"Chez Said" à Turin, un exotisme de proximité

Since the nineties the quarter of Porta Palazzo in Turin undergoes a process of gentrification. Starting from two observations the author connects this urban process with some trade exchanges between a Berber shopkeeper of Moroccan nationality and his young Italian customers. He studies trade relations built up on misunderstandings. Some Italian customers « buy » products that, beyond their materiality, represent in their eyes the Maroccan culture or they refuse the transaction proposed to them on account of their own cultural and political values, namely their ecological principles against ivory trade. An ethnographic study of these « failures » helps better understand the trade space as a place where social relations are built up by actors with different trajectories who are brought together as a result of urban mutations.