real. With "Aroma" Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott invite us to follow the scent of cultures present and past and to discover a universe criss-crossed by the scent trails of the people, animals and plants that inhabit it. them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity by offering the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odors in Western history--from antiquity to the present--and in a wide variety of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odor of sanctity" to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity.