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Political effluvia. Smells, revelations, and the politicization of daily experience in
Naples, Italy
Marco Armiero, KTH of Stockholm
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa, Lund University
1. A sense of smell
No matter how much one tries to seal windows and doors, or to close one’s eyes and ears, some things
always find their way even into the most occluded lives. Naples, Italy, is the kind of city which does
not leave you alone; sounds, perfumes, colors, and tastes stitch together the urban fabric as much as
its architecture. Although always present in the city, garbage has become a cumbersome problem,
especially since the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the streets flooded by garbage and people
protesting, it is an issue that is hard to ignore. The stench of waste and the cries of people have even
reached the academic world, literally entering through our office windows and awakening our senses.
Solicited by this call from the world outside the university’s walls, we have attempted to make sensing
a fundamental tool in our research. In this contribution, we present research methods that account for
the relevance of senses for the politicization of people involved in the socio-environmental conflicts
over waste mismanagement and illegal dumping in Naples and its surroundings. In the following
pages, we first discuss the challenges of integrating sensorial experiences, and smells in particular, in
both academic research and activists’ practices – and sometimes at the crossroad of the two. We then
delve into the specific methodologies we have devised in our research: (i) walking interviews
concerned with sensations, (ii) oral sensorial histories, and (iii)“toxic tours.”
Those who have visited a dump or passed through the so-called Land of Fires
1
know that it is an
experience involving the whole body, where smells penetrate into the viscera, taking control of one's
reactions, and impregnating clothes, hairs, and skin. In Naples, the smell of waste has come to occupy
the mind, becoming a daily obsession, which changes everything one sees and consumes. As scholars,
we are not trained to follow our senses, even less our emotions. Actually, for many of us the golden
rule is "detachment,” the further the distance between researcher and researched, the better will be
the result. Some academics, maybe of the older generation, may still hear their supervisors list the
dreadful consequences of becoming too involved with their object of study. Luckily enough, students
do not always follow their supervisors' advice. Clearly, for those who identify as radical scholars, as
we do, things are different; radical scholars take stances, and propose engagement instead of
detachment. After all, it is not difficult to find inspiration and comfort in prestigious scholars who
have followed that path, such as E.P. Thompson, E. Hobsbwam, H. Zinn, and D. Harvey. Today there
might even be a return of the political. However, we think that the challenge of the senses goes beyond
a political approach to research. The senses involve the body and its relationships with the
surroundings and not only the positionality of the researcher within the geographies of political
allegiances and social hierarchies.
1
The term refers to the area between the northern province of Naples and the southern province of Caserta, utilized
by a network of criminal organizations and business owners as an open-air dump where hazardous and nonhazardous
wastes are put on fire. This definition, coined by local activists, has been picked up by all Italian major newspapers in
their reports on the Campania socio-environmental situation (e.g. cfr. La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and Il Mattino
from January to March 2014). The law approved in February 2014 as a government response to the social mobilizations
of Campania people (law n.6/2014), has been labeled by politicians and media the “Land of Fires law”.
Nonetheless, we do see a continuum between a political stance and sensorial research. We argue that
the political is deeply embedded into the sensorial, even within the bodily experience of affected
people. This awareness is already present in the work of Marx, whose insights on the political
potential of situated sensuous experiences have been unearthed and discussed in recent years by
several authors
2
. In particular, Alex Loftus
3
has taken the sensorial engagement of humans with the
socio-ecological relations making up their environments as the point of departure for thinking through
an emancipatory praxis of everyday life. Following urban political ecologists, he contends that the
social relations of production and the unequal distribution of power organize the concrete
manifestations of the appropriation and transformation of the external nature for societal needs. These
processes of metabolic exchange make up the environments where we carry out our lives, and are
experienced and mediated through the senses. Therefore, for Loftus, sensorial engagements shape the
possibility for a politicized response to unjust metabolic relationships. Every time water does not
come out of the tap, waste accumulates in the streets, air becomes unbreathable, food is contaminated,
we are hit with thirst, impaired mobility, bad smell, and dangerous eating; but herein also lies the
possibility for a politicization of the processes that produce specific assemblages of humans and non-
humans. Senses allow for the detection of “metabolic fractures”, and this consciousness becomes a
precondition for rethinking the urbanization of nature and the making of the person in relation to it.
