Hospitality and eroticism

Description
This paper aims to provoke discussion and reflection on the role of the erotic in the
cultivation of spaces of hospitality, and to provide a theoretical consideration of the structural
similarities of hospitality and eroticism.

International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Hospitality and eroticism
Hazel Andrews Les Roberts Tom Selwyn
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Hazel Andrews Les Roberts Tom Selwyn, (2007),"Hospitality and eroticism", International J ournal of
Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 1 Iss 3 pp. 247 - 262
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Hospitality and eroticism
Hazel Andrews
Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure,
Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
Les Roberts
Schools of Architecture/Politics & Communication Studies,
The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, and
Tom Selwyn
Department of Business and Service Sector, International Institute of Culture,
Tourism and Development, London Metropolitan University, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to provoke discussion and re?ection on the role of the erotic in the
cultivation of spaces of hospitality, and to provide a theoretical consideration of the structural
similarities of hospitality and eroticism.
Design/methodology/approach – With reference to classical studies as well as debates in the
social science literature, the paper starts by examining some of the theoretical and philosophical
underpinnings to hospitality and eroticism. It then develops this analysis by considering examples
drawn from ethnographic studies of “traditional” hospitality settings as well as of commercial
hospitality environments of charter tourism.
Findings – The main outcome of the discussion is to demonstrate the structural relations between
hospitality and eroticism. By situating the analysis within a broad theoretical and ethnographic
context, it is shown that the erotic has historically functioned as a socially-binding and communicative
mode of social intercourse that, while undermined by the demands of a market-based culture of
commercial hospitality, is also able to ?ourish within these same adverse conditions.
Research limitations/implications – This paper invites further research into the connections
between hospitality and eroticism in settings similar to and different from those described in the paper.
A fuller ethnographic study of the relationship between the two is needed, as well as an exploration of
more theoretical perspectives on hospitality drawn from the social science literature.
Practical implications – By highlighting the socially binding role of eroticism in the structuring of
host-guest relations, the paper draws on and contributes to a broader politics of love and sensuality
that will inform critical re?ections on commercial and market-driven hospitality practices.
Originality/value – This paper provides an original insight into the interrelationship between
hospitality and eroticism. It further illuminates previous writings on both subjects but particularly
that of eroticism and is supported by empirical data. It is of particular interest to those studying
hospitality from a social science perspective.
Keywords Hospitality, Eroticism, Love, Stranger, Transformation, Danger, Divinity, Senses
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
This paper discusses hospitality and eroticism in order to stimulate re?ection on the
nature of each and the relationship of one to the other. Part of what follows points up, in
general terms, some of the continuities between the two. A slightly greater part concerns
the role of eroticismin the cultivation of spaces of hospitality. We frame our analysis part
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1750-6182.htm
Hospitality and
eroticism
247
Received December 2006
Revised January 2007
Accepted April 2007
International Journal of Culture,
Tourism and Hospitality Research
Vol. 1 No. 3, 2007
pp. 247-262
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1750-6182
DOI 10.1108/17506180710817774
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theoretically, part philosophically, and part ethnographically. The early, and larger, part
of the paper considers meanings of, andrelationships between, hospitalityanderoticismin
the classical and “traditional” worlds. Following work by a number of sociologists and
other social scientists concerned with the fate of eroticismin the modern and post-modern
world, we also seek, inthe latter part of the paper, to comment onrecent developments and
transformations in the meanings and functions of the erotic in one commercial setting
(enabling brief general re?ections on the place of the erotic in market societies such as our
own). Here, inways that echo manyof the conclusions of the sociological literature referred
to, eroticism appears at ?rst sight to have cut loose from its classical and traditional
moorings altogether. But, whilst seeking to illustrate ethnographicallyhowthis is actually
manifest onthe groundina particular ethnographic setting, we also argue that even inthis
highly commercial context there is still evidence of a kind of sociable “eroticism of the
everyday” that has effectively resisted the depredations of the market.
The organizationof the paper is as follows. We start byframingthe subject of hospitality
anderoticismtheoretically. We thenconsider the two principal terms philosophically, using
Plato’s Symposiumand Homer’s Odyssey to do so. The third section is mainly ethnographic
and takes the lead from Pitt-Rivers’ (1977) articulation of the two themes. We use two
ethnographic examples, one fromthe United Arab Emirates (UAE), the other fromIndia to
consolidate our views of hospitality and eroticism in traditional settings. Fourthly, we use
ethnographic material froma study of charter tourismin the Spanish Island of Mallorca to
follow the lines of thought about the fate of both hospitality and eroticism in contexts of
high commercialism. We conclude by drawing some of the threads together.
