Exotism and Fruit of Imagination
This article deals with the durian, a fruit which is particularly popular throughout South-East Asia but whose smell is unequivocally compared by Westerners to this of corpses, putrefaction and so on. As the anthropologist Jacques Dournes observes, it is well established that the durian divides humanity into two. Instead of explaining this opposition through the existence of a « long cultural learning », I replace the-durian-that-divides-humanity-into-two at the core of a complex cultural, historical, social and cognitive set of relationships which makes it happen.