Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia

Obligation, Enaction and Projects of Governance

Bibliographic Data

ID3055432
AuthorsDavid Sneath (University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2019
Issue231-232
Pages67-88
Publication date2019-11-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueL Homme (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0439-4216 • E-ISSN: 1953-8103
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/lhomme.35537
OpenAlexW2990506129
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited24

Hospitality is an everyday part of life on the Mongolian steppe. Visitors to any rural ail (« encampment ») expect to be offered food, drink and, if need be, a place for the night. Rather than a form of reciprocity, Mongolian everyday hospitality can be seen to be enactional, not transactional ; its practices are materialisations of the roles of host and guest and do not imply some sort of return. As Annette Weiner noted, the notion of reciprocity, derived from the practices of emerging mercantile elites of early-modern Europe, has dominated anthropological analysis of « exchange » at the expense of considering older aristocratic principles and, I argue, relations of obligation. Mongolian everyday hospitality does not imply acts of generosity directed towards any particular person ; it is an expression of the status of the householders and their ability to fulfil a public norm. I argue that such hospitality can be seen as both a product and producer of socio-political order ; not as a timeless feature of a holistic culture but as an artefact of historical projects of governance. Order is manifest in the rituals of domestic hospitality in which hosts and guests are physically arranged into positions of relative seniority and subordination. As such, hospitality serves as a mode of inclusion into an existing sociopolitical and cosmopolitical order. Since the overthrow of Mongolia's aristocracy, hospitality has been reframed as « traditional culture » within the modernist nation state, but the household still represents a micro-domain in which status is enacted through hospitality – the roles of host, guest, dependents, and attachments made manifest through actions and emplacements. An examination of hospitality as a set of practices generated by historical domains of power, and the social forms that flow from them, returns us to Kant's notion of hospitality as practices constitutive of political subjects

Everyday life · Generosity · Hospitality · Political science · Politics · Reciprocity (cultural anthropology · Social science · Sociology · Tourism · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Religion and Society Interactions