Mobilizing Hospitality

The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World

Sarah Gibson, Jennie Germann Molz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138250154
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317094951
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The concept of 'mobility' has sparked lively academic debate in recent years. Drawing on research from the fields of anthropology, geography, sociology and tourism studies, this volume examines the intersection between mobility and hospitality, highlighting the issues that emerge as we encounter strangers in a mobile world. Through a series of diverse empirical accounts, it focuses on the transnational movement of people in the contexts of migration and tourism and examines how hospitality serves as a way of promoting and policing encounters, questioning how these relations are marked by exclusion as well as inclusion, and by violence as well as by kindness. In addition to exploring the power relations between mobile populations (hosts and guests) and attitudes (hospitality and hostility), the book also examines spaces of hospitality and mobility, such as cities, hotels, clubs, cafes, spas, asylums, restaurants, homes and homepages. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to the political and ethical dimensions of mobile social relations.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Mobilizing and Mooring Hospitality

Jennie Germann Molz and Sarah Gibson

Hospitality is a profoundly evocative concept that reverberates with cultural, political and ethical undertones. It conjures up a jumbled collage of images and senses drawn from ancient mythology, cultural traditions, scriptural references, tourism metaphors, regional stereotypes, national narratives, and government policies. Hospitality reveals its complex nature in a range of places, moments, objects and fantasies, from the material gestures of a warm smile, laden table or cosy bed, to the moral tales of Philemon or the Good Samaritan, to the iconic symbols of an open door or of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the world’s tired, poor, huddled and homeless masses. At the same time, the concept of hospitality embodies its own impossibility, calling to mind images of exclusion, closure and violence: walled borders, gated communities, asylum detention centres, and race riots.

Hospitality is a phenomenon that, even in its failure, evokes the ancient and persistent question: how should we welcome the stranger, the sojourner, the traveller, the other? Where might hospitable encounters occur, and what kinds of spaces does hospitality produce? Who is able to perform the welcoming host, and who can be admitted as a guest? And in extending hospitality to the other, how should we define our individual, communal, or national self? It is toward these questions that the contributors to this book direct their investigations of a variety of phenomena, practices, places, and histories of intersecting hospitalities and mobilities. By invoking the concept of hospitality, the chapters presented here aim to reflect critically upon the ethical implications, including the limits and the possibilities, of social relations between people in an increasingly mobile and globalized world.

As individuals and groups of people now travel across the world at ever-escalating distances, scales, and speeds, the contemporary global condition is perhaps best understood through metaphors of scapes, flux, flow, mobility and liquidity (Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1996; Bauman, 2000; Urry, 2000). Social relations are increasingly produced through mobile networks of environmental, cultural, social and economic interdependencies that transcend territorially bounded societies or nation-states (Urry, 2000; Hannam, Sheller and Urry, 2006). People and places across the globe are now bound together through complex and fluid connections that emerge around the transnational flows of commodities and capital, images and information, ethnicity and culture, crime, disease, waste and pollution. And, of course, people. New patterns of migration, diaspora, and transnational labour, along with the exponential growth of business travel and global tourism, now account for unprecedented levels of international mobility.

Even individuals who are not physically on the move may find themselves imaginatively or virtually mobilized, especially as the Internet and new mobile communication technologies bring geographically dispersed social networks together in new ways (Bauman, 1998; Tomlinson, 1999; Morley, 2000; Urry, 2000). At the same time, neighbourhoods, communities and nations are ‘internally globalized’ and ‘cosmopolitanized’ by complex global circulations of commodities and cultures that accompany the flows of tourism and migration (Massey, 1994; Beck, 2000). For those who travel as well as for those who ostensibly stay home, social life is increasingly comprised of ‘strange encounters’ (Ahmed, 2000). These new intersections and proximities bring the provocative dilemma of hospitality – how do we welcome the stranger? – urgently back to centre stage, reframing it against the contemporary concerns of a mobile world.

The plethora of different journeys in today’s mobile world has thus led to a diversity of hospitalities. By examining both literal and metaphorical examples of hospitality, this book introduces questions of context, historicity, temporality, space, mobility, and social relations in order to complicate the meaning of hospitality. The concept of hospitality has been applied in several disciplinary settings and across a wide range of phenomena. Hospitality has long been a focus of anthropological enquiry, with ethnographic accounts framing hospitality as a way of negotiating kinship, friendship and hostility (Selwyn, 2000). More recently, the metaphors and paradigms of hospitality have emerged in other fields as well, from historical accounts of the shifting social and cultural meanings of hospitality (Heal, 1990; Browner, 2003), to commercial forms of hospitality, such as those provided by the travel and tourism industry (Smith, 1989; Lashley and Morrison, 2000; Lynch, 2005; Lashley, Lynch and Morrison, 2007), to less explicit forms of hospitality extended by the nation to migrants, refugees or asylum seekers (Ahmed, 2000; Rosello, 2001; Pugliese, 2002; Schlunke, 2002; Gibson, 2003, 2006; Yegenoglu, 2003; Chan, 2005; Metselaar, 2005; Savic, 2005; Kelly, 2006; Worth, 2006). Along these lines, critical accounts of hospitality in the context of business, tourism and migration have also sought to highlight the contingent notion of hostility within hospitality (Gibson, 2003). The concept of hospitality, especially in its Kantian articulation, has been revived to address human rights and cosmopolitical formulations of a universal law of hospitality (Derrida, 1999, 2000: 2001b; Honig, 1999; Dikeç, 2002; Venn, 2002; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002; Amin, 2004; Benhabib, 2004, 2006), and emerging forms of online social relations and cybernetic encounters have been examined in terms of technological forms of hospitality and belonging online (Aristarkhova, 1999, 2000). Clearly, the concept of hospitality poses practical and theoretical questions that span disciplinary boundaries.

A key aim of this collection of essays is to enact a form of ‘intellectual hospitality’ (Kaufman, 2001; Bennett, 2003) by considering how the deployment of the concept of hospitality in one disciplinary context may provide insights in another. As Friese argues ‘what is at stake is not only the thinking of hospitality, but thinking as hospitality’ (2004, 74; and see Still, 2004). In the able hands of various scholars, the cultural, commercial, philosophical, political, ethical and social dimensions of hospitality have been subjected to rigorous debate. Yet, perhaps because of its wide appeal across disciplines, the concept of hospitality has eluded any attempt to delineate it as a unified theoretical paradigm or ontological framework. Nor is that our intention here. However, we do aim to coordinate some of these interdisciplinary approaches to hospitality through the perspective of mobility.

Hospitality is not just a metaphor for reflecting on encounters with the stranger (Rosello, 2001), but serves more broadly as a central concept for the emergent paradigm of ‘mobilities’ (Urry, 2000). By focusing on the complex intersection between hospitality and mobility, we hope to open up a space for imagining humane and ethical answers to the pressing question of how to welcome the stranger in today’s mobile world. Hospitality is a structure that regulates, negotiates, and celebrates the social relations between inside and outside, home and away, private and public, self and other (Still, 2006: 704). We seek to engage critically with the way such social relations are structured through literal or metaphorical gestures of hospitality that transgress and reiterate boundaries, that fix and mobilize identities, and that negotiate the distinction between the self and the other. Thus, this book is about the ‘politics of mobility’ (Cresswell, 2001) and the ‘ethics of hospitality’ (Derrida, 1999).

