TABLE OF CONTENTS Tom Selwyn
The Business School, University of North London
This chapter offers a social anthropological view of hospitality. An opening section briefly considers the purpose and social function of hospitality and then offers some comparative historical and ethnographic material on the subject. Some preliminary comments are made about the social, ritual and cognitive structures within which acts of hospitality are carried out. A second section considers the importance to the practice of hospitality of food. This is illustrated and developed mainly from one ethnographic example, and the chapter ends by returning to more general themes of hospitality s structural organization.
The basic function of hospitality is to establish a relationship or to promote an already established relationship. Acts of hospitality achieve this in the course of exchanges of goods and services, both material and symbolic, between those who give hospitality (hosts) and those who receive it (guests). Since relationships necessarily evolve within moral frameworks, one of the principal functions of any act of hospitality is either (in the case of an existing relationship) to consolidate the recognition that hosts and guests already share the same moral universe or (in the case of a new relationship) to enable the construction of a moral universe to which both host and guest agree to belong.
Acts of hospitality thus either consolidate structures of relations by symbolically affirming them, or (in the case of the establishment of a new framework of relations) are structurally transformative. In the latter case givers...
