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| Restaurant Oliviera, Nice. Photo by Mong789. |
In his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1948, English version 1969) Claude Lévi-Strauss described the then commonplace phenomenon of solitary diners in a Provençal lunch place sitting at adjacent tables, or sharing a table for two. Each has a little pichet of red wine and a glass at his place setting, but instead of pouring himself a glass ("himself" because it's hardly going to be a woman eating alone, in southern France in the 1940s), he pours one for the stranger, who pours one for him in turn. Because society, as Lévi-Strauss learned from his great teacher Marcel Mauss, is made up of acts of motivated and unmotivated exchange, this economically meaningless gesture creates a sociality on the spot that doesn't have to go anywhere, a moment of human community.
I was reminded of this famous moment in the history of structural anthropology by a tweet that showed up today: [jump]
