Eating together
As a preview of sorts to the publication of the Cahiers européens de l’imaginaire (CNRS Éditions), Michel Maffesoli hosts a discussion with Michaël Dandrieux, Vincenzo Susca and Patrick Tacussel on the complex subject of « eating together. »
As anthropologist Marcel Mauss pointed out, cooking, the preparation of the meal and the meal itself may be considered as a « total social fact. » Besides, beyond and below the physiological need for food, this « fact » encompasses desire, imagination, aesthetics, the elemental forms of any communal living.
Love, death, the regulation of conflicts, conviviality all have a share in this “fact,” making it an excellent laboratory where any society is constituted and comforted.