The Stranger As My Guest – A Critical Anthropologyof Hospitality

Notions of informal encounter and relational idiom illuminate ambiguous experiences of tourism harassment, economic transactions, hospitality, friendship, and festive and sexual relationships. Comparing these various connections, the author shows the potential of touristic encounters to redefine their moral foundations, power dynamics, and implications, offering new insights into how contemporary relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

“The book contributes to our understanding of what it is like to live in the contemporary Pacific. Doing this through the lens of mortuary rituals is both original and relevant.”

Based on a detailed ethnography, this book explores the promises and expectations of tourism in Cuba, drawing attention to the challenges that tourists and local people face in establishing meaningful connections with each other. Notions of informal encounter and relational idiom illuminate ambiguous experiences of tourism harassment, economic transactions, hospitality, friendship, and festive and sexual relationships. Comparing these various connections, the author shows the potential of touristic encounters to redefine their moral foundations, power dynamics, and implications, offering new insights into how contemporary relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

“This book is an important contribution to the growing literature on appropriation and the aesthetics of change. Conceiving creativity as process rather than outcome is the key argument of the book whose contributors discuss the argument in numerous ways and case studies.” • Peter Probst, Tufts University

Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place.