Breaking hospitality apart: bad hosts, bad guests, and the problem of sovereignty

Talk of hospitality often turns to the problem of bad guests and bad hosts. This trend holds whether the speakers are Balga Bedouin in Jordan or political theorists in Europe, and it would seem that bad hospitality accumulates in the gaps created by shifts in scale, as houses absorb other houses, or nation-states and their citizens compete to control the concepts and practices that define house, host, and guest. Moving from Bedouin history to metropolitan political theory, I show how bad hosts and guests break hospitality apart, revealing its component parts and how they work. Like the Balga Bedouin, I am intrigued by bad guests, and I dread bad hosts. Whenever I encounter these characters – in Jordan, where they stand out and can be appreciated, not in the United States, where they are common – I immediately tell others about them, and seldom are people more eager to hear my news. I am not spreading idle gossip. I am keeping up local standards for excellence in the handling of guests and hosts. Among Bedouin, these standards are high, and Balgawis are always pleased to see that I understand them. Hospitality, karam in local dialect, is not simply a matter of offering tea, cigarettes, and pleasant conversation to guests. It is also a test of sovereignty. The man who is karim (hospitable, generous, noble) is able to feed others, project an honourable and enviable reputation, and protect guests from harm. Hospitality, as Bedouin describe it, is a quality of persons and households, of tribal and ethnic groups, and even of nation-states. At any of these levels of significance, failure to provide karam suggests low character and weakness, qualities that attract moral criticism. In short, Bedouin assume that disputes over hospitality can open a social space to ridicule and ultimately to the threat of trespass and subordination. This negative potential makes bad hosts and bad guests important. It gives moral focus to the central problem of hospitality: namely how to enact autonomy and exchange, openness and closure, within the same social space. When Balgawis suggest that a nation-state can be hospitable, just as a person can, they acknowledge the scalar complexity that has made hospitality a concept of interest to metropolitan political theorists. The latter do not fixate on whether the tea was hot or the greetings ample, but they do share with bs_bs_banner