Olfactorizing religious education

Abstract

The scientific study of religion has steered toward materiality. Herein, researchers have highlighted the intricate role of the human body and its sensorium for perceiving objects. With this trend, a text‐based approach to religion has become less prominent. However, parallel exploratory efforts have been underreported for religious education except the limited pedagogical emphasis placed on visual aspects of religious objects. Here, an attempt to olfactorize religious education is documented. Olfactorization has been documented both as a learning strategy wherein students are encouraged to form associations between scents (real or mentally imagined) and images/words and as a means of highlighting the olfactory materiality of religious objects. The means approach paired with a “cognitive ethnographic” methodology is expected to help students to reinterpret the existing meanings of object‐centered religious traditions whereas the learning strategy approach is expected to spill over to other (nonreligious) domains of learning.