The Stranger As My Guest : A Critical Anthropology of Hospitality

The migration crisis of recent years has elicited a double response: on the one hand, many states have responded by tightening border controls, in an attempt to restrict population movements, while on the other hand many citizens have responded by welcoming new arrivals, offering them shelter, food and whatever help they could provide. By so doing, they have re-awakened an old form of anthropology that was long-considered to be dead - that of hospitality. In this book, Agier develops an original anthropology of hospitality that starts from the reality of hospitality as a social relationship, albeit an asymmetrical one, in which each party has rights and duties. He argues that, with the decline of state and religious support, hospitality is now making a comeback at individual and municipal levels but these local initiatives, while important, are insufficient to respond to the scale of migration in the world today. We need a new hospitality policy for the modern era, one that will regard hospitality as a right rather than a favour and will treat the stranger as a guest rather than as an alien or an enemy. This timely and original book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with migration and refugees in the world today. Cover 1 Title page 4 Copyright page 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction Hospitality When Least Expected 10 1 Making the Stranger My Guest 18 The conditions of unconditionality 20 The elementary forms of hospitality 30 From domestic hospitality to public hospitality 45 2 Hospitality The Challenge of the Present 50 Encounters of a new type 53 Hospitality: causes and effects 59 The emergence of municipal hospitality 64 From ghetto to migrant houses 66 Hospitable municipality versus hostile state 78 3 The Need for Cosmopolitics 82 Cosmopolitanism today 83 The principle of hospitality and cosmopolitics from a philosophical perspective 86 Banal cosmopolitanism: an anthropological point of view 92 4 Becoming a Stranger 101 The death of Stavros or the birth of Joe Arness 102 Three times a stranger 104 The migrant poet and the spectre of the alien 115 Conclusion 126 Postscript The Stranger after Covid-19 132 Notes 137 Notes to Introduction 137 Notes to Chapter 1 137 Notes to Chapter 2 140 Notes to Chapter 3 143 Notes to Chapter 4 145 Notes to Conclusion 146 Note to Postscript 147 Index 148 EULA 154 "A well-argued case for a new hospitality policy that welcomes foreigners as guests rather than treating them as aliens or enemies"-- Provided by publisher