Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality

Tematy i Konteksty, 2024

: The word hospitality includes the sense of hostility and a reciprocal exchange among equals. The accelerating human and non-human migrations caused by climate change call for a reclaiming of that complexity. Historically, the stranger, the barbarian, was the one deprived of the logos, the one not operating the language of the political centre. If, however, following Merleau-Ponty, the logos becomes the property of the living world, then it is not the human who can offer hospitality to other human and non-human strangers, but they all become guests in the living world with varying degrees of agency. Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island explores the complexity of the notion of the host and the barbarian, questioning the Western belief in the primacy of human logos. It is shown both in the plot line and in the form of the novel which re-enacts the interplay between two modes: logos and mythos.

Hospitality is intricately linked with the idea and the real physical place of home. For hospitality to be operative, or to be something enact-able, it is contingent on having a home from which one offers hospitality. Invasion of these boundaries conjures hostility. Yet hospitality without extending itself to the foreigner-outside and in excess of known categories and boundaries is not hospitality, a limited welcome defeats its own purpose. Therefore, to put it very simply, hospitality as unconditional necessitates opening hospitality beyond the home and family. But where does this leave us? It is this question after the question that is what I want to consider here today – the door [inside the door?] to be opened after we have crossed the threshold and embraced what Derrida has given us. My paper has two sections: I will first briefly discuss why hospitality is relevant in the context of irregular migrant labourers. Secondly, I will outline how Derrida’s hospitality invites the question of home, while at the same time ripping the welcome mat out from under our feet. At this irreconcilable threshold between hostility and welcome, hospitality can be conceptualised as nothing but inoperative.

Migration and Society, 2018

This article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transformative moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the fifth century BCE, hospitality becoming the marker between civic society and the international community, confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question of: Who is the host? The article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty-first century we observe a shift towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measuring society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.

In this paper, I explore the question of hospitality as a ritualizing process for coping with the arrival of migrantstrangers in todays globalizing world. Hospitality provides a set of practices to lessen the threat of difference. Even as it is a universal cultural mode for coping with strangers, each nation-state undertakes specific forms and practices. Through institionalized forms of welcome to a new nation-state seeks to minimize the risk of the stranger-guest. Further research should explore the situated dynamics of hospitality and national ideological formations and policy practices.

Journal of Refugee Studies

In May 2015, Acehnese fishermen rescued over 1,800 displaced Rohingya who were stranded in the Andaman Sea. They did so in the face of a regional governmental stand-off that threatened to leave the Rohingya to drown. What compelled the fishermen and the villages from which they came to respond in this way? How might this example be instructive for an international refugee regime that failed in this case, as in others, to offer even the most basic form of protection to some of the world's most egregiously displaced? In this article, we respond to these questions, drawing on fieldwork based in Aceh and Jakarta alongside the insights of Jacques Derrida on the subject of hospitality. We show how the Acehnese example speaks to a general paradox of hospitality that all potential hosts confront, including those states currently denying entre´e to asylum seekers. We identify three specific ways in which the Acehnese example can be drawn on as a source of both critique and inspiration. These concern the limits of refugee law as a 'solution' to the current 'refugee crisis', the ways in which capacity to provide hospitality is measured and the value of contingency in generating pathways oriented towards more hospitable responses to displacement.

Through the analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, this paper investigates the subject formation of Changez, the protagonist of the novel, who identifies as a foreigner, an Other, especially after 9/11. The essay shows how Changez navigates his role as an insider/outsider in America and Pakistan, and traces the peripheral spaces in which Changez locates his sense of belonging. The essay questions if hospitality is possible for the foreigner and if it is the destiny of the displaced to always remain homeless.]

