The materiality of Intangible Cultural Heritage: food and social encounters.

Following the patrimonialization process of the Mediterranean diet, some gastronomies found themselves involved within a common framework of food traditions. Some regional practices, indicated as representative of national food cultures, were chosen to illustrate a shared heritage that historically took a shape around the Mediterranean sea. This heritage, still concretely performed, needed to be stated and preserved against the globalization of food practices. Institutional and political dynamics, occurring on a transnational level, triggered this process, which is nevertheless not detached from the communities involved. Common people played a fundamental role not only in promoting the patrimonialization process itself, but above all in concretely perpetuating some traditions and in spreading them in the contemporary world. In particular, some different cultural groups that found themselves living a common territory and social context thanks to migration, began dialoguing about their own food traditions, starting from some shared elements. As a consequence, some gastronomies interact through people’s practices and define in relation one to the other. This is the case, among others, of Moroccan and Italian cuisine. Throughout a doctoral research conducted within a group of Moroccan women living in the North of Italy, I collected an amount of ethnographic materials showing how social encounters developed through food. The influence of the patrimonialization process on these encounters made people try to find similarities among different traditional practices or to describe some ways of reinterpreting them in reason of the new context. My presentation will focus on these dynamics, thus proving that the Intangible Cultural Heritage is indeed grounded on materiality, that is, in this case, the concrete performance of food practices and their pragmatic effects on relations among humans.