Senses can even detect the penetration of capitalist relations in the body, its subsumption and its
transformation into a commodity and a machine. Capitalism controls the very ecologies of the
subordinate body, its cells, its cure and esthetics. In the face of the capitalist appropriation of the
body, a revolutionary project of emancipation could pass through bodily awareness and sensuous
engagement as the basis for engendering a transformative politics. We argue that the sensorial
experience is part and parcel of the process of politicization of subaltern communities which, as Alf
Gunvald Nilsen and Laurence Cox have stated, provides clues to understand the underlying structures
of injustice beyond the particular features of daily oppression.
4
Especially in environmental justice struggles, the body often becomes the first place of politicization,
or we may say of subjectification; it literally becomes the space where people experience the
oppression of capitalist relations and the opportunity for building resisting communities. This is the
case of indigenous people affected by extractivist capitalism, of workers exposed to industrial
hazards, and of all the subaltern communities whose neighbourhoods become the dump sites for the
wellbeing of elites. The centrality of the body challenges the alleged separation between economy
and ecology, production and health, but it also questions the production and legitimation of
knowledge. What happens to the body is a controversial issue; experts and government agencies claim
to own the body, or at least to know the language to understand it. It is not up to workers or city
dwellers to say if a factory or a neighbourhood is killing them. Our argument is that in challenging
the expropriation of bodily knowledge, the senses play a fundamental role. In place-based struggles,
people can re-activate the body in relationship to the external nature, choosing to listen to its signals.
Unequivocally, the sick body speaks loudly, although not always in an understandable language.
However, in this essay we will not focus on the sick body, but rather on the space where the body
experiences the surroundings. Sometimes, senses have been consciously mobilized in experiments of
countering official monitoring programs, noses and eyes vs. sophisticated technologies, to expose the
2
Foster J. B. (2000). Marx’s ecology: materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
3
Loftus A. (2012). Everyday environmentalism: creating an urban political ecology. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
4
Nilsen A. G., & Cox L. (2013). What would a Marxist theory of social movements look like? In Barker C., Cox L., Krinsky
J., & Nilsen A.G.. Marxism and social movements. Leiden: Brill, 73.
contamination affecting the community. This is, for instance, the case of the Community
Environmental Monitoring in Chennai, India. Here, an NGO has challenged the official truth about
the contamination in the area by implementing a grassroots system of monitoring based on the bodily
experience of affected people. As Shweta Naryan, the coordinator of the program, explains, the so
called bucket brigades have been instrumental in forcing the government and the corporations to
address the air pollution in the industrial district of Tamil Nadu.
5
Before people organized their own
independent monitoring, Naryan said, “even if the air smelled like rotten cabbage or eggs, local
governments in India wouldn’t respond to public protests because protestors were considered liars,
not scientists.”
6
In her book, Noxious New York, Julie Sze has also illustrated how the bucket brigades
have been instrumental in stimulating public intervention in poor neighborhoods quantifying “bad
smell” in air samples.
7
Jason Corburn has similarly described how grassroots organizations in New
York have challenged the assessments of the Environmental Protection Agency, broadening
dramatically the scale of observation in order to include the direct observations and sensorial
perceptions of residents.
8
In the above cases, the sensorial understanding of the environment has been somewhat systematized,
and thereby made accessible for the work of scholars, including environmental historians and political
ecologists. However, in most of the cases the sensorial experience is elusive to research, especially
in its historical dimension. The paucity of sources, together with an ideological repulsion for the
sensorial and emotional way of knowing, has almost impeded any research on the topic. Nonetheless,
some scholars have tried to enter into the "smellscape", as Douglas Porteous has defined it.
9
In 1982
Alain Corbin published what still stays as the basic text for anybody who wants to explore smells in
history.
