The migration crisis of recent years has elicited a double response: on the one hand, many states have responded by tightening border controls, in an attempt to restrict population movements, while on the other hand many citizens have responded by welcoming new arrivals, offering them shelter, food and whatever help they could provide. By so doing, they have re-awakened an old form of anthropology that was long-considered to be dead – that of hospitality. In this book, Agier develops an original anthropology of hospitality that starts from the reality of hospitality as a social relationship, albeit an asymmetrical one, in which each party has rights and duties. He argues that, with the decline of state and religious support, hospitality is now making a comeback at individual and municipal levels but these local initiatives, while important, are insufficient to respond to the scale of migration in the world today. We need a new hospitality policy for the modern era, one that will regard hospitality as a right rather than a favour and will treat the stranger as a guest rather than as an alien or an enemy. This timely and original book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with migration and refugees in the world today.
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Michel Agier. The Stranger as My Guest
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
The Stranger as My Guest. A Critical Anthropology of Hospitality
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction Hospitality When Least Expected
Notes
1 Making the Stranger My Guest
The conditions of unconditionality
The elementary forms of hospitality
From domestic hospitality to public hospitality
Notes
2 Hospitality The Challenge of the Present
Encounters of a new type
Hospitality: causes and effects
The emergence of municipal hospitality
From ghetto to migrant houses
Hospitable municipality versus hostile state
Notes
3 The Need for Cosmopolitics
Cosmopolitanism today
The principle of hospitality and cosmopolitics from a philosophical perspective
Banal cosmopolitanism: an anthropological point of view
Notes
4 Becoming a Stranger
The death of Stavros or the birth of Joe Arness
Three times a stranger
The migrant poet and the spectre of the alien
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Postscript The Stranger after Covid-19
Note
Index
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Michel Agier
Translated by Helen Morrison
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From the year 2000 onwards, and especially since 2015, the majority of European countries have seen a divergence between national governments and some of their citizens on the subject of the welcome extended to migrants and refugees. On the one hand, governments have sought to demonstrate a certain protectiveness towards their citizens by portraying migrants as a threat to the security and identity of their countries, reviving a symbolic theme highlighted a few years ago by the American philosopher Wendy Brown2 – namely that of the strong (and masculine) state protecting the fragile (feminine) nation… Walls, expulsions, mass checks, a dissuasive police presence, all intended to reassure nervous inhabitants, and they were ready to give up some of their own freedom when confronted with the spectre of the dangerous stranger, who would thus be kept at a distance. In France in particular, the lack of enthusiasm or expertise demonstrated by government authorities in providing a dignified and peaceful welcome to migrants and refugees and the confusion provoked by the arrival of migrants to Paris, Ventimiglia or Calais – admittedly on a large, though by no means overwhelming or catastrophic scale – seem to have been both a response to, and a way of nurturing, a widely felt anxiety of the sort most clearly expressed by parties of the extreme right. In accordance with the supposed expectation of the population at large, there was a clear need to demonstrate all possible reticence and distrust towards the intruder, which meant not providing shelters, reassurance or food, all of which could have been made available, from a material and economic standpoint, without any special difficulty. And yet this same attitude provoked another section of the population to act in precisely the opposite manner. Some people felt deeply concerned by the state of the world and by the hostility displayed by their governments towards certain strangers (comments made by certain elites and images of neglect or of police violence). These people wanted to take action rather than remain indifferent, to show solidarity to the peoples or individuals in danger, the ones they were seeing arriving in their immediate neighbourhood, coming across their mountains, onto their coasts, into their streets. As a result, it has become possible – and by no means uncommon – to join forces and criticise states from a standpoint of hospitality, at a societal, community-based or micro-local level. This politicization of hospitality is, as we shall see, an alternative way of defining the ‘politics’ of hospitality and of understanding the contemporary meaning of a practice at once ancient and constantly transforming.
The entire history of hospitality demonstrates that, through a gradual process, the responsibility – on a family, community, or local level – for the duties of hospitality has been distanced from society and instead delegated, and at the same time diluted, within the functions of the state. That responsibility has been replaced by the rights of asylum seekers or refugees. Subsequently these rights have themselves ended up being diluted in the politics of control over borders, territories and movement and are now so far removed from any general principle of hospitality that they have become virtually unrecognisable. This is what lies behind the ‘resurgence’ of hospitality that, in what might be described as a complete reversal of direction, goes from politics to society and from the latter to the private, domestic world.
