Good Concept, Bad Politics? The Heuristic Value of Hospitality

Résumé En

This paper assesses the heuristic value of hospitality. Hospitality as a politics or a political justification of border policies is ambivalent. The power of the hosts, the expectations of gratefulness and quiescence from the guests, the temporariness of hospitality, or the hypocrisy and partiality of the welcoming rhetoric, raise doubts about the current revival in activist, political, and scholarly mobilizations of the concept. Nevertheless, I argue that hospitality as an analytical tool has a heuristic role in migration studies. I reconstruct the main conceptualizations of hospitality-an "ordinary practice of accommodation," a "social mechanism," an "ideology," an "idea," or a "normative principle"-to show how it produces new and useful knowledge across different fields. Hospitality helps to describe, explain, and evaluate social phenomena such as the accommodation of migrants at home, the quality of welcome against organized hostility, the justification of resistance to harsh border enforcement, the social construction of foreigners as temporary guests, and the relationships between the religious and legal vocabularies of asylum.