10
Corbin came to smell from a classical social history background, proving once more the
possible, though rather underdeveloped, connections linking smell to environmental history. Corbin
focused mainly on the perceptions of smells and showed how smell as a field of interest and study
has been progressively dismissed by the increasing authoritarianism of modern science. There was
almost no room for the nose in the modernistic laboratory. But smell did not submit easily to science
for two main reasons: on one hand, smell was too subjective, almost impossible to measure and
catalogue. On the other hand, smell belonged to an idea of the world that kept together internal and
external ecologies, thinking about the body and the environment as being in a continuous exchange.
This was a concept that was difficult for modern scientists to comprehend. For them, smell spoke the
language of effluvia, not that of bacteria or viruses.
The agency of smell as a highway placing in communication the body and the environment is central
in the work done by the few environmental historians who have tackled that topic. Environmental
historians' meager attention to smells has gone hand in hand with the poor understanding of the
connections between bodies' ecologies and external nature. As a matter of fact, the environmental
5
The Bucket Brigades are self-organized teams of residents who monitor air pollution with low-tech tools, including
their own senses. On the bucket brigades see Ottinge G. (2010). "Buckets of Resistance: Standards and the Effectiveness
of Citizen Science," Science, technology & human values, 35 (2), 244-270.
6
Global Community Monitor, India, Chevron and monitoring pollution after toxic disasters, March 25 2013,
http://www.gcmonitor.org/india-chevron-and-monitoring-pollution-after-toxic-disasters/ (accessed on October 21,
2015).
7
Sze J. (2007). Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press,
181.
8
Corburn J. (2005). Street science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambrdige: The MIT Press,
173-199.
9
Porteous J. D. (1985). "Smellscape," Progress in Human Geography 9 (3), 356-378.
10
Corbin A. (1982). Le miasme et la jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Paris: Aubier Montaigne.
historians who have addressed the issue of smells are generally those who have been more attentive
to the metabolic relationships between environments and people. Indeed, also in the empirical case
at the basis of this chapter, the awakening of the nose is linked to a context in which health and
environment blend in the toxic biographies of the affected people.
11
2. Stories of odors
Since the early 1990s, Naples, the capital city of the Campania region in Italy, and its surroundings,
have become the global icon of the urban ecological disaster: an area of 3.800 square km – the
provinces of Naples and Caserta – inhabited by approximately four million people has turned into a
huge trashcan. The synergy between government-sponsored urban waste management project and a
complex network of mafia groups, industrial managers, corrupt white collar and public officials, has
created a system of profiteering from the disposal of waste at the expense of local livelihoods. On the
one hand, the authoritarian governance of the urban waste management for the entire region, framed
by the government as an “emergency”, has become an attractive business for private investors who
enjoy legal derogations and optimal contractual conditions for building waste facilities based on
incinerators, landfills and storage sites. On the other hand, the infamous trafficking, haphazard
dumping, open-air burning and illegal disposal of hazardous byproducts, mostly from industrial
production, has turned every available hole in the region into a sink of toxic scraps. Both processes
have shifted the environmental costs of industrial production and waste disposal onto communities
and local ecologies. This has translated into a toxic environment for the local population, affected
today by threats to health, the reduction of cultivable land and stigmatization. More than 2000
potentially contaminated sites were recorded in 2008 by the Regional Agency for Environmental
Protection, and the complex links between those contaminants and the increasing cancer rates among
the locals have been documented by several scientific studies. The hazards to public health have been
recognized by the central government through the insertion of three wide areas within Campania in
the national record of polluted sites in need of remediation, together with 50 other places all around
Italy (SIN). Nevertheless, cleaning-up works are still minimal and the authoritarian governance of
environmental management and land-use planning still dominates the regional landscape.
