At first, people were disarmed when Stephanie Weismann asked what they had smelled in Lublin, Poland between the World Wars, during the years of the Cold War, and in 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell.
“You’re not used to that, someone asking about your smell experiences,” said Weismann, a cultural scholar from the Department of Eastern European History at the University of Vienna.
To get people in a smelly state of mind, she would prompt them to imagine what smells they encountered from their apartment to school or work, re-living the routes in their heads—down the steps in a stairwell, riding on public transportation, walking along sidewalks and roads. Soon enough, her interview subjects had countless smell memories to offer, and also, the feelings that came along with them.
Using these smell recollections, as well as smells recorded in historical documents, Weismann is analyzing the "smellscape" of one Polish city—an approach called sensory history which interrogates the sensory experiences of the past to gain insight into political, cultural, and social life.
We usually examine the past with just one sense—vision. “We don’t listen to the past. We don’t consider the olfactory context of the past. We don't think about taste. We rarely think about touch," said Mark Smith, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History.
Everyday senses like smell, hearing, taste, and touch are not universal and unchanging throughout the millennia, but morph in different historical, political, and cultural contexts. The way we perceive the world influences what we think, and vice versa. Sensory history is an attempt to understand human life as it was felt and experienced through the body—not just cognitively or through the mind or eyes. Understanding the history of the senses could provide key insights into the past, and the times when people were hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting things.
One reason why we place so much emphasis on seeing when it comes to "looking" at history comes from the overpowering influence of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the invention of the printing press. “All of these things catered to the eye, and denigrated the other senses,” Smith said.
Today, we often still don’t give the other senses their due. A survey from 2011 found that 53 percent of 7,000 16 to 30-year-olds from around the world would rather give up their sense of smell than their Facebook accounts.