American Ethnologist, 2023

The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted "the other" as a subject of comprehension, categorization, and containment. Later, with the post-9/11 geopolitical backdrop, anthropologists focused on selected themes such as religious and ethnic disparity and political nationalism, eliding some topics or groups. What would it mean for the anthropology of Pakistan to consider alienated themes and groups while emphasizing the infinity of the Other? How would conceiving the Other beyond a political or religious other, or even beyond a human subject, create a possibility of decolonizing the anthropology of Pakistan while exploring multiple futures-emergent, imagined, and expected? Such an approach critically moots a reexamination of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tenets and urges the discipline to engage with diverse lifeworlds. It brings the face of the Other face-to-face with anthropology beyond humanity to consider all beings, intersubjective and collaborative experiences, and shared values.

Migrants and refugees have become the most contested categories in recent times. As these terms loom they tend to pose intense volatility and complexity. As against the backdrop, this paper probes into the factors that propels both the migrants and refugees ‗within' and ‗between' is usually a function of the complex interaction of economic, socio-cultural, and religio-political factors. Among these, the most important facets however, are political, economic and religious vis-à-vis closing of borders and intolerance prevailing in societies—ethnic cleansing and xenophobic tendencies. Unless and until the factors that facilitates the phenomenon of migrants and refugees at alarming levels are viewed and examined in integrated ways, the intensity and magnitude of the problems meted out by migrants and refugees may not be comprehensively understood and thus be treated pragmatically. Hence, this paper attempts to unfold the ideological underpinnings between political and religious forces so that a synthesis of current knowledge of migration-refugee dynamics be adequately addressed and articulated. Further, the paper focuses on the vital issues that the migrants and refugees face by taking into account the changing contours interfacing fundamentally politics, economy and religion. Under such gruesome changing context-specificities and in a given de-humanizing scenario, as a Christian responding to the call, an ethic of hospitality is proposed to evaluate the current fiasco as a viable and realistic option for the migrants and refugees. In the contemporary globalized world, mobility of people within and between countries/ continents is on the rise and thus become inevitable and irreversible as well. Every day people of all age-groups migrate within and across countries particularly from poorer regions to richer terrains. Hundreds and thousands migrate for livelihood, quality life, socioeconomic , religio-cultural and political safety and security. Since, the number of migrants refugees is rising every day at alarming levels and has reached to several millions, it cannot be construed as a phenomenon, but as phenomena—entails socioeconomic , religio-cultural and political facets. It is estimated that ―Over 200 million people migrate globally from one country to another in search of gainful employment.‖ 2 In the whole gamut, South Asians do constitute major portion and an important segment of this migration-refugee dynamic. Notably, Indian sub-continent has a number of commonalities such as poverty, inequality, corruption, caste-class-gender oppressive tendencies, ethnic conflicts, embracing Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG). In addition to South Asian labor, there also a significant number of migrants' presence from

In this article we examine the current political situation of migrants trying to enter Poland through the lens of two lectures on hospitality given by Jacques Derrida in 1996. We analyze Derrida’s notions of “laws of hospitality” and “absolute hospitality” as deconstruction of Kantian and Hegelian moral ideas, especially Hegel’s Sittlichkeit. The text outlines the situation of the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, as well as the issue of migration of people from Ukraine after February 24, 2022. Using Derrida's terms and concepts, we try to show the impact of ethical issues on the process of helping in the context of state policy.

Journal of Social Archaeology, 2020

How quickly can displaced peoples develop meaningful ties to new locations and what material forms facilitate such connections? In this paper, we provide a discussion of post-displacement topophilia (attachment to place). As a case study, we focus on the migration of the Sharif family who fled from India to Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. The Sharif family fundamentally lost their home and faced threats as they migrated past socio-politically opposed migrant groups moving in the opposite direction. They then resettled into the places abandoned by these “enemies” while these “enemies” resettled within the village they left behind. Through this example, we consider the effects of propinquity though dwelling—a closeness and empathy born from a shared familiarity with a dwelling place. We acknowledge that when multiple groups have ties to the same location, contention often ensues. However, we argue that when peoples become intimately familiar with one another’s dwelling spaces, the...