Hospitality

Hospitality to judge by what one reads or experiences about the folkways and foodways of all the innumerable ethnic and other groups in the world, is everywhere ‘traditional’, ‘unstinted’, ‘unrivalled’, and often ‘legendary’. This sounds very similar to the cheer dispensed by today’s ‘hospitality industry’—perhaps an oxymoron in the twinning of profit and gift.

But perhaps not, for anthropologists have spilt much ink in describing the ‘gift economy’, of which hospitality is in a sense a subdivision. The survey of the many traditions of hospitality undertaken by Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col (2012) raises the interesting possibility that had the pioneering anthropologist Marcel Mauss chosen hospitality rather than the gift as his subject of analysis, the world of anthropology today might look very different.