Sensuous, Censorious and Sensorial

The FameWorks were in Saudi Arabia last month, where despite the much-reported social reforms there were very few female drivers to be seen.  (Women face the small matter of obtaining a driving license, and as there are, to date, relatively few female driving instructors and examiners…)   In other areas,  however, things are beginning to look different; there are now women working on hotel front desks, in airport lounges and offices, with pleasant customer-service smiles, unencumbered by the niqab.

Cultures can often present paradoxes.  On the one hand, the Kingdom is a moralistic kind of place; censure of people and their behaviours seems to be constant and to come from all directions, at all levels of society. On the other,  aspects of the experience suggest a rather hedonistic culture. This is, notably, the culture of fragrance par excellence.  You know when you’re in Saudi Arabia by the ubiquitous, and rather pleasant smell of oud.   It’s sweet, woody, intense and everywhere.  And unlike, say,  Japan or Britain, it’s not bad manners to let the world know you’re wearing it.

Inflight magazines in Saudi Arabia are heavy with ads for oud  fragrances; it clearly holds a great deal of dewy promise to the subjects of this arid kingdom.  Ads like this, which a semiotician would no doubt decode as positively filthy, speak, like Baudelaire, of luxe et volupté;  of the frisson of the Moresque, of languid pleasures enjoyed behind delicately carved celosías.  

Oud,  reminiscent of the noble rot (or muffa nobile) that transforms grapes into the finest dessert wines, is the scandalised response of the Aquilaria tree to a fungal infection known as Phialophora parasitica.  In one of nature’s more striking ironies, as the infection proceeds, this dark, aromatic resin is secreted into the heart of the otherwise entirely odourless tree; producing one of the most expensive raw materials in the world. It fetches hundreds of thousands of dollars per kilo.  

Intriguingly, the fragrance of oud is non-gendered, so presumably everyone can play.

We humans have five senses, all with highly developed capacities to receive communication from the culture around; if in the West, we place inordinate emphasis on the aural and visual, the Kingdom reminds us of the communicative power of the olfactory.