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*** Since apologies for cross-posting***


For all of you interested in hosts, guests, strangers and parasites, here's a short message to announce the release of the 2012 Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jrai.2012.18.issue-s1/issuetoc

Very best regards,

Giovanni and Matei

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The Return to Hospitality: Strangers, Guests and Ambiguous Encounters

Edited by Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col

"Imagine what anthropology might look like today if Marcel Mauss had chosen hospitality rather than the gift as the subject of his 1924 treatise (Mauss 2002 [1923-4]). In this alternative world, we would by now have a long-standing debate around multiple interpretations of Maussian hospitality; an exhaustive cross-cultural list of ethnographic vignettes of hospitality known to every undergraduate in the discipline; hospitality might well appear, in the way the gift now does, as a central trope in the discussion of a range of other themes (from ova donations to transactions with spirits); mentions of hospitality in other disciplines would be followed by a string of anthropological references. Taken together, the papers in this volume give a glimpse of this potential alternative present of anthropology."

From the introduction to the volume

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The last decade has witnessed an interdisciplinary resurgence of interest in the topic of hospitality and the ambiguous figures of the stranger and the parasite. This volume aims to put hospitality back on the anthropological agenda, by presenting ethnographically grounded, theoretically innovative engagements reflecting a broad geographic and thematic range. From Tibetan poisoners-parasites to ghostly visitors in Laos, from astronauts' handshakes in outer space to Amazonian pet-guests and from the irreverence and wit of Afghan traders to law-defying hosts in Corsica, the articles in this volume offer hospitality as a heuristic for rethinking alterity and humanity. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface (pages Siii–Siv)
Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col

The return to hospitality (pages S1–S19)
MATEI CANDEA and GIOVANNI DA COL

Breaking hospitality apart: bad hosts, bad guests, and the problem of sovereignty (pages S20–S33)
ANDREW SHRYOCK

Derrida en Corse? Hospitality as scale-free abstraction (pages S34–S48)
MATEI CANDEA

Making guests, making ‘liveliness’: the transformative substances and sounds of Manggarai hospitality (pages S49–S62)
CATHERINE ALLERTON

Hospitality and tone: holding patterns for strangeness in rural Mongolia (pages S63–S75)
CAROLINE HUMPHREY

Arresting hospitality: the case of the ‘handshake in space’ (pages S76–S89)
DEBBORA BATTAGLIA

Visitors from hell: transformative hospitality to ghosts in a Lao Buddhist festival (pages S90–S102)
PATRICE LADWIG

The captive guest: spider webs of hospitality among the Nuosu of Southwest China (pages S103–S116)
KATHERINE SWANCUTT

Fatal embrace: trading in hospitality on the frontiers of South and Central Asia (pages S117–S130)
MAGNUS MARSDEN

Parasitic Chinese, vengeful Russians: ghosts, strangers, and reciprocity in Mongolia (pages S131–S144)
GREGORY DELAPLACE

The experimental hut: hosting vectors (pages S145–S160)
ANN H. KELLY

‘Luck in the double focus’: ritualized hospitality in Melanesia (pages S161–S174)
ROY WAGNER

The poisoner and the parasite: cosmoeconomics, fear, and hospitality among Dechen Tibetans (pages S175–S195)
GIOVANNI DA COL

The friend, the enemy, and the anthropologist: hostility and hospitality among the Parakanã (Amazonia, Brazil) (pages S196–S209)
CARLOS FAUSTO

Afterword: reciprocating the hospitality of these pages (pages S210–S217)
MICHAEL HERZFELD



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