Hospitality: Its Functions and Limitations

One major function of hospitality—understood, as Collin's English Dictionary puts it, as a "kindness in welcoming strangers or guests"—is that of providing a way for negotiating the tensions that can exist between the fundamental human commitments to the establishment and maintenance of our own particular identities on the one hand and, on the other, to respect for all who share with us a common membership of the universal class of humanity as a whole. The status of guest provided by a welcoming offer of hospitality has thus to be recognized as being of an essentially temporary nature.