Theoretical framing
First principles
Hospitality and eroticism share several structural and functional properties. Both are
grounded in ?elds of physical relations shaped and de?ned by social, as well as moral
and cultural structures (Selwyn, 2007). Being shaped by ideas about social and
physical solidarity and order, both involve multi-stranded relationships between
physical bodies and social boundaries. As Gero (2003) states, whilst “feasts present an
occasion to experience a commonality, like other practices that help forge new social
relations, one learns these lessons with the body, underscored by sensuousness”.
Feasting resembles sex in its participation in the establishment of a new social order:
“something that must be undertaken in the ?esh and experienced in the person” (p. 287).
Furthermore, both hospitality and eroticism are attended by danger and divinity.
For example, there is always a danger that a guest will turn out to be an enemy or
stranger unable or unwilling to be transformed into a friend. In such a case the “fragile
equilibrium” (between hosts and guests) that “the ?ne art of hospitality” is designed to
contain and transform is “destabilised” (Friese, 2004, p. 70). Furthermore, as Hocart
(1952, originally 1927) observed, the idea of guests being touched by the divine if not
actually being divinities themselves (sometimes in disguise) was one routinely adopted
by the ancients. There are elements of danger in the erotic too. By de?nition, for
example, eroticism thrives on the borders of the acceptable and unacceptable, taste and
distaste, passion and order. Indeed, eroticism becomes itself, precisely, by its ability not
only to contain these antimonies simultaneously but also to test and stretch the borders
almost – but never completely – to breaking point. On this issue Jusdanis (1987, p. 97)
argues that, in his erotic poems, the Egyptian poet Cavafy stresses the close kinship of
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eroticism and transgression, advocating that poetry and eroticism positively require
dissent from social norms. We would certainly agree that poetry and other forms of
imaginative writing required, as it were, regular visits to the borders of the taken for
granted world and its moral strictures. And yet Cavafy also observes that art,
aestheticism, and eroticism all exist on the edge of acceptability. We can take from this
that the danger lies in the possibility that a border will actually be breached – in which
case what started as erotic might simply de-compose into something distasteful,
pornographic, and/or boring, the last named arguably the principal enemy of the erotic.
As for the relation between the erotic and the divine, early discussions about the nature
of eroticism were, of course, conducted (as in the Symposium) by way of re?ections on
the nature of Eros, personi?cation, and god, of love who, emerging from chaos was
instrumental in bringing order and harmony to the cosmos.
A number of writers in the ?eld of eroticism follow Paz (1993) in linking the erotic
with sex and love in a triangular relationship. In this formulation the erotic appears as
belonging to the sphere of the cultural and aesthetic, love to feelings, and sex to desire.
Featherstone (1999, p. 1) follows this line of thought by quoting Bauman’s (1999)
observation that “eroticism is the cultural processing of sex”. Along the same lines, in
her study of the iconography of a collection of highly sexually explicit pre-Columbian
Peruvian earthen pots, Gero (2004, p. 19) observes:
Ritual expression of enactments of sex are embedded in wider social structures: like feasting,
dancing, and drinking the deeply human sex response is conditioned by a cultural context to
serve cultural ends and, in turn, to reproduce that cultural context.
We would like to make the obvious rider to this: namely that cultural and social
reproduction necessarily also involves constant transformations over time. Individual
persons and the social collectivities (such as kinship groups) to which they belong are
inevitably caught up in constantly renewing processes of alliance formation, structural
evolution, reproduction, splitting, the forging of new alliances, and so on ad in?nitum.
What role does eroticismplay in this scheme of things? To drawon Gero (2004) again:
The effectiveness of sex in symbolic life as an activity that is displayed iconographically,
emerges not only because its viewers know what it means but also because they know how it
feels, and the feelings are powerful and blissful, ecstatic (moving) the bounded self into a
universe of feeling, connecting to the divine.
In other words, the sphere of the erotic is one that, touched by the sense of the sacred and
outside ordinary time, space, and quotidian social structure, provides us with a reservoir
of deep feelings to use in the service of social and physical transformations (all of which
may be quite familiar to students of rites of passage). In suggesting that in entering a
?eld of speci?cally sexual feelings, we enter a world that, in Gero’s (2004) words, is:
A vital source of shared meanings: joking, shaming, blaming, pairing, individuating.
Heightened feelings, therefore, obviously, attend and de?ne erotic practices. Hospitality
too involves the generation of heightened feelings amongst both hosts and guests.
