In search of welcome: tracing hospitality in the Sicilian borderlands

Thesis

Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in western Sicily, this thesis reconsiders the classical anthropological theme of hospitality. Sicily is an island marked by emigration and a sense of political and economic marginalisation, manifested in locals’ anxieties for their futures. Over the past thirty years, Sicily has also emerged as a place of first arrival for people crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe. The island has become part of the spectacle of the EU border in which professed state-level hospitality is unmatched in practice, or else enables the violent and exclusionary business of bordering to occur. Often, this mismatch between what is professed and what occurs in grounded form leads people to feel a sense of the surreal or an emptiness of meaning.

My work shows that other forms of what I call ‘grounded hospitality’ emerged precisely in the gap between professed state hospitality and the social realities of the Sicilian borderlands. Where people felt that state bordering forces took control away from them, grounded hospitality emerged as a way to take back control. For many who felt marginalised – whether elite Sicilians in Palermo, undocumented migrants living in informal encampments, or underpaid reception workers in the state centres – welcoming others through hospitality emerged as a means of trying to exert control over one’s self and one’s home in such a way that permitted both connection and autonomy, and restored meaning.

In this thesis, I argue that hospitality is characterised by a tension between welcome and control. Hospitality could not fully upend state structures or social hierarchies, and often played into them. Studying hospitality in Sicily can nonetheless teach us about how people living in borderlands make meaning out of the arrival and presence of ‘others’ in a way that stands at a remove from state-based understandings of hospitality.

Authors: Neil, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-zbmvpgymx
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: hospitality; welcome and reception; Mediterranean migration; borderlands; EU border
• Subjects: Italian Studies; Anthropology; Migration Studies