12
Naples is a city that is literally on fire; for journalists looking for sensationalism and dark stories,
Naples is the Promised Land. Images work well in the construction of the dark tale of Naples; what
is better than photographs and videos to transmit the sense of an apocalypse? But although extremely
powerful, images are unable to uncover the subterranean paths at play in the Neapolitan garbage
drama. Although continuously evoked in all the analyses, the mafia has stayed invisible in these visual
representations. One can guess its presence in the landscape or make a metonymic connection
between an object and the entire criminal organization, but it is not self-evident. The mafia is part of
an underworld that can become visible only through more complex narratives; undoubtedly, Roberto
Saviano’s Gomorra contributed dramatically to expose that reality to a wider public. The visual is
also almost blind towards the toxic waste buried in many places in the region. By definition, this is
11
Chiang C. Y. (2008). "The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History". The Journal of American History. 95
(2), 405-416; Nash L. (2006). Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley:
University of California Press; Bolton Valenčius C. (2002). The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood
Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books.
12
On the waste crisis in Campania see: D'Alisa G. et al. (2010). “Conflict in Campania: Waste Emergency or Crisis of
Democracy”. Ecological Economics 70 (2), 239-249; Armiero M., & D’Alisa G. (2012). “Rights of Resistance: The Garbage
Struggles for Environmental Justice in Campania, Italy”. Capitalism Nature Socialism 23 (4), 52-68; Armiero M. (2014).
“Garbage Under the Volcano. Fighting for Environmental Justice In Naples, Italy, and Beyond,” in A History of
Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories, eds. by Armiero M. and Sedrez L.. London – New York: Bloomsbury.
part of the underworld, not visible on the surface. In other words, there are things, and even more
processes, which cannot be expressed by the visual. The relationship of local people with waste,
especially with toxic waste, is one of those processes which run under the skin of both land and
humans.
3. Sensitive methodologies
During our fieldwork in Campania, once it became clear that the senses and physical perceptions are
an important motivating factor in some people becoming activists, we begun to devise specific
research methodologies that could account for the sensorial as political, and that could detect within
life trajectories those turning points linked to sensorial experiences of metabolic fractures. The
activists had their own methodologies for understanding the radical environmental changes
happening around and inside them. One of these methods, enacted by several activist groups within
more than fifteen years of social mobilizations in the region, was the mapping of the countryside
surrounding the towns and the cities. Armed with simple technological devices, a GPS and a camera,
activists crisscrossed rural areas, suburbs and brownfield sites documenting the places where waste
was illegally discharged, abandoned, and, in some cases, put on fire. One of the most successful
campaigns of this kind was promoted in 2013 by the Coordination Committee against Toxic Fires
(CCF): in a single day of denunciation, they collected hundreds of photographs and geographical
locations of dumping sites, assembling a map of the state of the countryside and turning it into a
collective complaint to the institutions in charge.
Toxic tours have been another crucial tool employed by activists in order to expose the contamination
affecting their communities.
13
The practice of toxic tours is rather common in environmental justice
struggles; it empowers local people, recognizing their knowledge, and builds connections and
solidarities to support local struggles. It was through a toxic tour in 2007 that activists were able to
shift the public attention from the urban trash in the streets of Naples towards toxic contamination in
the outskirts of the metropolis. It was a truly Copernican revolution in the understanding of the waste
crisis in Campania through which activists revealed both the ecologies and the politics of
contamination in subaltern communities. This revelation occurred not through the usual tools of
scholarly interventions, the written text, but through an experiential exploration of places that appeals
to intellectual, sensorial, and emotional understandings. Our participation in toxic tours has had a
twofold meaning for our research; it has implied the need to open up the canon of knowledge
production, renouncing any pretense of monopoly, as well as it has challenged a positivist approach
to sources. While toxic tours were evidently crucial sources of information for our research, our
participation cannot be reduced to a mere extraction of information. We have been instrumental in
organizing toxic tours, involving international scholars, therefore, our sources were not just out there
waiting to be mined, but we have actually contributed in creating the very sources we wished to use.
13
Phaedra Pezzullo defines toxic tours as “noncommercial expeditions organized and facilitated by people who reside
in areas that are polluted by toxins, places that Bullard (1993) has named “human sacrifice zones”. Residents of these
areas guide outsiders, or tourists, through where they live, work, and play to witness their struggle.” In Pezzullo P.
