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Preface
The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of philosophical interest in the topic of
hospitality, from Levinass phenomenological ethics and Serress study of parasitic
relationships, through to Agambens musings on inclusive exclusion and Derridas
invention of the neologism hostipitality. In a related development, political theorists
and literary and legal scholars have also found in the figures of hosts and guests key
themes for theorizing phenomena on other scales: from migration and postcoloniality
to sovereignty and international law.
This recent work on hospitality often draws on classic anthropological wisdom
about reciprocity and mediated otherness, and yet, amidst this interdisciplinary chorus,
anthropologists themselves have been strangely silent. Since Julian Pitt-Riverss forgot-
ten 1968 classic The stranger, the guest, and the hostile host, which anticipated through
an ethnographic tour de force many points made by Derrida thirty years later, and
Michael Herzfelds powerful 1987 exploration of hospitality as a scaling mechanism in
Greece, the topic has been relatively under-theorized within the discipline. Further-
more, the predominance of the Mediterranean in the early anthropology of hospitality
has risked occluding the broader relevance of the topic to anthropology at large, as a key
social form for mediating all manner of relations with a potentially dangerous Other.
The starting-point of the volume was a panel entitled The ambiguous objects of
hospitality: material ethics, houses and dangerous guests, which the editors convened
at the 2009 meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and
Commonwealth in Bristol. The present volume includes articles by a selection of
contributors from the original panel (Catherine Allerton, Matei Candea, Giovanni da
Col, Michael Herzfeld, Patrice Ladwig, Ann Kelly, Andrew Shryock) alongside work by
invited contributors (Debbora Battaglia, Grgory Delaplace, Carlos Fausto, Caroline
Humphrey, Magnus Marsden, Katherine Swancutt, Roy Wagner).
This volume aims to put hospitality back on the agenda, by challenging both emer-
gent and well-established anthropologists to produce ethnographically grounded,
theoretically innovative engagements with hospitality reflecting a broad geographical
and thematic range. To extend the anthropology of hospitality into new theoretical and
ethnographic grounds is also to extend the hospitality of anthropology to new topics
and themes. What all of these contributions have in common, however, is a concern
with three interlinked topics: ambivalence, materiality, and scale. The status of the
stranger and the ambivalence of guest-host relations which so often threaten to
collapse into enmity are indissociable from the materiality of hospitalities, grounded

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), Siii-Siv

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as they are in the physical transaction of things and the situated inhabitation/
exploitation of places and locales. The questions of scale complicate and intersect with
these issues: what happens when the language of hospitality connects houses to con-
taining entities on other scales, villages, nations, or homelands, when guests and hosts
come to stand for collective entities, immigrant communities, insects, non-humans,
corporations, and states? How are such scale shifts managed and when and where do
they fail? Yet anthropology itself is only made possible by hospitalities extended to
ethnographers in the field. The ethics of hospitality are at the core of ethnographic
knowledge-making, as anthropologists first play guest then host to the worlds of their
informants, acting as custodians of their stories and memories.
Taken together, the papers in this volume offer hospitality as a heuristic for rethink-
ing alterity, humanity, and the figure of the stranger. The time has come to bring
hospitality back to the forefront of our disciplines concern and theorizing, and provide
a strong and distinctly anthropological voice to the rising chorus of interdisciplinary
interest in hospitality.

The editors wish to express their gratitude to the contributors and everyone who has
been involved in this project over the years, from audience members at the original
panel, through to colleagues who generously helped with reviewing the papers. We are
grateful to Michael Herzfeld for productive comments and encouragement for the
completion of this volume. For their help, suggestions, and support we would like to
thank Olivier Allard, Debbora Battaglia, Bernard Charlier, Stephan Feuchtwang, Chris
Hann and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Lars Hojier, Caroline
Humphrey, James Leach, Nicholas Long, Elena Mamoulaki, Justin Shaffner, and
Andrew Shryock. We are very grateful to Wendy James at the Royal Anthropological
Institute, Matthew Engelke and Narmala Halstead at the JRAI, and Craig Gregory at
Wiley-Blackwell for their help and advice during the editing process, and wish to
extend our heartfelt thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, who read and provided
invaluable comments on the entire manuscript.
Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col
February 2012

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), Siii-Siv

Royal Anthropological Institute 2012