Contribution short abstract:

“I sank my teeth into its fragrance. Not words, but dreams spilled forth,” I wrote in a poem about the heavenly scent of spring lilacs. Reflecting on that verse, I realized that smells, intertwined with the act of remembering, can evoke a daydream state through their ephemerality and non-verbality.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation invites ethnographers to explore poetic methods for keeping field diaries, particularly regarding research topics that don’t narrate themselves easily. While not dismissing the ancient craft of writing or harboring a priori hostility toward language, the presentation reflects on and values the attempts to undermine the official structures of academic writing to create space for affective ways of knowing, sensing, and attuning to the world. Drawing from ethnographic research on olfactory affect and memory among elderly Turkish and Kurdish migrant women in Berlin, as well as my own olfactory plant diary, this presentation demonstrates how novel perspectives on the social lives of smells can emerge. These perspectives move beyond well-trodden discussions of smell’s role in othering, urban planning, and power structures.

First, I will introduce the olfactory plant diary and outline my intentions in keeping it. Diaries—whether written by a literary figure (Woolf, 2003) or an ethnographer in a drawing format (Taussig, 2011)—are experiential forms where one can loosen intellectual boundaries, allowing unexpected ideas to take root. Along this vein, I will further highlight how the use of smells creates a descriptive atmosphere that represents the almost existential exhaustion felt by participants—a culmination of racism, backbreaking working conditions, and embodied longing. Finally, I will address methodological pursuits that bridge the gap between the diary and the field. Thus, I seek to present the ways to find connective tissues between poetry and sensory methodologies through fragmented narratives of smell stories of migrants.