Hospitality going back to the future

31 October, 2013

Hospitality going back to the future

The arrival of visitors is an important moment for people of many cultures.

Custom dictates they be welcomed and fed, often with the best offerings available. Failure to provide the appropriate level of hospitality can be seen as an unforgivable slight on the host and an insult to the visitor.

This traditional view of hospitality has changed markedly over time and those changes - and the implications of them - will be the subject of a public lecture by visiting British academic Alison Phipps at the University of Waikato on 12 November.

Professor Phipps is from the University of Glasgow where she is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies, and Co-Convener of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network. In 2012 she received an OBE for Services to Education and Intercultural and Interreligious Relations.

She says the lecture will be “taking a fresh look at giving and receiving hospitality in the 21st Century, in a rapidly changing world”.

Prof Phipps has spent years researching both the giving and receiving of hospitality, in particular how it works in situations where people are living under occupation, such as in Syria and Palestine, with refugees and asylum seekers in Glasgow, and also within the Occupy movement, the worldwide protest movement against social and economic inequality.

Whereas the Occupy movement freely chose to operate outside the market economy, that was not the case in occupied territories.

“They are under occupation, so what’s similar and different?”

She says there is evidence people are reverting to or reinventing more traditional ways of giving and receiving hospitality which sit outside the current market-driven model, which mostly involves a financial transaction.

“The Occupy movement tried to operate outside the market and with different market values. The Occupy people were fed, housed and organised their own education creatively changing the standard market model. It wasn’t a financial contract, it was voluntary, and hospitality looked and felt different under these circumstances” she says.

Professor Phipps says this form of hospitality, where things are given and received with no financial transaction taking place, has its origins in ancient times and many of these customs are being reinvented for today, largely due to failures within the current market-based economy and people questioning the way the world is heading.

“The systems we’ve used for years have some quite big cracks in them,” she says.

The Occupy movement hinted at an alternative economic system, which Professor Phipps says could, over time, change the way the world works.

“We may see a gentle, ethical revolution as countries seem to be abandoning notions of democracy and more people don’t fit into the model,” she says.

“I think, at the moment, there is something interesting going on.”

Professor Phipps’ lecture, Hospitality and Occupation, takes place in lecture theatre SG.02 at 5.30pm on Tuesday 12 November.

ENDS

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