Pre-eminently, both hospitality and the erotic are thus concerned with the use and
deployment of the senses – including taste, smell, touch, sound, sight, and awareness of
temperature. It is not surprising, therefore, that substances such as food, perfume,
special clothing, along with particular kinds of music, decorative objects (including
lights), and heat (cold is seldom associated with either hospitality or eroticism) should
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play signi?cant roles in commensal gatherings and on erotic occasions as symbolic
instruments designed to test and re-draw boundaries, including that between the
physical and the social. In short, heightened awareness of physicality and sensuality is
an essential prerequisite to the transformations of existing social arrangements that acts
of hospitalityanderotic practices seekto make. We will look at this more closely belowin
relation to two hospitality rituals associated with traditional marriage ceremonies.
Our “?rst principles” thus locate the erotic within an aesthetic, cultural, and
expressive sphere of human activity that (following Paz, 1993) is attached in a triangular
relationship to a sphere of feelings (in which love is found) and one of desire (including
sexual desire). They also look to the realm of hospitality and the heightened feelings,
routinely including “erotic” ones, to be found therein as means to engender the senses of
both social solidarity and transformation that acts of hospitality seek to promote.
We may now move from these relatively a-historical and a-geographical
generalisations to more contextualised sociological studies of eroticism in
contemporary society (always bearing in mind, of course, our overall aim of
bringing eroticism into the discussion of hospitality).
Eroticism and the market
Eros, reduced to pure “sex” has become a commodity; a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or
rather, man himself becomes a commodity (Pope Benedict XVI, BBC, 2006).
Democratic capitalist society has applied the impersonal laws of the market and the
technology of mass production to erotic life (Paz, 1993, p. 147).
The opening quotation above is an extract from the ?rst encyclical delivered by the
present Pope, arguing here that the erotic has been reduced in contemporary capitalist
society to mere sex and that one of the consequences has been that something has been
lost to human kind through the pressures of economic forces. Other writers have
conceived of this loss in terms of a rupture with the natural order of things. For example,
an argument advanced by Marcuse (1987) with particular reference to the erotic is that
natural or instinctual ways of being in the world are sublimated to the point that people
in capitalist society become disengaged fromtheir “near senses” of smell and touch. For
Marcuse, these senses are more associated with pleasure and sexual activities than the
“far senses” of the oral and the visual. According to him, modern society represses
pleasure. “The free grati?cation of man’s instinctual needs is incompatible with civilized
society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress”
(Marcuse, 1987, p. 3). Thus, from childhood, the libido is repressed in a way that
effectively collapses the relation between individual desire and socially constructed
expressions of the erotic (that might be found, for example, in the kind of ritual settings
we describe shortly) into one. What is left is unconscious (and sublimated) individual
desire. It is this that becomes the driving force of capitalist society. As he puts it: “The
societal authority is absorbed into the ‘conscience’ and into the unconscious of the
individual and works as his own desire, morality, and ful?llment” (Marcuse, 1987, p. 46).
This is a development to be explained by the fact that, as an economic system, capitalism
requires people to surrender control of themselves and become subject to the market: a
fact that steers minds away fromthe dangerous thought that they could be autonomous
and gain satisfaction from practices and relationships outside the net of market forces.
For Marcuse (1987, p. 100) “the high standard of living in the domain of the great
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corporations is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that
individuals buy control their needs and petri?es their faculties”.
The argument put forward by Marcuse in some ways echoes the approach taken to
eroticism by Bataille (1957). He too argues that it is society or the cultural that thwart the
immediate satisfaction of desires. For Bataille, work acts to repress impulses or natural
urges, offeringinsteadthe promise of a later reward. Society, andparticularlyChristianity,
has made sexual behaviour a hidden activity with associated prohibitions on nudity or
exposures of ?esh that might generate erotic feelings. “Underlying eroticism” he argues,
“is the feeling of something bursting: of the violence accompanying an explosion” (1957,
p. 93). Such a stance is consistent with Bataille’s view of the body being the seat of
emotional and sexual passions which could in certain circumstances lead on to protests
against the rationalisation and bureaucratic regulation associated with capitalism.
Giddens (1992, p. 202) has argued that the erotic, as a ?eld of communication in which
feelings and emotions are transmitted, has been taken out of the hands of individuals
and kinship groups by institutions that seek to curb its articulation outside the rational
and bureaucratised frameworks associated with the advancement of capitalism.
According to himthe overall effect is to limit the autonomy of individuals and to create a
greater sense of dependency on those institutions that assume the task of shaping social
relations (along, we might add, with economic and political relations too).
In short, the argument by these and other writers turns on a view of the market that
sees it working to repress pleasure and sexual feelings, to sublimate them, and to
encourage their re-emergence (suitably tamed and transformed) in the desire to work
for future, rather than immediate, reward. At the same time, the now hidden sexual
feelings are, so to speak, “given back” in the shape of individual sexual desire, by the
commercial corporations that articulate the system as a whole. Such feelings are here
constrained only by conscience (not to mention police and the law) rather than within
family, kinship, class, or other socio-ideological structural frameworks.
