In December of 1835, a few years into his adventures aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin found himself on the coast of New Zealand. Walking one day with a native companion, he came to a Maori hut and witnessed a greeting ritual he described as the “ceremony of pressing noses”:
“They then squatted themselves down and held up their faces; my companion, standing over them, one after another, placed the bridge of the nose at right angles to theirs, and commenced pressing. This lasted rather longer than a cordial shake of the hands with us, and as we vary the force of the grasp of the hand in shaking, so they do in pressing. During the process they uttered comfortable little grunts.”
Darwin was hardly alone in taking an interest in such practices. European travelers of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries often remarked on the peculiar-seeming greeting customs they encountered. Writing a couple decades later in The Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace commented on a similar salutation involving nose-rubbing, dubbing it the “Malay Kiss.” A century earlier, during his tour of northern Sweden, Carl Linnaeus had noted how Laplanders would not kiss but “only put their noses together.”
Darwin records being “amused” by the nose-pressing greeting he observed, which is known in Maori as hongi. Other Europeans seem to have found such practices uncomfortably visceral. Somehow the obvious involvement of smell was too much—too “primitive”—for their sensibilities. Even Darwin, who refrains from overt negative comment on the hongi, could not help but leap to an animal comparison, likening the “little grunts” he observed to those of “two pigs, when rubbing against each other.”
European discomfort notwithstanding, the evidence is clear: the kinds of “nose-forward” greetings noted by Darwin, Wallace, and Linnaeus used to be widespread. They have been observed in the Arctic, Madagascar, New Guinea, Polynesia, and elsewhere. And while they are often described in the subtly sanitized language of “nose-rubbing,” or as a form of “kissing,” many of the more detailed descriptions—including Darwin’s—suggest that mutual sniffing was a key part.
Sometimes such greeting practices prevailed over large regions. In a remarkable recent paper, Antoinette Schapper assembles ethnographic descriptions of “smell-kissing”—as she refers to it—from across Southeast Asia, including from Laos, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the Nicobar Islands. And she documents how this custom left its stamp on the languages of the region: the verb for ‘smell,’ in the sense of sniff, is often the same word as the verb for ‘kiss,’ in the broad sense of a gesture of greeting involving face-to-face contact (or near-contact). She also notes that similar smell-kiss “co-lexification” occurs in parts of South America.
None of this is to suggest that sniff-intensive greetings have been identical everywhere, of course. If we take earlier observers at their word, there is considerable variation—both within and across groups—in how the act is done. Some emphasized rubbing, others head-on pressure. Angles of approach differed, too. According to Gifford (1929), in Tonga, different variants of nose-pressing were used in different contexts:
“There were three forms of uma or fekita: the pressing of nose end to nose end; the pressing of the sides of the noses together; the crossing of noses and pressing together of nostrils. These various methods have no specific names. There were formerly but two correct methods of kissing, namely the first and third; no one but a “country fellow of low birth” would employ the second. The first was employed by relatives and friends, and the third was employed by man and wife or by sweethearts.” (p. 230)
Beyond cases of direct nose-to-nose engagement, ethnographers have also described other conventional greetings in which smell played an overt role. Sometimes these involved one party bringing the nose to another’s cheek or head and inhaling. In several places it was customary to draw another person’s hand up to one’s face and smell it. A common greeting practice in Gambia, reportedly, was for a man to take a woman’s hand and sniff the back of it twice.
Such greetings may make some readers squirm—inwardly at least. As noted earlier, to Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) sensibilities, there seems something untoward in overtly sniffing another human. This is no doubt tied up with a larger, thornier fact: our relationship to the sense of smell is, well, complicated. We think of olfaction as underdeveloped, more part of our animal past than our human present. We seem reluctant to talk about odors; and when we try, we often can’t find the words. But this is not the case everywhere. Thanks to a recent upsurge of work—by Asifa Majid and others—we are beginning to understand the striking diversity in how smells are valued, talked about, and understood across cultures. And we are also beginning to understand that WEIRD attitudes toward smell—like other WEIRD beliefs and biases—are neither natural nor universal. Rather, they are products of a peculiar cultural history.
A porcelain sculpture of hand-kiss (c. 1740’s), by the German sculptor, Johann Joachim Kändler.
Given our relationship with smell, it’s not so surprising that we have banished it from our greeting practices. Except maybe we haven’t. A 2015 study in reported that, after shaking hands with an experimenter, participants were much more likely to sniff their own hands (see a video of such “self-sampling” here). To my knowledge, this is the only study yet to examine surreptitious sniffing in WEIRD greeting behaviors, but it could be common. Do people also take sneaky whiffs during hugs or rounds of la bise? When Europeans used to indulge in a courtly hand-kiss, did they surreptitiously sample the scent? It may be that the centrality of smell in human greetings has been constant—and all that’s changed is our willingness to own up to it.
Notes
1. Darwin’s observations, see here. For Wallace’s, see here. For Linnaeus’s, see here.
2. For the Arctic and Pacific, see Garrick Mallery’s two-part 1891 article on human greetings, which I’ve made available here. For Madagascar, see Sibree (1884, p. 178), which is available here.
3. As Mallery describes it, “the essential action does not seem to be either pressure or rubbing, but of mutual smelling” (1891, p. 486).
4. In a 1907 paper, one scholar suggested that a similar conflation was evident in Ancient India. He remarks: “The Vedic poets have no real word for kiss but employ instead a word meaning ‘sniff’ or ‘smell.’” (p. 121).
5. Roth (1890) relates several examples, including the one from Gambia (see p. 167)
6. Another reason readers may squirm is more meta: by drawing attention to such greeting practices, perhaps we are perpetuating dangerous ideas of indigenous peoples as “primitive,” as closer to their animal nature than Westerners are. It may be even tempting to suppose that European travelers exaggerated their descriptions of such greetings—whether consciously or not—to buttress their notions of the sub-humanity of the other. Embellishment is possible, but the evidence that such practices existed is, I think, overwhelming. Better to confront our own peculiar squeamishness about established cultural practices than it is to pretend they don’t exist.
7. For more discussion of the role of smell in human communication—and our WEIRD attitudes toward it—see a very recent article by Roberts et al. 2020, as well as the larger collection of papers to which it serves as an introduction. For discussion of the historical emergence of our peculiar attitudes toward olfaction—including our misguided scientific attitudes—see Harrington & Rosario (1993) and McGann (2017).