Implicit in most definitions of hospitality are the movements of tourists and visitors (those mobile others who come and go) as well as the movements of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (those mobile others who come and stay). Although mobility underpins any discussion of hospitality, none of the erstwhile contributions on hospitality have explicitly brought a mobilities focus to bear on hospitality, nor has the emerging scholarship on mobilities studies included a sustained focus on the political, philosophical and ethical aspects of hospitality. The notion of hospitality, as Hent de Vries (2001) argues, has ‘immense relevance [...] for the most urgent questions dominating contemporary political debates’ on immigration, globalization, multiculturalism, and citizenship (178). In this book, we want to make explicit what is often implicit about hospitality – its predication on mobility – and to highlight the fluidity of the practices and categories of hospitality. In order to do this, the book inserts itself at some busy intersections: between politics and ethics, between tourism and migration, between travelling and dwelling, and between mobility and immobility.

The Politics of Mobility and the Ethics of Hospitality

To be sure, the question of hospitality is not new; indeed, it is one of human civilization’s most ancient themes. Nor is the global movement of people in itself a new phenomenon. For centuries, the movements of traders, travellers, pilgrims, tourists, migrants, explorers, nomads, colonialists and warriors have drawn individuals, communities and nations into contact along varying degrees of friendship and violence. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the question of how the social relations that occur in these ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1992) should be politically or ethically negotiated.

In recent articulations of these debates, Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1996 [1975]) has been of particular importance in teasing out the complex civic and moral implications entwined in questions of mobility, citizenship and human rights. In this slim but influential treatise, Kant observes that: ‘by virtue of the right of possession in common of the earth’s surface on which, as a sphere, [humans] cannot disperse infinitely but must finally put up with being near one another’ (1996 [1795], 329). In other words, because humans inhabit a geographically limited planet, it is our natural destiny to come into contact with one another. For Kant, this ‘natural law’ of shared residence on the earth’s surface assumes a ‘cosmopolitan right’ to travel and encounter each other under various auspices. This right that is conditioned by the law of ‘universal hospitality’, which ensures the rights and duties associated with the movement of foreigners around the world: the right to travel and be received in other lands without hostility; and a duty to not use one’s travels as a means of exploitation or oppression (see Waldron, 2006: 90). Written more than 200 years ago, Kant’s reflections on global civil society sought to institutionalize a special relationship between mobility and hospitality as the underlying tenet of cosmopolitan interaction between people and nations. We maintain that this intersection between mobility and hospitality is just as relevant today, if not more so, in framing the political and ethical parameters of social interaction, moral duties and state obligations in a world of strange encounters. And we are not alone. Scholars across disciplines have revived Kant’s notions of universal hospitality and cosmopolitan right to address contemporary concerns, especially around issues of migration, asylum and citizenship (see Nussbaum, 1994; Derrida, 1999; Bauman, 2002; Dikeç, 2002; Benhabib, 2006; Waldron, 2006). While the current debates owe much to Kant’s meditations on hospitality, many scholars are critical of the juridical conditions and necessary limitations that Kant imposes on the concept of hospitality. One of the more powerful critiques has been offered by Jacques Derrida in his various writings on cosmopolitanism and hospitality.

Because several of the chapters in this collection engage directly with Derrida’s work on hospitality, we want to take a moment here to outline Derrida’s critique of Kant’s universal hospitality and to reflect on Derrida’s contribution to our understanding of hospitality as a framework for thinking about the ethics of social relations in a mobile world. Derrida explains that because Kant’s notion of hospitality relies on conditions of reciprocity, duties and obligations between people and nation-states it delimits rather than opens up borders and possibilities. Derrida admonishes that Kant’s hospitality is ‘only juridical and political: it grants only the right of temporary sojourn and not the right of residence; it concerns only the citizens of States’ (Derrida, 1999: 87).

In contrast, Derrida draws a distinction ‘between an ethics of hospitality (an ethics as hospitality) and a law or a politics of hospitality’ (Derrida, 1999: 19), seeing Kant’s formulation of hospitality as a politics of conditional hospitality as opposed to an ethics of infinite, unconditional and absolute hospitality (Gibson, 2003). The laws of hospitality place a series of conditions upon the welcoming of others, but the law of hospitality – hospitality as an ethics – ‘tells us or invites us, or gives us the order or injunction to welcome anyone, any other one, without checking at the border’ (Derrida and Düttmann, 1997: 8).

