When the Archive Doesn't Breathe

This post is part of a series that examines how colonial knowledge systems in libraries, archives, and museums erase Indigenous, oral, and ecological ways of knowing — and explores how they might be dismantled and reimagined from the perspective of the Global South and the margins. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Memory Without a Nose

Libraries are built for paper. For text. For words on surfaces. And when they stretch, they stretch toward sound and image — podcasts, video, oral history, digitized film. But smell? Scent has no shelf. No metadata field. No preservation protocol. No classification number. Within the architecture of our institutions, it barely registers.

And so, it vanishes.

We speak of preserving knowledge, safeguarding memory, ensuring long-term access to information. But we rarely ask: what kinds of knowledge can we not even perceive? What epistemologies get left outside our collections — not because they're not valuable, but because they're not printable?

There is a bias here. A deep, sensory bias that runs beneath our entire profession. We have built literate, ocular, textual repositories to hold the world. But the world is also aromatic, fermented, breathed, and burned. And we do not know how to hold that.

Cataloging Absence

Take a ritual. A cleansing. A prayer. The leaves are listed. The words transcribed. Maybe a video is archived. But the smell of the resin? The way it coils into the room and settles in the bones? That doesn't get saved. It escapes the system.

This is not an accident. It's a design flaw — and a colonial one.

Western epistemology has long elevated what can be seen, recorded, and stabilized. The archive was born as a visual regime: paper in files, ink on parchment, type on screen. Even the "modern" embrace of sensory knowledge rarely gets beyond audio and image. Smell, touch, taste — they are treated as ephemeral, too subjective, untrustworthy.

In cataloging practices, there are no standard fields for olfactory descriptors. In metadata schemas, there are no tags for scent as knowledge. In preservation labs, there is no plan for aromatic longevity — unless it's the smell of mold, which must be eliminated. Everything that cannot be extracted, named, and stored gets marked as "not information."

We have built our systems to reflect what we already believe counts. Everything else is noise.

The Sanitization of the Library

Librarianship is obsessed with cleanliness — of data, of air, of smell. The ideal reading room is silent, still, climate-controlled. Paper is protected from humidity, bodies from sweat, collections from time. But this impulse toward sterility has epistemic consequences. It conditions us to distrust what is volatile, fugitive, or difficult to standardize.

In many Indigenous and rural knowledge systems, scent is not decorative. It is diagnostic. Ritual. Communicative. The smell of a plant, the fermentation of a drink, the smoke of a ceremony — these are not atmosphere. They are archive.

To erase them is not just to lose a detail. It is to sever the logic that connects knowledge to breath, body, and place. It is to render illegible a whole category of memory practice — and then to pretend it never existed.

Can a Library Learn to Smell?

What would it mean for libraries to reckon with scent?

Not just by hosting exhibits on "aromatic plants" or placing scratch-and-sniff panels on the wall. But by treating smell as epistemic infrastructure. As something that carries memory and meaning in its own right — volatile, yes, but no less real.

Could we catalog scent as presence? Include olfactory notes in field recordings, community archives, food histories, rituals, and ethnographies? Could we document the smell of land after rain, of ancestral remedies, of burned offerings? Not perfectly. Not permanently. But intentionally.

Could a metadata schema evolve to hold a note that says "this plant smelled like sweat"? Could a collection development policy make space for fermented knowledge, for the invisible cloud that once surrounded an object?

Could a library… breathe?

Toward a Sensory Ethics of Memory Work

When we dismiss smell as too unstable to be archived, we are not just making a technical decision. We are continuing a historical one — the same logic that marked Indigenous practices as superstition, that sanitized ceremonial spaces, that replaced the scent of the healer's room with antiseptic glare.

To expand our memory work is not just to include "more voices." It is to include more senses. To acknowledge that some forms of knowledge cannot be fully represented — and that our job is not to force them to fit, but to make space for their difference. To learn to dwell in what escapes us.

Not all archives can be touched. Some can only be inhaled. And when we lose those? When the land no longer smells like itself? When the palosanto wood no longer burns in the ritual? When no one remembers the scent that meant "healing" or "mourning" or "home"?

That, too, is a form of memory loss. And we ought to call it by its name.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "The Archive of Smell," a narrative reflection on the same theme.