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Resumo

Over the centuries among many peoples, wind, air, breath, and notions of soul and life‐force have been regarded as intertwined semantically and in their effects on the world. Humans and intangible and invisible non‐human agents are often said to share these elements. Life as breath and wind as spirit, and both as evidence of consciousness, intention or soul, allow persons to abridge what they otherwise view as the separate domains of solid and non‐solid phenomena. They may understand them as transformable one into the other: human becoming spirit and spirit taking on human characteristics and form. The further association of this complex with smell reinforces the cyclical idea of human and non‐human transformation, by presenting it as what we ethnocentrically call a material and spiritual cycle, because smell itself has molecular origin and effect and yet, as regards vision and touch, can be elusive like spirit. The particular case described is of Bantu‐speaking inhabitants of the East African coast, and shows how Muslims and non‐Muslims have common metaphysical assumptions concerning this semantic cluster despite differences of religious belief.

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