Ethos Of Hospitality Research Articles

Lot’s Daughters: “Sacrificial Children” and the Ethos of Hospitality

Abstract Upon discovering the arrival of guests at Lot’s home, the men of the city rushed to his door and demanded that he bring them out, prompting Lot to respond by offering his daughters to the mob instead (Q 11:78–79, 15:67–71). The depiction of Lot’s offer of his daughters in Q 11:78–79 and 15:67–71 has troubled many scholars, some of whom question both the nature of this offer and Lot’s moral character. While early Muslim sources depict Lot as a righteous host and focus on the legal implications of his offer, later scholars grapple with how Lot sought to protect his guests. Such concerns arise from the later Muslim belief that Lot, being a prophet, is protected from sin. In this article, I propose adopting a historical reading of Lot’s offer of his daughters that takes into account early Muslims’ perceptions of the Lot narrative as fundamentally about hospitality. Moreover, I contend that Lot’s offer of his daughters can be read in light of other ancient narratives of “sacrificial children” for the purpose of upholding the sacred virtues of hospitality, generosity, and loyalty.

Towards Social Negotiation: The Case of Handshake Debates in Sweden and Denmark

SUMMARY: 1. Introduction - 2. The necessary conditions of social negotiation - 3. Nordic Secularism - 4. Organic religious literacy - 5. Translation - 6. Conclusion.
 ABSTRACT: The refusal to shake hands with a female reporter by a Muslim politician from the Miljöpartiet resulted in a controversy in Sweden. Together with a number of court cases, it revealed a disparity between the established judicial line and the views of the general public. The Swedish controversy received a response from Denmark, where the ruling coalition introduced new citizenship legislation with an obligation to shake hands with the mayor during a naturalization ceremony. These controversies highlighted the rising tensions on multiple levels, between majority and minority, religious freedom and gender equality, law and public opinion. This paper takes a closer look at the role of law as a negotiator and employs the notions of Nordic secularism, organic religious literacy, and the ethos of hospitality towards the untranslatable, in order to answer two questions: where these tensions come from and what are the possible ways of overcoming them.

THE FOOD IN THE SOCIALIZATION PROCESS: INTIMATE AND EXTIMATE

The article is devoted to the meaning of the food for socialization, socio-cultural identification of the human. Sociality of Human is not a simple natural phenomenon, the process of socialization is mediated by various ritual practices. As a universal indicator of the social being, the article deals with food, since it combines the vital necessity for a human as a natural organism and socio-cultural significance of common meals, beyond which no socially important event passes. It is argued that food/table traditions define of social structures, cultural diversity and social-cultural identity. It is noted that the meal is always common. In society food is excluded alone, unlike other natural processes, which appear as exclusively intimate. The process of inclusion (as well as exclusion) into a specific community/genus is marked through the ritual, through the formation and strict observance of table manners and the diet. The process of civilization is generally associated with the normalization of everyday life, which leads to the standardization of food and eating of the feast to overcome the aversion to Another, in order to make it possible of coexistence. Nutrition proves the unevenness and some limited of social relations, defining of the space of intimacy/privacy, access to which is in some measure limited (by age, gender, status, class, money). On the other hand, the expansion, extimation of this space occur during of the collective initiation rituals or in the ethos of hospitality. Thus, the transformation of the food rituals reveals the dialectic of acceptance and disgust, aufheben of which is carried out against the backdrop of cultural averaging, which characterizes the modern society. In the article, the influence of the food rituals on socialization is specified in the definition of the function of potlatch and initiation, the meaning of which is revealed only through a food, which is the material basis of a certain community.

The refugee’s flight: homelessness, hospitality, and care of the self

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the contemporary international refugee regime is grounded in a paradigm of ‘homesickness’, which puts the refugee in an inferior position of the supplicant, whose subjectivity is framed by the regime of fixed belonging. In order to address this situation, we need to challenge the ontological primacy of homesickness and embrace ‘homelessness’, which offers the possibility of rethinking the positions of both refugees and non-refugees in ethical terms. While the responsibility of the non-refugees lies in cultivating an ethos of hospitality, the refugee can take hold of her subjectivity through the practice of care of the self. This paper first examines Nietzsche’s thought on homelessness and compares it with Foucault’s reading of the role of anakhōrēsis in the Hellenistic practice of care of the self. It then suggests how, by building on the project of universal hospitality, we can interpret the figure of the refugee through the prism of an ethic of freedom, anchored in a positive break with the city. From this perspective, the refugee regains her ethico-political agency by cultivating the relationship with her own living self, which offers new avenues for resistance against the dominant paradigm of ‘homesickness’ that governs her subjectivity today.

