‘CALIBRATING HOME, HOSPITALITY AND RECIPROCITY IN MIGRATION’ 

(HARNEY & BOCCAGNI, ‘ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY’, 2022)

Nicholas Harney (UWO) and Paolo Boccagni have recently published an open-access article in Anthropological Theory.  The article revisits the anthropological debate on home and hospitality by advancing a notion of ‘calibrated reciprocity’, based on both authors’ fieldwork. See the full citation and abstract below.

Harney, N. D., & Boccagni, P. (2022). Calibrating home, hospitality and reciprocity in migration. Anthropological Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996221118140

Hospitality, as an analytic and a lived experience, is central to the day-to-day workings of home, and to managing the tensions and contradictions inherent in place attachment and appropriation on any scale – from the domestic to the national one. This emerges as a contentious and yet under-researched social question whenever newcomers such as immigrants and refugees lay some claim for guesthood. Following this premise, and based also on our fieldwork, this article outlines a conceptual argument for a joint understanding of home and hospitality in time and space. This leads us to conceptualize ‘calibrated hospitality’ to appreciate the ongoing dialectic between the spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions of the host–guest encounter in immigrant- and refugee-receiving societies. Looking at immigrant and refugee inclusion in terms of hospitality being claimed, negotiated, and possibly denied, relative to the theories and practices of ‘home’, opens an extensive conceptual terrain for social research that is more connected to foundational lived cultural idioms, and contextually more sensitive, than approaches based only on policy frames such as integration, or on formal entitlements such as access or residence rights.