(2004). Toxic Tours: Communicating the Presence of Chemical Contamination in Communication and Public Participation
in Environmental Decision Making, eds. by Depoe S. P., Delicath J. W., Aepli Elsenbeer M. F. New York: SUNY, 236. A
wonderful experiment merging activism and scholarship is Pulido L., Barraclough L. R. & Cheng W. (2012). A People's
Guide to Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press.
By performing these investigations several times, some of the most engaged activists developed a
special sensitivity and were able to recognize the different kinds of waste, inferring their
hazardousness from the smell. Our method of research to access the experiences in which perception
was intertwined to political motivation and spatial focus, has been to elaborate further the “walking
interview” devised by Evans and Jones.
14
In their pilot project with the walking interview, Evans and
Jones utilized a GPS and a voice recorder to produce geo-referenced descriptions, or spatial
transcripts, of local people’s connections to place during their walks with interviewees that were
familiar with the area. They show how mobile interviews and rigorous design generate more place-
specific data than sedentary interviews and produce “a decidedly spatial and locational discourse of
place, which is structured geographically rather than historically” (p. 858). In five interviews with
Campania’s activists, in which respondents were leading us on a route decided by them, we
complemented the method of walking interview with sensorial data, by recording the detections of,
and the reactions to, specific smells in the course of explorations in the countryside of two towns. In
this way, we could highlight in the landscape zones of relevant sensuous engagement, often not
recorded in official maps of contaminated sites. Andrea, a farmer in the town of Acerra, guided us in
the no man’s lands between old factories and cultivated fields in the middle of the countryside, and
just by following his nose he uncovered a location where waste was habitually burned illegally.
Mimmo, in his walk with us in the outskirts of a small town, Maddaloni, was continuously
superimposing the memories of the past beauty of the land over the current disorder that surrounded
us, offering an insight into the tension felt by the locals between a past of spring waters and woods,
and a present of chemical puddles and unknown materials. For him, the memory of past smells, buried
today under disturbing scents, was a constant encouragement to struggle for the reclamation of “his”
land. The value of this method is not only to offer a spatialized account of people’s relation to place
and sensorial reactions, but it could also act as a base for institutions to localize in the landscape areas
in which to conduct deeper analysis and assessments of environmental monitoring.
While complementing the walking interview with sensorial detections helped us to deepen the
geographical dimension of people’s reactions to perceived environmental threats, an attention to
smells when collecting oral histories, or rather to memories of smells, informed our research to get
insights in the ways experiences of environmental changes were symbolized into shared memories
and acted as political triggers. In collecting oral histories, we gave particular importance to the
relations linking sensuous experiences of specific places to the emotional attachment felt by the
interviewees in different moments of their life. In this way, we were able to reconstruct the links
between physical environmental change (when and how the environment was changing), sensuous
perceptions (the moment in time when bad smells arose), emotional reactions (the shift from
happiness to anger when going to specific places), and the emergence of the political will (when and
why the interviewee decided to “do something”). These oral “sensorial” histories allow for a specific
focus on the space where people and their surroundings meet and are symbolized. Our role has been
to create the stage for the interviewees to produce a narrative of their body’s sensitivity within specific
environments, aiming to uncover the experiential base that feeds the activists’ motivation.
In order to undermine the dichotomy researcher/researched, we have also experimented with a
laboratory of guerrilla narratives in which we have invited a group of women to write their own
biographies of contamination and politicization.
15
Borrowing from the collective of Italian radical
novelists, Wu Ming, we have argued that “stories are axes of war to be unearthed.” In almost all the
14
Evans J. & Jones P. (2011). “The Walking Interview: Methodology, Mobility and Place,” Applied Geography 31, 849-
858.
15
Armiero M. eds. (2015). Teresa e le altre. Storie di donne nella terra dei Fuochi. Milano: Jacabook.
biographies we have collected - several also used in this chapter - the sensorial, bodily experience is
crucial in mobilizing people, transforming victims into political subjects.