What Derrida encourages us to think about is a hospitality that is infinite, absolute and completely open – a welcoming of the other and regardless of who that other is, regardless of the potential dangers and risks involved. An ethics of hospitality entails opening one’s borders or doors to anyone, acting beyond our own self-interest. It is not an easy thing to imagine, and indeed Derrida is fully aware of this difficulty. As Gibson observes:

Absolute hospitality is impossible as it undermines the very condition of a nation or state, which is constituted through the erection of frontiers and borders. Absolute hospitality requires the “generosity” of the state even as the ethical notion of absolute hospitality goes beyond any frontier or border of the state (2003: 374–375).

Absolute hospitality is impossible for the nation-state, and equally aporetic in the case of interpersonal exchanges of hospitality, for in welcoming the foreigner unconditionally, the host must relinquish the mastery of his or her home which is the condition of being able to offer hospitality in the first place. In other words, absolute hospitality requires us to go beyond, even beyond the very conditions that enable a state or a person to offer hospitality at all.

Derrida is concerned with the difficulty in thinking through these two supplementary meanings of hospitality as an ethics and as a politics.

If the two meanings of hospitality remain mutually irreducible, it is always in the name of pure and hyberbolic hospitality that it is necessary, in order to render it as effective as possible, to invent the best arrangements [dispositions], the least bad conditions, the most just legislation. This is necessary to avoid the perverse effects of an unlimited hospitality whose risks I tried to define. This is the double law of hospitality: to calculate the risks, yes, but without closing the door on the incalculable, that is, on the future and the foreigner (Derrida and Düttmann, 2005: 6).

His concern is not to reconcile the politics of hospitality with an ethics of hospitality, but rather to extend a provocative challenge that speaks to the politics of self-other relations and draws out a model for living with difference.

As critics working especially in the area of migration and multiculturalism remind us, our official and informal policies toward welcoming the other for the most part fall far short of Derrida’s ideal of absolute hospitality (see Gibson in this volume). While we might find in political and popular rhetoric gestures toward multiculturalist tolerance and metaphors of generous hospitality surrounding the reception of migrants, these discourses often serve to reiterate a specific power relation between the self and the other. As Yegenoglu (2003) notes, ‘far from laying the grounds for an interruption of sovereign identity of the self, multiculturalist respect and tolerance implies the conditional welcoming of the guest within the prescribed limits of the law and hence implies a reassertion of mastery over the national space’ (16). In other words, hospitality tends to reassert the identity and belonging-ness of the host against the movement, shifting, unstable, un-belonging-ness of the guest. But in Derrida’s deconstruction of hospitality, the binary opposition between host and guest unravels:

The hôte who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received hôte (the guest), the welcoming hôte who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hôte received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives it from his own home – which, in the end, does not belong to him. The hôte as h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Mobilizing and Mooring Hospitality
• 2 Moments of Hospitality
• 3 Hospitality and Migrant Memory in Maxwell Street, Chicago
• 4 Cosmopolitans on the Couch: Mobile Hospitality and the Internet
• 5 Sensing and Performing Hospitalities and Socialities of Tourist Places: Eating and Drinking Out in Harrogate and Whitehaven
• 6 Hospitality, Kinesthesis and Health: Swedish Spas and the Market for Well-Being
• 7 Resident Hosts and Mobile Strangers: Temporary Exchanges within the Topography of the Commercial Home
• 8 Hospitality in Flames: Queer Immigrants and Melancholic Be/longing
• 9 ‘Abusing Our Hospitality’: Inhospitableness and the Politics of Deterrence
• 10 Hospitality and the Limitations of the National
• 11 Figures of Oriental Hospitality: Nomads and Sybarites
• Index