Ricerc@Sapienza

The starting point of the paper is that social interaction is anchored in the world of practical logic (Bourdieu 2003). On this base, authors aim to demonstrate that love, before being an interpretative category, is a “practical knowledge” that can be observed in daily life of social actors. Two case studies support the analysis. The first case study concerns the school of arts and crafts of Santa Maria de Catamarca in Argentina which, through a creative revisitation of calchaquì culture in training and in handicraft production, became a flywheel for new daily relationship models between genders and cultures. The second case study concerns the specific phenomenon of suspended goods, born in Naples with the practice of leaving a paid coffee at the bar for a person in need. The phenomenon spread becoming global on the web and assuming different shapes: suspended spending, suspended book, suspended paid permits at work, etc. Both cases show that love is a practical action that can be addressed to unknown people, even to ungrateful persons, and can be generative of communities.