Our oral history project is packed with stories of people discovering the mysterious ways through
which waste continuously cross boundaries and spills into personal lives. Lucia, for instance,
recollected for us the episode that transformed her from a "normal housewife", borrowing the
beautiful self-definition of Lois Gibbs,
16
into a pasionaria.
17
Lucia tells that while studying English
in a public education program, a terrible smell erupted in the classroom coming from the nearby
dumps, making it almost impossible to carry on with the class. Probably, the public-sponsored
English program was part of some kind of plan to pursue equal opportunity in education, but the
stench coming from the dump was a reminder that environmental inequalities will always find a way
to reach everybody, maybe entering through the window. However, that odor did not stop Lucia and
her friends from studying; maybe it stopped the English course, but they started studying life cycle
energy, the effects of toxic waste on health, and the recycling and disposal of garbage. In Lucia's
story, the smell performed a function of revelation; symbolically and materially, it broke through the
barriers we always build to protect our lives from the "external". Smell proves that no barrier is thick
enough to keep the flux of toxicity outside our bodies. As Alain Corbin has written, "The nose, as the
vanguard of the sense of taste, warns us against poisonous substances. Even more important, the sense
of smell locates hidden dangers in the atmosphere. Its capacity to test the properties of air is
unmatched".
18
We are tempted to argue that the nose makes visible what stays often invisible. Of course, we do not
mean to say that the piles of garbage are invisible to the people living on the edge of dumps; however,
we believe that smell is an immaterial bridge able to connect the space of normality and that of the
extreme otherness, acting as a political trigger that unsettles everyday life, suggesting the possibility
that waste can actually enter in the human body. In her autobiographical notes, Doriana explains how
the blowing of the wind changed forever the secluded paradise she and her friends believed to have
built for themselves just a few kilometers from downtown Naples.
19
The wind sweeping the beautiful
house Doriana and her friends had bought on the slopes of the Astroni hill, brought the sickening
smell of the Pianura landfill, the oldest dump in the region, active from the 1950s, to her doorsteps.
The smell uncovered the illusion of seclusion and at the same time the radical ignorance of the city
elites; apparently, Doriana and friends did not know that they bought their little corner of paradise in
the neighborhood which had swallowed their garbage for decades. Overwhelmed by the stench of the
landfill, Doriana began her own politicization, which would bring her to become one of the leaders
of the Pianura movement.
20
Sometimes the stench does not stay in the air; it does not stop at the nose
of people. Nunzia recollects the sense of dirtiness soaking her entire body when she used to patrol
the lands around Naples, deeply affected by the illegal disposal of toxics:
16
The interview to Lois Gibbs is available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrzqFPego4A (accessed on
November 1, 2015).
17
Interview in possession of the authors.
18
Corbin A. (1986). The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 7.
19
Sarli D. (2015). “Posillipo Pianura, solo andata,” in Armiero M., Teresa e le altre, 102-103.
20
Pianura is a working class neighborhood in Naples that was the theatre of a strong anti-dump movement between
December 2008 and January 2009. On the Pianura case see the EJOLT Atlas at http://ejolt.cdca.it/conflitto/discarica-di-
pianura (accessed on November 1, 2015).
As I was getting nearer to the fence, my throat was burning more and more, but not
only the throat, also the eyes, the face, I felt pervaded by the stench, it was not
anymore only an olfactory sensation. The smell was becoming more intense, the air
more thick and cloudy, suffocating. It seemed as if I was not only smelling with the
nose and the mouth, but also with my skin which was soaked with that stench, with
those substances. I came back home and jumped in the shower, the smell was
following me everywhere, I was soaked in that stench to the bones. I was scratching
my skin with the sponge, trying to erase that smell which was pervading me, but it
did not go away. I looked devastated, with my face red and eyes swollen with tears
and then again that smell, still with me.
21
In the case of Nunzia, the sickness that penetrated her body seems to confirm the permeability of the
human ecosystem to external agents.
