The human species that gets up on both feet has begun to need less sense of smell and more sight. The fact that humans started to use their sense of sight to recognize their surroundings did not dull the sense of smell. On the contrary, it can be said that the sense of smell has become the carrier of human's primitive drives: defining, detecting as friendly or hostile. Smell is one consequence of sniffing. The sniffing reflex is part of a process called "olfactory learning", in which a person stores in her/his memory what she/he learned through smell. This memory, which can be called "olfactory memory", triggers the person to match the smells she/he knows before with the facts she/he knows and to act according to the result she/he derives from this match. Thus, olfactory memory becomes the subject of many metaphors such as "smelling like a poor", "smelling like a black", "smelling like a Jew", "smelling like a prostitute". This metaphoric discourse make possible a connection between odoyr and politics.
In this presentation, I will focus olfactory memory issue based on Bong Joon-ho's Parasite movie. In the movie, wealthy Mr. Park compares poor Ki-taek's stink with smell of subway. Subway smells like poor people who use it for transportation (at least in Mr. Park's viewpoint). Poor people has a typical odour but this is not just valid for poor ones. As mentioned above; prostitutes (puta), blacks, jews, immigrants etc. also have typical odours. Historical circumstances where they live in cause that their odours were determined and categorized. They have got learned and remembered odours. In this work, odours of "parasites" of the history will be discussed with inspiration of stink of Ki-taek. Firstly, I will focus on olfactory system which includes biological and physiological truths about odour and smelling and relation between odour and memory. Later, I will argue that odour was a social and class issue. Hereby, I will mention how the memory of smells is used to define and describe an identity.
Keywords: memory, odour, impurity.
