later governor of South Australia. Nicholls was an Aboriginal man of the Yorta Yorta Nation. In his playing days, the Carlton football club rejected Nicholls's selection to its team purportedly because he smelled.24 His nephew, Robert Nicholls, also recounts that when Nicholls asked to be rubbed down, the Carlton trainers refused: “No, we're not going to rub you down because you stink.” Nicholls's daughter, Aunty Pam Pederson, recalls the effect on her father: “Dad carried that for a long time, hardly spoke about it.”25My second example is from my current research with Jan Richardson on an African Caribbean boxer who was active in Australia in the late-nineteenth century, Edward Rollins. In 1890, one reporter described him in a boxing match: “There was noble birth and rank in every speaking lineament. I could see it—aye, I could smell his rank strongly as the fight wore on.” In the same newspaper article, the reporter claimed that Rollins “emitted . . . Chinese otter of roses”—otter being a wordplay on attar of roses, the fragrant essential oil.26Like you, I smelled a rat. There is no reason to believe that either man smelled any better or worse than other athletes of their time. These instances reflect racism, against Aboriginal people in Australia and against people of African descent. But my reading of the sensory turn forces me to think a little deeper about these incidents. They are not simply racist moments, but examples of how race was historically constituted. Smith explains how this is done. “Through metaphor,” he argues, “smells, tastes, touches, and sounds broke free of their physical space, slipping into the social and cultural realm.”27 “Rank” and “otter of roses,” in my boxer's case, were metaphors that helped construct and reinforce readers’ understandings of black boxers as not only different, but lesser than.Rotter analyzes how “odor was racialized” in British imperial encounters in India and in American engagement in the Philippines.28 Unfamiliar smells were linked to social and racial difference, and inferiority. Historian Andrew Kettler's The Smell of Slavery focuses on “olfactory racism” in the Atlantic slave trade and how smell was an othering tool and helped construct race.29 According to Smith, “the notion that black people had a distinctive odor gained national currency in both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. even though many people who believed the stereotype had virtually no direct contact with African Americans.”30 In Australia, similar notions prevailed against Aboriginal people and Africans, based not on personal encounters or lived experience but cultivated in large part through the press and directed against individuals such as Nicholls and Rollins.Where to from here? Intersections with other senses—or “intersensoriality”—offers possibilities to extend the analysis of smell and race.31 We draw on all our senses to understand the world. In what ways did sight, and hearing, for example, contribute to the construction of race? Of course, we know much about this already—the ways bodies and faces of Black and Indigenous people were described, for example.32 Indeed, my Rollins example also uses visual cues to derogate the boxer. Sounds, specifically accounts of accents and lingo, were also used to “other” and insult Black people, Indigenous people, and others.33 Smell, however, has tended to evade us—we have references such as the ones I've cited here about Nicholls and Rollins, but little analysis.One way to explore references to historical sporting smells and their role in the construction of race, or gender, or class, would be via distant reading of digitized newspaper accounts for references to smell and the ways they are used—the narratives created and buttressed in the sporting press. We could ask: What commonalities and patterns exist? How do descriptions and constructions change over time? Are there differences internationally, across countries? None of these would be easy projects to conduct. Yet as the sensory turn suggests, opportunities await.Of course, the political manipulation of historical smells is only one possible avenue for exploration. Sport is redolent of smells, from the malodorous gym bag and other odors specific to sporting spaces to less repellent liniments, deodorants, and body sprays in contemporary locker rooms. The range of smells and their subjective associations for individuals opens pathways to consider nostalgia, personal experiences, and other memories that have the possibility to generate new insights into sporting pasts, including sporting spaces and places. Here I take my cue from poet and writer Diane Ackerman's classic work on the senses, A Natural History of the Senses, in which she asserts, “Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once.”34 Additionally, the phenomenon that historian Stephanie Weismann refers to as “the continuous global efforts towards both deodorization and fragrantization . . . or aromatization” also points to commercial encroachment into sport, as in broader society, and raises other potential avenues of enquiry.35 The myriad pathways of inquiry presented by the sensory turn offer a range of opportunities and challenges for sport historians. After all, as Weismann argues in the AHR Lab conversation, we are all “nose witnesses.”36