Smell as a Marker of Social Boundary: Exploring the Role of Fish ‘Stench’

Abstract

This article engages with questions about smell, specifically ‘fish stench’, to understand social hierarchy amongst Muslims in Kerala. I argue that the discourse on fish ‘stench’ as framed by inland Muslims contributes to the construction and maintenance of hierarchy between themselves and coastal Muslims. I investigate smell on three levels: (1) in relation to Islamic understandings of cleanliness and hygiene; (2) through the distinction between ‘Gulf smell’ and ‘fish stench’; and (3) in contradistinction to sight. I argue that the ‘marginal’ sense of smell is key to the marginality of coastal Muslims vis-à-vis inland Muslims, who develop a perspective in which they are associated with the ‘higher’ sense of sight. This hierarchisation of the senses becomes the ground for a variety of what Johannes Fabian calls the ‘denial of coevalness’, aligning economically mobile inland Muslims with the future and coastal Muslims with the past.