Ethnic boundaries are marked by sound and smell, not only sight

Evidence

The terms “physical,” “phenotypal,” “innate,” and “immutable” suggest a fixed, objectively measurable difference; the notion of “visibility” (which could be complemented by Hannah Arendt’s point that there are “audible” ethnic groups as well as visible ones, and by the fact that the olfactory sense is also often invoked in setting up ethnic boundaries) rests on culturally shaped sensory “perception,” hence not on “objective” factors. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 708

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s ‘audible ethnic groups’ plus smell-based boundary-setting connects to my soundscape reading — sonic markers of group identity are a real, under-explored mechanism of exclusion.
• SEED: An essay on the senses of ethnic boundary-making — accent and body odor as exclusion devices — would pull together soundscape theory and race scholarship.
• STORYSTEM: A narrative built around a character who is ‘inaudible’ or ‘odorless’ to the dominant group’s perception — passing through acoustic and olfactory, not visual, registers.