Stratégies identitaires en repas d’affaires ou le principe de la bonne volonté interculturelle

Abstract

During a meal, guests are joined around dishes and games of communication. The objectives to be reached in a business meal rest on the quality of relationships which individuals are able to establish during the meal in order to achieve the business itself. To establish such relationships, either they ignore cultural differences that characterize them, or they exploit them in a positive way. Through the study of meal scenes extracted from French and foreign movies, and by making interviews with actors of social life in France, the business meal has been observed in an anthropological perspective. This observation of business meal permits to analyze intercultural communication in order to mark the uses that individuals in business meal make from their cultural universe to reach their objectives. Indeed, in an atmosphere of tension due the ambivalence between social mise-en-scène and the animality of the being and between the necessity to be oneself and another at the same time, guests play with their multiple identities, but also with their personalities and with the randomness of all communication situations.