Commensality and Poisoning
Maurice Bloch
Abstract
In all societies, sharing food is a way of establishing closeness, while, conversely, the refusal to share is one of the clearest marks of distance and enmity. These points have been repeatedly made by both anthropologists and psychologists. Commensality, the action of eating together, is thus one of the most powerful operators of the social process. Commensality evokes a similar dialectical process of temporal unification and diversification. The concepts of kinship and commensality act together and are often believed to imply one another. The source of discomfort in commensality is the fear of poisoning. The Zafimaniry are as obsessed by the theme of poisoning as they are by the theme of domestic oneness. The fear of poisoning is always present when strangers are treated as close kin, and it is particularly present at feasts when large groups of people suddenly become ‘one house’ eating from one hearth.