Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems and Adoption by Judith Still (review)

Much recent scholarship on the vastly interdisciplinary subject of hospitality has pitted a theory of the universal and unconditional gesture of welcome against the concrete experience of relations to others afforded within given juridical and political limitations. Building on her previous study Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2010; see French Studies, 66 (2012), 581–82), Judith Still now shifts the focus from ‘the impossibility of hospitality’ to the constraints and relations of power within which any hospitality is achieved, or, in her terms, to ‘the moral and social codes that pervert the law [of hospitality] because they limit it, and which thereby also render it possible’ (p. 8). In place of the more common normative account of hospitality, Still’s book suggests that hospitality is better defined by examining its most liminal manifestations: cannibalism, bad guests, harems as hospices, and adoption (barely masking as sexual predation), as well as other gestures of hospitality between unequal parties, at home or abroad. Taking as its starting point the Encyclopédie’s entry for ‘hospitalité’, which already identifies the commonplaces of the topos that endure in modern analysis (gestures of welcome, sharing food, gifts, rituals of bathing, naming or not knowing names), the book moves past the idea of universal virtue, identifying instead the breakdown of hospitality as constitutive of its makeup: the art of being a good host or guest has been lost, exists only in a distant time and place, is too often supplanted by the bad guest whose unwanted tokens are at times more decisive than any gift. The breadth of Still’s corpus masterfully supports her argument that hospitality is, above all, a historically specific relation. She juxtaposes a wide array of contexts, ranging from the New World to the Orient — including Persia, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire — and Europe, and through a broad range of texts, from early travel narratives to the emblematic works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, to early ethnographic fiction (such as the diamond merchant Jean Chardin’s travels to Persia), and to letters and natural history accounts of lands and peoples newly encountered. Above all, her focus is on hospitality as an interlocutory situation and verbal strategy, where a given gesture, individual, or group can be interpreted in opposite ways or can change entirely. From treacherous guests usurping their hosts’ place in the New World, Europeans can also become dangerous hosts, in an original look at gendered relations of hospitality through adoption and its abuses. Cannibalism, for example, is shown to be at once a cultural practice, a contingent necessity, or a representation of other cultures that legitimates a relation of power. While the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune describes the ‘savage’ as an ‘exocannibal’, the British sailor Samuel Hearne recounts a similar scene — individuals picking lice off of each other — as playful grooming. Judith Still skillfully brings to bear her deep-seated understanding of hospitality as theory and practice on a broad and often little-studied corpus, opening a dialogue across centuries that is essential reading to scholars with regard both to questions of hospitality writ large and to the Enlightenment and its legacies.