An ethos of hospitality as public morality in the face of the disorderly process in Nigeria today?

Nigeria, a highly populated country in West Africa, has for the past five years been embroiled in turmoil. Agitation arising from displacement of a large number of people coupled with alienation in their own ancestral lands and homes, due to activities of the unpopular Islamic sect, Boko Haram (roughly translated in English as “Western education is an abomination”). This radical religious sect seeks in the most poignant way, to create a wide gap for its own conceived Islamic world order by killing, dispossessing, kidnapping and alienating people, especially in the north-eastern part of Nigeria, bordering Cameroon, Chad and Niger Republics. Economic, religious, cultural and political lives of the locals including Muslims are destroyed. No end is in sight. However, in the face of hostility, hatred, injustice, disorder, despair and an attempt to create order, a new form of public morality is desperately needed in Nigeria, today. The questions then are: what is this public morality? How can a public morality be facilitated to salvage such a disturbing situation?

‘The Perfect Hostess’: Mrs. Dalloway, Gift Exchange, and the End of Laissez-Faire

This paper intervenes in the longstanding debate over modernism's relationship to the market by taking the publication of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Marcel Mauss's landmark essay, The Gift, in 1925 as a prompt to remap the historical and conceptual intersections between Anglo-American modernist literature, economic discourse, and twentieth-century theories of gift exchange. Drawing a crucial distinction between a modernist fascination with the gift and a modernist fascination with the primitive, I argue that Mauss uniquely conceived what John Maynard Keynes called the “end of laissez-faire” in terms of a shift in our collective thinking about gifts and exchanges. Via her sympathetic and critical characterization of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf then figures this shift in terms of the emergence of a feminine ethos of hospitality. In furthermore establishing literature's centrality to fostering this ethos, she also anticipates, while historicizing and gendering, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, one of Mauss's primary heirs.

PUBLIC MORALITY AND THE NEED FOR AN ETHOS OF HOSPITALITY

This article sketches the prevailing sense of moral crisis with reference to the film Code Unknown. Following this cultural diagnosis, it analyses three responses to such a sense of moral crisis and suggests that an ethos of hospitality is necessary for the sake of public morality. It concludes by offering an analysis of five dimensions that may be identified with reference to such an ethos of hospitality.

The ‘measure of a man’ and the ethos of hospitality: towards an ethical dwelling with technology

In this paper, I argue for the impossible possibility of an ethical dwelling with technology. In arguing for an ethical comportment in our dealing with technology, I am not only arguing for the consideration of the ethical implications of technology (which we already do) but also, and more importantly, for an ethics of technological artefacts qua technology. Thus, I attempt to argue for a decentering (or rather overcoming) of anthropocentric ethics, urging us to move beyond any centre, whatever it may be—anthropological, biological, etc. I argue that if we take ethics seriously we must admit that our measure cannot be that of man. To develop the argument, I use an episode in Star Trek where the fate of the highly sophisticated android Commander Data is to be decided. I show how the moral reasoning about Data remains anthropocentric but hints to other possibilities. I proceed to use the work of Derrida and Levinas (with some help from Heidegger) to suggest a possible way to think (and do) an ethos beyond traditional ethics—an ethics of hospitality in which we dwell in a community of those that have nothing in common.

Midrange Reflection: The Underlying Practice of Wabash Center Workshops, Colloquies, and Consultations

Abstract. This article argues that the primary intellectual embodiment of the Wabash Center's ethos of hospitality is a particular kind of reflection on teaching and learning, “midrange reflection.” It defines and describes midrange reflection and then discusses the two essential skills required to facilitate it as distinct from other types of reflection and discussion: (1) the ability to identify issues in the life of a learning community, and (2) the ability to design sequences of questions and intellectual activities that promote reflection on those issues. As the underlying, if not defining practice of Wabash Center workshops, colloquies, and consultations, midrange reflection is crucial to the significant learning that occurs in Wabash Center programs and to participants’ ability to take their deeper understanding and insights back into their classrooms and professional lives.