It smells like a thousand angels marching

The Salvific Sensorium in Rio de Janeiro's Western Subúrbios

Bibliographic Data

ID2435620
AuthorsLaurie Denyer Willis (0000-0003-2630-9092, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume33
Issue2
Pages324-348
Publication date2018-05-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360
PublisherAmerican Anthropological Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.14506/ca33.2.10
OpenAlexW2805479248
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited42

Based on almost three years of ethnographic research living in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, I consider how the senses comes to matter and how Pentecostalism, margins, smells, and soaps are put to work to construct new kinds of affective space. To do so, I track the way in which a fragrance composed of runoff waste from an international flavor and fragrance company has come to be understood as "pieces of grace," or divinely given fragments of prosperity. I argue that the forms of racial and spatial governance that enable something like repurposed waste to become pieces of grace form part of a larger story of the sensorium of the subúrbios. In contending with Rio's racialized urban landscape and how it is sensed and made sense of, I look to what I call the salvific sensorium, a kind of sensed space and territory that exists by engaging the senses with a divine alterity that reconfigures worth and temporality. It is affectively generative, if fleetingly so, and capacious enough to be open to both optimism and its cruelties

Aesthetics · Alterity · Construct (python library · Epistemology · Ethnography · Political science · Prosperity · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Temporality · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure