Afterword: Reciprocating the hospitality of these pages

Abstract

In accepting the hospitable invitation to respond to this collection, I draw out the themes of ambiguity and potential danger that hospitality entails for all parties. The vast cultural range of case studies, extending even to the role of mosquitoes in human habitations, perhaps owes something to the capacity of hospitality to enable translation among vastly different levels of social organization. But that is only one dimension of its besetting ambiguity, which can disrupt social certainties of many kinds. In particular, it subverts facile distinctions between disinterested and self-serving actions, and it allows skilled social actors to draw sometimes unexpected degrees of agency from the ..