Descripción de Casos de Uso

Hospitality is predicated on the existence of a space over which the host has sovereignty and into which the guest can be welcomed. In the context of hospitality this space is never merely a space. Host-ness and guest-ness are not enacted in some kind of featureless void or against a standard and interchangeable backdrop, but are constituted by, and in turn constitute, place. Within the extant migration literature place remains remarkably under theorised. There is a sense whereby those who are perceived

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as out of place are also imagined as essentially placeless, living out what Edward Said (1979, p. 18) calls a ‘generalized condition of homelessness’ in the world in general. However, as Clifford Geertz (1996, p. 262) has pointed out, the lives that people live are inseparable from the settings in which they live them and ‘even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving’ live in some confined and limited stretch of the world. Moments of life are invariably experienced in place.

Since the 1990s there has been a renewed interest in issues of space and place across the social sciences (Sojo 1989). Much of this interest has revolved around the pursuit of distinguishing space from place. While historically there has been ‘little recognition that place is more than locale, the setting for action, the stage on which things happen’ (Rodman 1992, p. 643), anthropologists have increasingly sought to foreground spatial dimensions of culture, giving new meaning to the notion that ‘all behaviour is located in and constructed of space’ (Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003, p. 1). Through human action and interaction we bring about the world in which we then are; ‘we create so that we may be, in our creations’ (Richardson 1982, p. 74). Early attempts to grapple with questions of identity and locality focused on the social-wellbeing attached to a sense of being rooted in place, with all the organic and arborescent connotations of such terminology. However, the emphasis given to the in-place, rather than the out-of-place is at best problematic and has been widely criticised as inauthentic (Appadurai 1996; Gupta & Ferguson 1992; Richardson 1984). Counter to this, anthropology has developed, over the past two decades, a heightened awareness of the way in which the historical disciplinary emphasis on culture as bounded and discrete has hidden the reality of a world in movement. The ‘once black-lined borders and boundaries are increasingly smudged by vagueness, erased by chaos, or clouded by uncertainty’ (Feld &

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Basso 1996, p. 6). As such, there have been calls for an anthropology of space grounded, not in outmoded notions of rootedness and cultural sedentarism—an ‘assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture’ (Gupta & Ferguson 1992, p. 7)—but in an understanding of the realities of globalised mobilities and uncertain boundaries (Feld & Basso 1996).

Nevzat Soguk (1996) suggests that in a highly mobile world the certainty of native place and culture is displaced by the uncertain possibilities of the world as a ‘nominally fragmented but pragmatically continuous space’ in which ‘everywhere’ has the potential to be ‘home.’ This perspective celebrates the deterritorialisation of contemporary life, without properly accounting for the ways in which mobility is unevenly distributed and variously experienced. The reality, of course, is that the world is not lived, by any of us, as a continuous space and that home cannot be everywhere (although it can certainly be nowhere). Furthermore, the capacity to make a home of a given place is not held in equal measure. Disparate relations of power are implicated in the establishment, and contestation, of spatial meanings. Even as cultures and peoples cease to be plausibly identifiable as spots on the map, the imaginary of culturally and ethnically distinct places becomes ever more salient (Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Indeed, these two processes are generally viewed as closely intertwined (see Greenfeld 1992; Kaldor 2004; Robertson, R 1994) and nationalism, as a political ideology, is understood to be a response to the increasing permeability of national borders.

How then do we integrate an anthropological concern with place, with a recognition of the way in which processes of globalisation have acted to make tenuous—even to the point of entirely decoupling—the link between locality and identity? By focussing on the enactment of hospitality between Iranians ‘at home’ and Afghans ‘out of place’ I hope

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to throw into relief the way in which place is variously constituted and experienced. I am seeking to emplace hospitality, in order to understand it as a practice that at once informs and is informed by the spaces in which it is enacted.

Hospitality is, as Brian Treanor (2011) argues, the ‘preeminent virtue of place.’ There can be no hospitality without place, and hostness and guestness is formed in the context of an individual’s relationship to [a] place. Places are social, communal and historical (Casey 1993). Place is the space in which we live and act. It is in action and interaction that space becomes place, crowded with familiar [land]marks which give meaning and allow us to orient ourselves.

Spaces of hospitality exist at multiple scales. Indeed, Derrida utilises a form of bifocality in locating his discussion of hospitality simultaneously at home and in the nation. Switching effortlessly between the two he implies that these spaces of hospitality are interchangeable—that the nation is the home and the home is the nation. The nation as home is a commonly invoked metaphor and nationalist discourses attach political meaning to the spaces in which people carry out their ordinary lives (Waetjen 1999). The idea of being at home in the nation implies that the nation can be understood on the same terms as the domestic ‘homely’ space. Being at home evokes a sense of security and stability. Importantly, both the home and nation are idealised as ‘monocultural sites’ in which inhabitants are tied to each other by way of ‘blood,’ common origins and shared membership status (Ranchod-Nilsson & Tétreault 2004). Where the nation and the home are theoretically conflated, the stranger becomes an intensely problematic figure and must necessarily be brought into place. Efforts to constitute the refugee as guest and the relationship between refugee-guest and citizen-

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host as one of hospitality can be understood as an attempt to solve this problematic of the stranger.

Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson (1998, pp. 9–10) argue for a deterritorialised definition of home as a ‘cognitive environment’ in which ‘one best knows oneself.’ This deconstruction of identity-place has had powerful repercussions within anthropology. Today, it is generally accepted that individuals are engaged in multiple processes of identity formation and that identity does not emerge naturally out of territorial rootedness. However, within migration literature territory continues to hold enormous sway over the way identity is perceived. Refugees, for instance, are understood and indeed popularly described as displaced. The place that refugees are not in, or are wrongly situated in, is the nation. Refugees are fundamentally a symptom of the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). There can be no refugees without nation states. Indeed, the 1951 Refugee Convention makes a defining moment of the (international) border crossing. Refugees continue to be defined by their placedness in relation to borders. Refugees originate within (nation) states, are (re)located within (nation) states and are a problem for and between (nation) states. The state, therefore, constitutes a theoretically significant space of hospitality. In state-space hospitality is enacted through the policing of borders, the granting or withholding of citizenship and related visa regimes, and policies which variously extend or deny rights to those who have been constituted as ‘guests.’ Perhaps less concretely (but for the purposes of my thesis more importantly) hospitality is enacted in state-space through the imagining of nationhood.

At this point we might usefully look to David Farrier’s (2011, pp. 12–3) construction of the relationship between nation-states and refugees as one of ‘inclusive exclusion’ in which refugee bodies are abandoned by the law (deprived, for example, of government

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support and services) even as they are ‘held by the law’s vested interest in their exclusion’ (original emphasis).

In migration scholarship the metaphor of hospitality is most often invoked as what Mireille Rosello (2001, p. 3) calls a ‘dead metaphor.’ That is to say, the framework of hospitality is used in order to point to hospitality’s absence. In this, there is a subtle reworking of Derrida’s hostipitality formulation. Whereas Derrida saw hostility as an integral element of hospitality, many migration theorists separate the two terms out so that a discourse or play of hospitality becomes a foil for hostile politics (see Gibson 2003; Kelly 2006). Hospitality comes to be treated not as something which ‘encompasses, frames, or explains people’s actions, but as an object of contention, concern, and debate’ (Candea 2012).

This theoretical shift is perhaps a result of Derrida’s more prescriptive intentions against anthropology’s descriptive purpose. Derridean philosophy points to an absolute, universal and utopian hospitality. At the same time, however, Derrida calls for giving ‘place to a determined, limitable, and delimitable – in a word, to a calculable – right or law…to a concrete politics and ethics’ of hospitality (Derrida 2000b, pp. 147–8). As Ulrik Pram Gad (2013, p. 122) argues, there is a role for philosophy in keeping the ‘pillars supporting the ceiling’ of political debate ‘erect and tall,’ but we also need to ‘make ourselves familiar with the strategic terrain we intend to intervene in.’ That is, ‘having shown that we can be philosophers, we need the courage to refuse this ambition and return to ethnographic empathy and ordinary language’ (Miller 2005, p. 15).

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The ‘strategic terrain’ in which I utilise Derrida’s notion of hospitality is the city of Shiraz. In doing so I explore the relationship between Iranian (hosts) and Afghan (guests) as it shapes and is shaped by the particular locale in which it plays out.