Introduction

Abstract

With the blurring of social boundaries in the global age, there has been considerable interdisciplinary attention on the concept of hospitality regarding the relationship between the self and the other. Jacques Derrida uncovered an aporia between the ethical requirement of absolute openness toward the other and the exclusionary sovereignty of the self. From an anthropological perspective, however, the philosophical discussion of hospitality pays little attention to details and scales of a particular situation with regard to receiving the other as a guest. Rather, it is through an ethnographically grounded engagement with hospitality that anthropologists should grasp the complexity of the situation relating the self to the other. In this special theme, we will attempt to hospitality as a heuristic concept for eliciting multiple heterogeneities of social relations and moral principles and thereby aim to reveal ethnographically diverse ways of relating the self to the other.