We will come back to these arguments later on. For now we would say that whilst
we feel sympathetic to some of the intellectual and analytical claims and implications
of these writers, we would like to insist on the possibility that, even now, there are
actual and identi?able counter ?ows, opportunities for resistance, and continuing
possibilities of cultivating an “erotic of the everyday” by individual persons and
groups who might appear at ?rst sight terminally subject to seemingly all conquering
market forces and the processes of rationalisation that go with them.
Philosophical framing
So far we have made some generalisations about the nature and kinship of hospitality and
eroticismandbrie?yreportedonaselectionof more or less well-knownviews onthe relation
betweeneroticismandthe market. The remainder of the paper is designedtoapproachthese
ideas from another angle and work our way towards three ethnographic readings from
which vantage point we will make some ?nal observations. We will thus step back to the
beginning (or, at least, one beginning) to consider the Symposium and the Odyssey.
Plato’s (1951) Symposium is based on the re?ections and conversations about the
nature of love and the god Eros between guests at a meal in the house of Agathon in
Athens. Since a substantial part of our paper concerns the social basis of eroticism it is
worth pointing out at the outset that the Greek word symposion means, narrowly,
“drinking together” and, more broadly, “being together” and that this is fundamental to
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anyunderstanding not onlyof the Symposiumitself (Geier, 2002, p. 23) but, inour view, the
nature of the erotic itself.
According to the guests at the banquet, love and the erotic have the following
intersecting qualities.
First, according to Phaedrus, love is primordial and autocthanous (he quotes Hesiod
to the effect that out of chaos was born the earth and then love). As the oldest of the
gods, the primary function of Eros was to bring order to the chaos. Thereafter it was
love that set the course of orderly life on earth.
Other guests tookupthe ideaof love andthe erotic beingthe foundationfor order froma
variety of slightly different angles. Pausanias, for example, stressed the dual aspects of
love, one physical (base) the other “heavenly” and “noble” the implication being that true
love necessarilycontains bothaspects. We mayput this ina slightlydifferent way, namely
that whilst love is assuredly associated with the physical desire of one individual for
another individual, it comes fully into itself when this physical desire is placed within a
framework of a care for the other that, in turn, is rooted in an understanding of how the
other will fare in the social world. Thus, according to Pausanias the physical desire of an
older man for his boy/lover is truly loving when it is accompanied by a concern by the
former for the wellbeing of the latter’s intelligence and moral excellence as he moves
through the social world. For Aristophanes the orderly nature of the erotic stems fromthe
overarching quest for unity that individuals have for their (literal) “other halves”: erotic
feelings being based on the fundamental desire for the re-uni?cation of the halves of the
primordial mythological creatures split intwo byZeus. The point made bybothPausanias
and Aristophanes here is the propensity of the erotic to lead to bringing together,
uni?cation, and establishment/re-establishment of orderly relationships. This approach
was supported by the medical doctor Eryximachus who observed that “the desire and the
pursuit of integrity and union is that (which) we all love”.
At this point the question of pleasure and enjoyment enters the picture. For
Aristophanes these sentiments (which we might chose to term “sexual” – in whatever
actual physical form they might come to be expressed) derive precisely from the sense of
encountering unity. We may notice, in passing, and recalling that for Aristophanes
primordial creatures took three forms – male/male, female/female, and male/female – that
it wouldbe perfectlypossible for unityto be encounteredbetweentwo males or two females
just as much as one male and one female. Love, fashioned froma quest for order and unity
and based on bothbase desire and noble disposition, could thus be found (for Aristophanes
at any rate) in relations between partners of the same sex just as much as between partners
of different sexes.
There are two further insights we wouldlike todrawfromthe Symposiumonthe nature
of love and the erotic: both are central to our later arguments. The ?rst is Socrates’s
insistence that love derives fromawareness by a person of what he or she lacks – and the
potential to ?ll this lack in the course of a loving relationship. The emphasis here is clearly
not onlyso much onthe unity stressed bythe others but also oncompleteness. As Socrates
says “ the desiring thing desires what it is lacking or does not desire unless it is lacking”.
The second comes from the re?ections of the host, Agathon, on the nature of the erotic.
“Love” he re?ects, “is young, tender, and soft . . . the most moist and liquid of all divinities
. . . a manifestation of the liquid and ?owing symmetry of his (i.e. love’s) form”.
