Authenticating and Demarcating Ethnic Spaces Through Smellscapes: A Case Study of Chengdu Tibetan Quarter

This article focuses on the indexicalities of smells in the linguistic landscape of ethnic spaces. Drawing on olfactory fieldwork in a multi‐ethnic neighborhood in urban China with a significant presence of Tibetan migrants, we identify scents associated with incense, lamps, and bodies that help construct a sense of Tibetan ethnic space along with other semiotic resources. By examining their secular and transcendent meanings, we show how smells are emplaced to demarcate Tibetan versus Han ethnicities, how olfactory expertise is mobilized to verify and contest the authenticity of ethnic commodities, and how the presence and absence of scent become olfactory resources for locating internal differences among urbanized Tibetans in multi‐ethnic spaces. In doing so, this study contributes to the emerging efforts that extend sociolinguistic accounts of indexicality and linguistic landscape to the olfactory domain.