Social Studies of Science

This story is about the twentieth-century ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001), and his research on hallucinogenic plants. Ethnobotany can contribute directly to science and technology studies in that the discipline makes cultural ways of knowing its scientific subject. Ethnobotanists must learn about plants through people, and are not able to conceal their interactions with indigenous informants and other ethnobotanists. I focus on an ‘enigma’ that Schultes presented, concerning the peculiar ability of indigenous Amazonians to distinguish between local varieties of vine that he was unable to tell apart, notably those used to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca. The enigma describes a complicated and irresolvable question thrown up at the uneasy intersection between different ways of knowing about the world, and shows how modern scientific travellers might navigate – or fail to navigate – the uncertain passage between them. Together with Schultes’s accounts of his own non-ordinary states of consciousness elicited by ayahuasca, and his writings on the Victorian botanist Richard Spruce, I chart an epistemological gulf between Schultes’s modern scientific cosmology and that of his Amazonian informants. In describing his inability to learn about the ayahuasca varieties from Amazonians, Schultes’s enigma traces the very limits of the ethnobotanical discipline and reveals the fragility of the processes by which scientific naturalists might impose categories such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

This exploratory article considers the accumulations of fat and other materials in London’s sewerage system – known as fatbergs in the UK – in terms of the processes of infrastructuring. In particular, drawing on a range of media, including a major museum exhibition, numerous newspaper and online articles, and a TV documentary, this article analyses how London’s fatbergs have been affectively enacted. The affects identified include: disgust in the composition of the fatberg, pride in the London-ness of the fatbergs, admiration at the ‘flushers’ courage, generic horror at the sewers, shame in the flushing of wet wipes, and anxiety about microbial threats. Such enactments simultaneously perform the fatbergs, the sewerage infrastructure, and the public audiences, through what we can call ‘affective infrastructuring’. This extends the analysis of infrastructuring to encompass the ways in which public audiences are affectively ‘made’. The article also suggests that the various affective enactments of the fatberg cumulatively perform London as spatially uniform and the sewerage system as temporally naturalized. A critical implication of this is an effacement of, on the one hand, class and cultural difference and, on the other, historical specificity.

In the mid-1800s, plantation-produced tea from India came onto the British market. Tea retailers blended this more malty and black tea with the lighter Chinese-grown tea to which consumers had become accustomed. By the turn of the 20th century, blending helped Empire-grown tea supplant Chinese-grown tea on the market. Scholars of tea have shown how British tea companies working in South Asia stoked racialized fears that Chinese tea arrived in Britain in an adulterated state, laden with impurities that included dyes, perfumes and even human sweat. This article describes how concerns about protecting tea leaves from outside adulteration gave way to concerns about the potential digestive threat that lay inside tea leaves themselves. Medical journals linked the increased consumption of Indian teas to a population-wide ‘epidemic’ of indigestion. The most cited culprits in this epidemic were tannins, chemical compounds that were also thought to give black tea its characteristic bitterness and color. The normalization of black tea consumption among the British public was not just a work of marketing or branding but a work of resolving uncertainty about what tannins were at a material, biophysical level. As this uncertainty was resolved scientifically, tea was materialized not as a singular, unified product but as an active chemical assemblage.

This article examines the politics of smell at the edge of perception. In January 2014, the municipal water supply of Charleston, West Virginia was contaminated by an under-characterized chemical, crude MCHM. Even when instrumental measurements no longer detected the chemical, people continued to smell its licorice-like odor. In a space where nothing was certain, smell became the only indicator of potential harm. Officials responded by commissioning state-funded sensory testing of crude MCHM to determine its sensory threshold. Via the critical passage point of sensory science, some instances of embodied attunement were allowed to enter into the evidentiary regimes of perception, while other, similarly trained moments of attunement were excluded from the process. This, I show, produced knowledge about the spilled chemical that maintained the systems that contributed to the spill in the first place. Drawing on new materialist thought, I riff on biology and ‘transduce’ the ephemeral phenomena of smelling crude MCHM into a new medium: Rather than thinking of smell as a volatile molecular material (an odorant), I show that consideration of smell as a manipulable object that one can imagine as having tangible substance and shape offers a way to experiment with disciplinary forms. I suggest an alternate future, where sensory science acts to record sensory labor that produces facts about collective experience that cannot (easily) travel through current systems, a process that is one possible way of beginning to unravel entrenched systems of toxic harm.

This article provides an experience-oriented relational account that goes beyond a human control of the world. Rather than working with the notion of intersubjectivity (commonly evoked in sensory STS, and still conserving the subject/object opposition), the article reports on how the sense of smell affords a rethinking of our relationship with the world. It does so by challenging the assumption of olfactory ineffability as it turns to a place whose inhabitants speak about smell as a part of their everyday affairs: a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics. There, we attend to a multimodal, embodied language that participates in preparing, running and analyzing scientific experiments. While Western languages are short on specialized vocabulary for expressing olfactory qualities and it feels difficult to talk about smell, laboratory events manifest smell language in its enmeshing with the sensory realm and the world. Noticing these ties destabilizes the idea of agential subject, highlighting instead our pre-intentional sensibility, in its connection with the world. A sister article on ‘troubles with the Object’ (Alač, 2020) continues to argue that the notion of intersubjectivity is overly narrow, highlighting our immersion in the world (rather than assuming our dominance of it).

This article takes advantage of the sense of smell’s peculiar spatiality to reflect on how we may render our engagement with the world other than through manipulating well-defined objects. The lived spatiality associated with olfaction is not reducible to the known parameters of ‘distant observation’ and ‘reaching toward’, familiar from the visual and tactile modalities. Instead, olfactory spatiality is one of immersion: Odors ask us to give up our dominance while we continue to be involved. The article attends to this immersive quality of the sense of smell by tracing multimodal, embodied qualities of mundane events in a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics, also considering the spatial organization of laboratory chambers, and how researchers fashion their bodies while they recognize the frailty of their enterprise. To engage these complexities, the article illustrates an exercise in experimenting with re-production, re-enactment and re-experiencing. While the exercise functions as a reflection on how to orient a laboratory study to non-ocular dimensions of science, the article, in parallel, enquires into semiotic articulations of smell experiences. By pointing out how smell language, rather than being ‘mute’, speaks the spatial quality of our olfactory experiences, it concludes the argument against the olfactory ineffability, initiated in the sister essay on ‘troubles with the Subject’.