In the so-called Land of fires, odors and images figure in the making of an ecological hell. While the
black smoke of the toxic fires colors the skies, the stench emanating from combustion is a familiar
presence for the inhabitants. Father Maurizio Patriciello, the energetic priest who has become an
environmentalist leader, described the night when the stench transformed his life:
It was deep night. I woke up suddenly trying to breath. A disgusting stench had
broke in through the window. It had invaded the room and stole all the air. Drowned
in that smell, I reached the window (...) but there was no difference between the
outside and the inside. (...) The stench changes your life. It is not Cogito ergo sum.
Rather it is Olfacio ergo cogito. Sniff and get angry.
22
Similarly, a life changing sensuous experience was the one that occurred to Chiara: to prepare food
for her family was not the same anymore after she got involved in her town’s grassroots movement
against illegal waste disposal. When they started mapping the countryside, looking for the dumping
places utilized for the criminal discharging of toxic byproducts, she saw the disorder of plastics,
barrels, sludge and scraps popping up amidst cultivated fields, and she smelled the revolting odor of
chemicals mixed with the fresh scent of leaves and earth. Knowing that many of the vegetables she
could buy in her town came directly from those fields, made her suspicious of the food she was giving
to her children. This fear could have become a source of despair and immobility, but luckily, it gave
her the motivation to better understand the metabolism of contaminants within soil, plants and
organisms, and the determination to fight back those processes turning “her” food into dangerous
source of unknown threats.
23
4. Conclusions
In this essay, we provide three methodological approaches that specifically address sensuous
experiences and that make them an object of analysis for enriching the understanding of the links
between environmental changes and social mobilizations. In the interviews we have thus collected,
smell plays two basic functions. It performs the function of the revelation in hagiography; smell is an
olfactory apparition which asks for conversion almost in a literal sense. In their stories, our informants
explain how the smell changed their lives, pushing them to dedicate energies and time to the cause.
21
Lombardi N. (2015). “Il mio nome è Nunzia,” in Teresa e le altre, 31.
22
Demarco M. and Patriciello M. (2014). Non aspettiamo l'apocalisse. La mia battaglia nella Terra dei fuochi. Milano:
Rizzoli, 51-54.
23
Interview in possession of the authors.
The smell makes the miracle to transform a passive consumer into a rebellious subject. We argue that
the power of stench lays in its "ability" to establish a bodily connection between the toxic landscape
and the potential toxic body. The toxicity is not anymore only in front of the observer, as, for instance,
in the piles of garbage spread everywhere in the landscape, but it enters into the body through the
nose, reaches the viscera making people sick, sticks on the clothes, skins, and hairs. Smell is the
passe-partout which opens the door of the body, revealing that the landscape is never only out there.
Of course, as in every account of dramatic conversions, also this narrative might stress too much the
apparition, the ethereal event which breaks into the normality and changes it forever. Many times it
is not only the smell but a more articulated set of events, relations, books, meetings and much more.
In addition, the stories we have included in this chapter offer a richer explanation of the political
subjectification, which can never be explained only with an olfactory epiphany. Nevertheless, we
claim that the smell is more than a rhetorical tool in the making of a rebellious self-narrative.
Recognizing the centrality of the nose implies a bodily understanding of politics; the space of the
political is not restricted to the mind or the mouth. The nose breaks with the usual way of acting the
political, reminding us that the materiality of the body is not only the terrain for governmentalizing
projects but also the very agent of resistance. The nose also blends the political and the personal
overcoming a masculine practice of politicization which strongly separates feelings and sensations
from political acts. By attending to smells and to other sensorial engagements with environments,
researchers can integrate in their accounts and explanations a fundamental dimension of human
experience often overlooked. We are aware that smells are rather intractable objects of analysis, and
that they can open up complexities that are difficult to fit into a neat research design. However, we
do believe that critical researchers should start taking seriously the ways ordinary people experience
their surroundings and motivate their political activation. Nobody can really do science, or anything
else properly for that matter, if surrounded by sickening smells. So, instead of trying to eliminate or
ignore the smell, would it not be more “scientific” to start taking smell seriously and follow it? Indeed,
as Arundhaty Roy has written, in order to understand history we need to “smell the smells.”
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Roy A. (2009). The god of small things. London: HarperCollins, 52.