Convenors
Hanna Lütke Lanfer, School of Public Health, Bielefeld University
hanna.luetkelanfer@uni-bielefeld.de
Ethnographic and qualitative research often occurs in places that belong to other people who have granted researchers access. Access to the field is often described in procedural terms in publications, yet ethnographic research is deeply shaped by relations of hospitality: by invitations and refusals, rituals and obligations that emerge when a researcher is allowed to enter spaces, conversations, and lives (Derrida, Dufourmantelle, 2000). Across private, professional, digital and non-digital settings, researchers arrive as guests. Researchers can be hosted by institutions, administrators, interpreters, certain communities and non-professional individuals. Such hospitality may stem from professional roles, organizational obligations, or informal expectations within households, communities, and digital settings. Hosting presupposes some control over space, time, and resources and the capacity to grant, limit, or refuse access is unevenly distributed, shaped by class, gender, racialization, legal status, mobility, and professional authority (Rozakou, 2012).
Being received binds the guest to that space for a certain time and creates conditions and expectations that are not always made explicit or known to the researcher. As guests, researchers may be expected to perform appreciation or discretion, participate in social events or reciprocate through gifts, invitations or other forms of favours (Mauss, 2001).
Nonetheless, fieldwork frequently unsettles the distinction between guest and host, as researchers perform roles traditionally associated with hosting (Candea , da Col, 2012): they select locations and formats for fieldwork; they open and close conversations; they decide who is included in or excluded from data collection, what is followed up, under what conditions contributions become data and what data is published. Being hosted and hosting can thus occur within the same situation. For example, a researcher may be hosted at a person’s kitchen table or workplace, while structuring the research encounter by starting a recording, directing questions and deciding when the conversation ends.
Additionally, there is an epistemic dimension to hospitality in research as researchers are guests to other forms of knowledge and ways of reasoning than academic ones during fieldwork, while they host the spaces in which they exercise authority over how others’ voices are received, ordered, translated, and published in academia (Imperiale et al., 2021; Kuokkanen, 2008).
Hospitality in ethnographic research thus raises questions about the fluidity of different roles, reciprocity, dependence, knowledges and expectations that shape research. This panel seeks contributions that explore hospitality as situated and shifting practices and as a constitutive dimension of ethnographic research. It welcomes contributions that examine how hosting and being hosted shape access, data collection, and knowledge production, while engaging with contemporary debates on care, labor, inequality, epistemic diversity etc.
Open Questions
- Which rites accompany the arrival and departure of a researcher, and what do they reveal about the terms on which a stay is granted?
- Under which conditions is access refused, delayed, or granted only in part, and what do such refusals reveal about a field?
- How and when do the positions of host and guest change during fieldwork?
- Who performs the work of hosting a researcher?
- What obligations/expectations does being received create, how can these expectations be met, and what happens to them when the fieldwork ends?
- How is hospitality in research organised, negotiated, and withdrawn in digital or hybrid fields?
- How can researchers make the spaces they host hospitable for their interlocutors, when they are guests at the same time?
Keywords
hospitality; host and guest roles; rituals of welcome; reciprocity; hostility and exclusion; knowledge production; epistemic authority
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
migration and refugee studies; health, care and medical anthropology; urban and domestic ethnography; feminist and gender studies; sociology of work
References
Candea, M., da Col, G.
2012, The Return to Hospitality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(s1). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01757.x
Derrida, J., Dufourmantelle, A.
2000, Of Hospitality. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford University Press. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam021/00056359.html
Imperiale, M. G., Phipps, A., Fassetta, G.
2021, On Online Practices of Hospitality in Higher Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 40(6), 629–648. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09770-z
Kuokkanen, R.
2008, What is Hospitality in the Academy? Epistemic Ignorance and the (Im)Possible Gift. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 30(1), 60–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714410701821297
Mauss, M.
2001, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Routledge.
Rozakou, K.
2012, The Biopolitics of Hospitality in Greece: Humanitarianism and the Management of Refugees. American Ethnologist, 39(3), 562–577. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01381.x