Food and Living Together
Creolization is the result of the situations of acculturation found in a number of societies formed by colonization and has given rise to some unusual socio-anthropological patterns, both in terms of tangible and intangible forms of production and in ways of living together. In these processes, food plays a major role in the construction and expression of identity. Food creolization refers to the ways in which cultural intersections have occurred in these societies and produced what is known locally as Creole cuisine ; these hybridizations continue even today with the most recent forms of globalization. More broadly, it refers to the identity processes crystallized in food, and how human beings in multicultural societies mark both their commonalities and their differences. In this contribution, we explore these issues in the context of Reunion Island, where creole food and cuisine symbolize the construction of a shared culture while the other cuisines sustain a dynamic of cultural differentiation and links to cultural origins.