In: Marchand, D., Weiss, K., Pol, E. (Direction). 100 Key Concepts in Environmental Psychology. Routledge, 2023, p. 71-74
Hospitality is the act of meeting and mutual recognition requiring at least two people as well a space in which to take place. We call that place home, whether it refers to a built dwelling, a neighborhood, a city, a country, or the Earth.
Hospitality is a major value, carrying a powerful evocative force stemming from ancient Greek and Roman body of ethical thought, the foundational philosophical, ethical, and theological texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The figure of Abraham remains a guiding reference and a living part the monotheistic traditions as he embodies unconditional hospitality through his tent’s four openings at the four cardinal points to welcome any traveler arriving from all directions, extending full and fearless hospitality to unknown people, showing complete discretion as to their origins, affiliations, or reasons for their travels, and eagerness to bring material and spiritual comfort to them. Hospitality remains a forceful part of our living humanistic worldview. It is, indeed, understood as an ethical risk taking.
Few ever confess that they are not hospitable and routinely assume the quasi-synonymy between hospitality and warm welcome. Yet, an elaborate set of time, spatial, and moral rules of hospitality are followed by both hosting and hosted hosts to ensure its regulation and dynamics, before, during and after their encounter, through a range of material and symbolic markers enforced by the potential hosting host. Such rules help securing homes, thus inevitably recognizing there is a risk, if not a danger, of confrontation and hostility between both hosts. They are supposed to tame and limit open hostility, confine it to a latent state, while, at the same time leaving room for welcome.
From the apparently benign but powerfully symbolic force of the fence marking the end of the public domain from the beginning of the potential hosting hosts’ private sphere of his house, and the dramatic, sometimes ceremonial walk and almost theatrical approach to the alley, the porch or the stairs, the guests walk to the complex place that is the threshold. This is the place where the first threat of intrusion can occur, where the hosting hosts’ sovereignty might be questioned. Indeed, it is already shaking on its foundation. Alertness and eager screening of the guests happen there, in a silent confrontation which will be resolved only by the decisive steps taken by the hosting hosts to welcome or not their visitors. The hosting hosts must answer immediately the inner question of allowing – or not – the guests “to be” within his house, and the encounter between both sides to “take place” into it.
Because the guests are defined by their position of exteriority to the home, the nature of the threshold is the place where the latent hostility contained in hospitality is evaluated, hopefully tamed, and resolved into a tentative welcome. That welcome
constitutes an implicit contract, an engagement for mutual restraint and respect where the hosting host remains a sovereign in his home, dictating the uses of its territories and time related practices. It engages the guest to accept to be served by the host without usurping the latter’s place as sovereign in their home nor becoming a parasite. To the eyes of the hosting hosts, the threshold is transgressive, as it represents the place where lies the mutual acquiescence to the terms of such contract.
The vestibule, where the hosting host re-enters into their own home, thus signaling the welcome, becomes then the place of the first appeasement between hosts and guest and opening a wider possibility for mutual recognition.
From near-home territories to the vestibule, the dance between the desire to act hospitably and the potential reversal of the latter into hostility is on the mind of everyone involved. It is a dance made more elaborate by a number and nature of several material elements that highlight the complexity of the issue at hand. A traditional doorknocker, for example, upholds the suspense of who is coming from the outside world until the moment when the host opens the door. The more suspicious doorbell with camera enacts hospitality from a place of distrust. The careful screening of guests through the door intercom system is equivalent to stronger frontiers between the outside world and the private home sphere. In more upscale residential buildings, a finely furnished and spacious entrance impresses social status on the entering visitors, while stopping their gaze from preying beyond the aesthetics of the controlled façade.
The dynamics of hospitality take on a special character with the door to the house. This Janus figure opens to two antagonistic worlds, separating while at once bridging the spatially and temporally self-centered domestic sphere with the shared public domain. The door’s shape, size, materials, and symbolism come together in an infinite play on sternness, ambiguous transparency, austere closure, or casual protection of the home. The door is everything but passivity. It addresses the issue of strangeness and foreignness of potential visitors, heightening the welcoming host’s confrontation with alterity, the strength of their identity and, most of all, their inner capacity to dwell safely within themselves.
People are permanently aware that they are securing their homes to keep the outside world out. They want to hold their authority over who may enter their home, to deny to the guest, as both their prisoner and potential master, the power to lord over them or to places them at his/her mercy. Contrary to Abraham, but nevertheless in line with his stature as a guiding unconditional hospitality figure, they maintain their sovereignty over their homes by exercising filtering, and a degree of violence, while, at the same time, transcending their fears and extending conditional hospitality.
Potential guests interrupt their hosting hosts’ mental and spatial focus on themselves, as well as the flow of their personal time. Hospitality thus requests that hosting and hosted hosts assume a double movement or self-expropriation and interruption of their own self-centeredness. They both must allow time and room for the other, let him/her be in their respective homes, step inside each other’s dwellings for each one to “take place” and be able to express themselves at their own time. This logic of gift and counter-gift in hospitality implies forms of renunciations and reciprocity, as well as the intentional and benevolent interruption of the flow of one’s personal time.
It is at the pivotal moment when the hosting host makes the effort to get beyond and above his centeredness on his own self to welcome a guest, that they are most vulnerable to the blurring of boundaries between their self and the self of the guest.
Separation, which guarantees the strength of the subject’s intimate identity, becomes unstable and must be restored by the hosting host.
The guest however faces that same risk as he must assume, at the same time as his host, an effort for mutual recognition. Under these conditions of respect for material and symbolic markers and of shared efforts towards self-limitation, hospitality indeed takes place.