The Symposium thus suggests that love and the erotic (which in the ?gure of Eros are
undistinguishable – a point that we would like to stress throughout the paper) start froma
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desire for unity and completeness predicated on a sense of social and ethical order. That
these philosophical foundations are expressed in the context of an encounter between the
host and his guests on the occasion of a meal is, for present purposes, highly signi?cant
because it places the erotic centre stage in a space in which hospitality is given and
received. The sense of the erotic being “moist” and of “?uid form” in Agathon’s terms, will
be worked out in later parts of the paper. Suf?cient to say at this point that ?uidity, ?rst
cousin to ?exibility, adaptability, spontaneity, is, we would argue on anthropological ?rst
principles, precisely what order lacks but which it thus desires. We know from such
passage rites as those associated with birth, marriage, and death that social order needs
continuouslyto refreshitself. Inthis sense, it depends ina fundamental wayonchange and
periods of disorder (as all passage rites stress). The metaphor of the erotic as the moist or
liquid handmaiden of such social renewal seems entirely ?tting.
Turning to the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem recounting Odysseus’ long homecoming
journey from Troy to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope, what is particularly noteworthy
in the present context is the rich narrative detail afforded to the home and domestic
environment, and the observance (and inversion) of the sacred laws of hospitality that
govern host-guest relations (xenia) in the Homeric moral universe. Taking each of these
points in turn, we wish to highlight, on the one hand, the sensuousness of the Homeric
hospitality setting that is evidenced in the poem, and, on the other, the framework of
theoxeny within which much of the host-guest encounters in The Odyssey take place,
and from which certain erotic associations and extrapolations may be drawn.
In structural terms, “home” as van den Abbeele (1992, p. xix) has observed, is a place
that can only truly be known at the price of its being lost. Narratives and metaphors of
travel thus typically have an ideological function in that they secure and reinforce the
positing of an oikos, or domus (the Latin translation of oikos) – a privileged point of
departure and eventual return (van den Abbeele, 1992, p. xix). In this regard The Odyssey
is no exception: the oikonomia (law of the household), insofar as it is coterminous with
the prevailing laws of hospitality (Derrida, 2000a, p. 4), places Ithaca structurally and
thematically at the centre of the narrative. Accordingly, despite being known more
popularly as a tale of travel and adventure, it should be noted that, of The Odyssey’s 24
books, only eight depict the actual wanderings of Odysseus and his men, the remainder
taking place almost exclusively within the familial domus of Ithaca and its environs.
Driven by his unwavering love for Penelope, Odysseus’ quest for home and identity
unfolds against the backdropof a subversionof the Homeric laws of hospitalityinthe form
of the suitors’ appropriation, in his absence, of Odysseus’ palace. By deviating from the
conventions of the Homeric hospitality scene, the suitors come to preside over a household
in which the sacred and ritual dimension that would otherwise frame the hospitality
setting is noticeably absent: practices of libation and sacri?ce, for example, are reduced to
merely“drinking” and“feasting”, their consumptioncharacterisedinterms of “outrageous
excess” (Reece, 1993, p. 173). Similarly, declarations of covetous intent towards Penelope
are marked not so much by a ritual formality of seduction, but rather by the “clamorous”
demands for her sexual attention (Homer, 1980, pp. 9-10). The de-coupling of these desires
and practices from the wider moral universe – a development that bears certain
comparisons with contemporary examples from the hospitality industry, as we discuss
below – stands in stark contrast to the socially-embedded and embodied conventions of
Homeric hospitality.
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In Reece’s (1993) study of these conventions, he identi?es several recurrent motifs of
hospitality that structure the various host-guest encounters that occur throughout the
epic. What these conventions in part reveal is the sensuous, tactile and essentially
transformative nature of the experience of hospitality evoked by the Homeric guest.
For example, the description given of Telemachus’ visit to the palace of Menelaus to
seek news of his father (Odysseus), provides a good illustration of two of the central
motifs: that of the bath and the feast; the latter typically given over to rich and often
elaborate description of the food preparation and the service provided to the guests:
The guests themselves, escorted onto the stately palace, were ?lled with wonder at what they
saw in the monarch’s house; for a radiance like that of sun or moon ?lled the high halls of
King Menelaus. When they had both gazed their ?ll, they went to the polished baths to bathe.
They were washed by maids, were anointed with oil, and had tunics and woollen cloaks put
around them; then they took their seats beside Menelaus the son of Atreus. Another maid
brought water in a ?ne golden jug and poured it over their hands for washing, holding a
silver basin below; then she drew up a polished table by them. The trusted housekeeper came
and put bread where they could reach it; she had many kinds of food as well, and gave
ungrudgingly of her store (Homer, 1980, p. 36).
