Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Breaking hospitality apart: what bad hosts and bad guests tell us about sovereignty  
Andrew Shryock (University of Michigan)

Paper short abstract:

Working with Bedouin materials from Jordan, this paper considers stories of "hospitality gone wrong," and tries to explain why these stories are so important in local accounts of political change. Bad guests, and bad hosts, can make complex assemblages of political and economic interests fall apart, revealing clearly the material and moral factors that held these assemblages together in the form of hospitality. Why are tribal systems vulnerable to disruptions at the guest/host interface, and what does this tell us about the relationship between hospitality and sovereignty more generally?

Paper long abstract:

Hospitality is shaped by political and moral concerns, but cannot be reduced to either. It tends to transcend ethical systems, flourishing beyond its own rules, in a realm of excess, exposure, and risk. Among Bedouin populations in Jordan, the pleasures and anxieties of hospitality are expressed architecturally, in interactional styles, and in the use and display of special objects: food, drink, utensils, décor. Over the last 300 years, these hospitality assemblages have been used to establish the sovereignty of social groups of different sorts and sizes, ranging from families to villages, tribal groups, and states. In each case, sovereignty is manifest in the ability to act as host, and new consolidations of power are often explained (critically or supportively) in stories of hospitality gone wrong. Focusing on several historical episodes of political incorporation and erasure, I will show how the breaking apart of hospitality assemblages - of existing arrangements of space, material objects, and interactive styles - is key to how shifts in Balga political systems were accomplished in the past and how they are remembered by Bedouin today. Why do bad hosts and bad guests play this crucial role in local historical accounts? To answer this question, I will refer, as Bedouin do, to sovereign spaces that no longer exist; their physical traces, and their missing features, reveal much of the political economy that sustained them. They also tell us why the moment of hospitality is such a potent link between moral and political domains.

Panel P34
The ambiguous objects of hospitality: material ethics, houses and dangerous guests
  Session 1