Community Building Practices

Abstract

This empirical chapter focuses on community building practices that were deployed during the dinners at this particular restaurant. There appeared to be a complex range of practices, organized and unorganized, intended and unintended, foreseen and unforeseen, that gave shape to the construction and constitutive boundaries of the restaurant community and its several subcommunities. By distinguishing three types of practices, and drawing on theories regarding rituals, ceremonies, and social solidarity, this chapter shows to what extent and how community building practices evoke and reinforce modes of collective thinking, feeling, and acting and thereby create (immaterial) boundaries to outsiders.