Commentingonthe lavishattentiongivento everydayobjects andactions – the warmbeds
andperfumedbaths, the wine vessels andsilverware, the eatinganddrinking, the beautiful
architecture, the pleasures of the after dinner entertainment – Johnston (2004) highlights
the fundamental importance of the home in the Odyssey in terms of establishing the very
centre of what makes life meaningful and worth living; a sacred and embodied space in
which one is invited to celebrate “the wealth of cozy human eroticism in everyday life”.
Having banished the suitors, it is only after the homecoming Odysseus has shed his
disguise as a beggar and been bathed, anointed and clothed in attire be?tting his true
status that he is able to resume his identity as master of the house; a transformation,
moreover, which is only fully complete upon his reclamation of the marital bedroom
located in the “innermost part of the house”; a spatial and symbolic progression which
connotes both the re-consummation of his marriage to Penelope and his elevation from
beggar to guest to master (Reece, 1993, p. 35).
Although Odysseus himself is not afforded divine status, his return to Ithaca (which
is in effect sponsored by the gods) takes on the form of a theoxeny (Reece, 1993, p. 182;
Kearns, 1982; Thompson, 1958). This brings us, brie?y, to another of the hospitality
conventions that merits some consideration: that of identi?cation.
As with the other examples, the questioning and revelation of the guest’s identity
assumes an elaborate and almost ritualistic formality, with etiquette typically demanding
that the stranger withhold his or her identity until after the meal (Reece, 1993, p. 25). Of
course, the unknown status of the Homeric stranger does not preclude the possibility that
s/he may in fact be a god or other divine entitycome to test the hospitality of the host (a test
which, incontrast to Telemachus’ hospitable reception of the goddess Athena inbook 1, the
suitors unequivocally fail). This framework of theoxeny, and the ritually protracted nature
of the stranger’s anonymity, injects a certain alterity into the host-guest relationship that
potentially destabilises its fragile equilibrium. The danger attached to the visitation of a
divine guest – and the crossing of physical, symbolic and corporeal thresholds of identity
and selfhood – is one which carries clear erotic overtones, as more recent literary studies of
hospitality and eroticism, such as Klossowski’s (1971) Roberte Ce Soir, or, more darkly,
Potter’s (1978) Brimstone and Treacle so richly demonstrate (Derrida, 2000a, b).
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What, then, doPlato andHomer tell us about eroticism, hospitality, andthe interweaving
of the two? The former grounds both within a setting in which individual love, desire,
and pleasure ?nd themselves ?owering within a social, cultural, and moral universe
underpinnedbya fundamental drive for unityandcompleteness. The latter places the erotic
within a context of domestic hospitality. In this view both eroticism and hospitality are
found pre-eminently in the home – which itself stands as microcosm of the larger order of
things. Here, we ?nd, precisely, an “eroticism of the everyday” that, once again, places the
individual within a social context symbolically evoked by an orderly relationship between
sexual desire, aesthetic stimulation, and the love between the protagonists.
Anthropological framing
The divinity of the guest and the nature of hospitality
The two anthropologists responsible for launching anthropological analyses of
hospitality, Hocart (1952) and Pitt-Rivers (1977) both took their initial inspiration from
the Greek classics.
In his “The divinity of the guest” Hocart explored the relationships between hosts,
guests, and strangers. Observing that they had a single term for all three, Hocart
reminded us that the ancient Greeks believed that strangers were accompanied by Zeus
and thus tinged with divinity. Pitt-Rivers’ essay on hospitality and the politics of sex in
the Mediterranean was written as part of his ?eld research in a Spanish village, clearly
with the Odyssey in mind. For him both hospitality and eroticism started at the
boundary of order and disorder, the former “imposing order through an appeal to the
sacred and replacing con?ict with reciprocal honor” (Pitt-Rivers, 1977, p. 107).
Hospitality in marriage ceremonies: lessons from UAE and India
Two ethnographic case studies concerned with the interplay between hospitality and
eroticism, both concerned with marriage rituals and the practices of hospitality that
attends them, are Kanafani’s (1983) account of marriage feasts in the UAE and
Selwyn’s (1981) analysis of Hindu marriage rites in rural central India. Both follow the
school of thought established by Pitt-Rivers.
