Introduction: Mediterranean Migrant Hospitalities

This book takes some of the insights of the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. Anthropology has revisited the concept of hospitality in recent years, drawing on the insights of ethnographers of the Mediterranean, who ground the idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge the ways in which the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers. The volume does not attempt to define a distinctive Mediterranean hospitality, but explores the potential of the concept of hospitality to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception.