Hosting as a Cultural Form

Abstract

In this article, I propose an analytical schema composed of the interrelated concepts of cultural logics, cultural forms, and institutional/structural forms. Cultural logics are operating principles and interpretive models for the organization of social relations and social life that have been transmitted from generation to generation, while cultural forms are the significant, recurring occasions (i.e., performative mechanisms) through which cultural logics manifest themselves. Institutional/structural forms can be households, villages, tribes, clans, spirit cults, kinship networks, political alliances, or businesses, depending on the scale of analysis and type of society. To demonstrate the utility of this analytical schema I examine a particularly key cultural form that crucially informs Chinese sociopolitical and religious life : hosting. I define hosting (heuristically distinguished from hospitality) as the ritual staging of host-guest interactions for particularly important sociopolitical and ritual occasions (e.g., funerals, weddings, temple festivals, communal exorcisms, the World Expo, the Olympic Games, etc.). On these « momentous » hosting occasions the host can be a household, a community, a nation, or a god, while the guest can be representatives of other households, communities or nations, or spirits of all kinds (ancestors, ghosts, gods). The key structural elements of hosting include the acts of inviting, banqueting, and sending off of the guests. I present two case studies from my own ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate the workings of hosting as a cultural form, one from northern China and the other from northern Taiwan.