Kanafani (1983) discusses the fualah (feasting) ritual in the UAEin terms of the ways
in which it brings to the fore relationships between senses of smell, touch, and taste. The
fualah is central to the hospitality tradition in the UAEand is built around bodily rituals
constructed to engage the company of hosts and guests in heightened olfactory,
gustatory, and tactile experiences. The author explains how these articulate the social
and spatial relationships of those present at the feast. Kanafani describes howindividual
women compose their own particular mixtures of scents, and how the senses in which
perfume, along with bodily decorations and the food itself, are part of an aesthetic
landscape in which both pleasure and purity are present in complementary
relationships. She further observes that the “socialising odours” are part of an
olfactory system into which also ?t odors associated with sexual relations between
husband and wife. As she puts it “the wife’s aesthetic skill” (in her composition of odors
and colors) “is an attempt to safeguard the marriage and to reinforce ties of the family”
(1983, p. 93). Kanafani’s work thus places the physical body at the core of the
construction of the sensual and, at times, erotic landscapes in which hospitality occurs.
Selwyn (1981) describes the rites associated with Hindu marriage ceremonies as
these are performed in a village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The aim
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of the analysis is to show how the relationship between “wife-takers” and “wife-givers”
(that is to say between the agnatically de?ned kin group who actually and ritually
“receives” the bride, on the one hand, and the family/kin group who “gives” her, on the
other) is linked at a metaphorical and symbolic level to the relationships between high
and low castes, and between men and women. He argues that men, high castes, and
wife-givers are made symbolically to appear as if they belonged to a conceptual set that
appears superior to another set consisting of women, low castes, and wife-takers. One
of the striking achievements of the ritual is to make this relationship seem a necessary
and inevitable part of the process of social (and sexual) reproduction.
The extended series of activities (most of which involve the giving and taking of food)
that, over several days and nights over a period of weeks make up the totality of the
marriage rites, take place either in the house of the bride (ina setting of rituals of hospitality
given by the bride’s family to that of the groom) or the house of the groom (where the
grooms family offer hospitality to the family of the bride). One consistent thematic thread
runningthroughmost if not all the complexseries of individual rituals, expressedvariously
in terms (for example) of the passage fromrawto cooked food, temperature shifts fromcool
to hot and back again, the literal tying together of the clothes of bride and groomand their
circumambulation around a ?ame, the throwing of rice by the groom into the bride’s lap,
and so on, is their sexually charged symbolic structure and sense of the erotic.
There is a fairly clear line of thought that links classical views of hospitality and the
erotic to these ethnographic considerations. One feature of the ethnographies is the skillful
symbolic deployment of objects such as food, clothing, perfume, and decorations, in ?lling
the spaces of hospitality with heightened feelings, including erotic ones, that animate the
?owering of senses of individual pleasure, domestic well-being, and social satisfaction.
Charter tourism and the return of the suitors
We come now to consider hospitality and eroticism within the explicitly modern and
commercial world of charter tourism in the Mallorcan tourist resorts of Palmanova and
Magaluf.
Both resorts are fuelled with intense feelings and a highly charged sexual atmosphere.
In the case of Magaluf the intensity is heightened by a sense of con?ned spatiality and
enclosure brought about by the physical layout of the resort (Andrews, 2006). Further, the
temporal framework of the package holiday of usually no more than two weeks exerts
pressure to do and feel as much as possible in a relatively short period of time. This sense
of urgency is symbolically portrayed in video images of people cramming their mouths
with food that are played in many of the cafe´-bars. The emphasis on alimentary excess is
further embodied in consumption of the apparently ever-?owing supply of alcohol and
food – the “eat as much as you like” offers in hotel restaurants - and the emphasis on
alcoholic excess in the bar crawls organized by the tour operators.
In addition, there is a heightened awareness of the body in terms of function and
appearance which is intimately linked to a magni?cation of sexual sensibilities. This
means that manyof the activities undertakenbytourists are underlainbysexual titillation.
Thus, games played as both part of hotel entertainment and during bar crawls include, for
example, one about “sexual positions” or a demonstration of some form of sexual
knowledge. The focus on sex is also manifest in the numerous displays of pornographic
images throughout the resorts ranging from completely naked women to depictions that
make suggestions of mixed-genderedgroup sex. Other references to sexual intercourse are
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made through the display in shops: of, for example, giant condoms, carrot shaped
vibrators, ashtrays and ring holders depicting penises and breasts. The combination of
con?ned space, commoditisation and fetishisation of sexualised aspects of the body take
us seemingly far away from any idea of a cozy eroticism of the everyday.
The majority of tourists visiting Palmanova and Magaluf are British. They
undertake their holidays as part of a package tour organized byone of the leading British
tour operators. The role of the tour operator is not simply to provide the holiday by
organizing transport and accommodation, but, once in the resort, to mediate, as far as
possible, the tourists’ experiences for economic gain. For example, as Andrews (2000,
p. 241) contends, “the motives behind welcome meetings are governed by a desire to
facilitate a commercial transaction rather than a warmfriendly gesture”. This mediation
is both aided and abetted in a struggle of control with other facilitators (for example,
hotel entertainers, cafe´-bar DJs) over the actions of the tourists. This is sometimes as part
of a mutually bene?cial ?nancial relationship, but at other times is the result of
competition between interested parties in attempts to dominate the activities and places
in which the tourists participate. This element of control extends to the erotic sphere.
According to some theorists the separation of sexual pleasure anderotic feelings from
reproduction has marked the decisive shift in the trajectory of the erotic, bringing it out
of the domestic realm into the market place. But, having brought it out, sexual desire
then needs, as Bauman (1999, p. 21) has argued “outside, authoritative and resourceful
powers to contain it within acceptable limits”. The experience of the package holiday
maker in Magaluf and Palamanova affords an ideal ground in which eroticismis at once
both promoted and highlighted, on the one hand, and manipulated and controlled on
the other. After all, the reputation of Magaluf as “Shagaluf” promotes ideas of multiple
sexual encounters. We are in a world in which, according to Bauman (1999, p. 21):
Eroticism is self-suf?cient. The freedom to seek sexual delights for their own sake, has risen
to the level of cultural norm . . . Being an eroticism “with no strings attached” untied,
unbridled, let loose – the postmodern eroticism is free to enter and leave any association of
convenience, but also an easy prey to forces eager to exploit its seductive powers.
In short, the tourist in Magaluf ?nds him or herself in a world where hospitality and
the erotic seem to have been detached from their moral underpinnings and where the
erotic appears in some respects like a commodity. In this form it becomes, as Bauman
suggests, “easy prey” for the appropriation, by the market’s latter-day “suitors” in a
purely instrumental way that has at its heart the desires of the individual and the
satisfaction of the needs of the market.
On the streets of Magaluf and Palmanova disembedded eroticism and hospitality are
part of a tourist menu of instant grati?cation, and self-satisfaction. At the same time, there
is a need for such potentially anarchic dispositions to be controlled: a fundamental
ambivalence that is signaled and embodied in some of the activities in which they
participate. One feature of hotel entertainment, for example, is a game involving male
contestants having sangria poured down their throats until they can swallow no more, a
challenge to kiss as many people in the audience as possible within 45 seconds, and then
a demand that they show constraint by gurgling water whilst in the process of singing a
nursery rhyme.
Although the game is profferedas a formof entertainment and enjoyment it also serves
to de?ne the basis of social relations in the resort. The acquisition of kisses, for example,
does not allow for the development of relationships, or the acquisition of any depth of
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knowledge of the other. Sex, intimacy, and the erotic seem powerfully present and the
emphasis on speed does not allow for their meaningful cultivation. What the game does
(legitimated by the laughter that accompanies it) is to reward rapidity, lack of knowledge
and the transitory nature of the relationships associated with the experience of being on
holiday. The pouring of sangria down someone’s throat is literally “in their face” and
brutal. It works against any development of the erotic. Although these practices may
conceivably be looked uponin terms of Bakhtin (1984) notions of the carnivalesque, inthis
instance laughter becomes a device that wraps or disguises the viciousness of what the
tourists are being offered. This seems far removed from the type of warm and cozy
sociability of the hospitality settings we considered earlier or, indeed, any version of an
eroticismof the everyday. In the competition played in the hotel the life-giving affectivity
of Eros andthe unconditional nature of love are absent. All that seems tomatter is howfast
andhowmuch. Sensual enjoyment is missing. Unlike the worldevokedbyTelemachus’ oil
or the fualah’s perfumes, the association of force and drinking to excess speaks of the
opposite: a disregard for the care of the body and a lack of the ability to savor and linger
over the possible sensual enjoyment of drinking a glass of sangria.
And yet we would be unhappy to leave it there. The instrumentality of the hospitality
anderoticisminthe resorts discussedthus far seems toplace thembothwithina landscape
in which they have simply been appropriated and put to use by the market. However,
despite this apparent triumph of the demands of a market-led culture there is evidence of
the socially binding and communicative modes of both hospitality and eroticism. Some
everyday practices and social rhythms at play within the resorts speak of a counter
tendency to the overarching commercial nature of the experience. For example, couples sit
tenderly holding hands in the midst of the audience for hotel entertainment, apparently
uninterested in engaging in or with the wider context. Furthermore, many of the
cafe´-bars/nightclubs hold dancing nights in which a tourist (and observer) can expect to
encounter a depth of sociability that reminds us of earlier contexts. Although people enter
a particular establishment in their discrete unit as friends, couples or families, dancing
brings everyone together. People move and sway together to the beat of the same rhythm.
This is an experience (common throughout the two resorts) that seems to gives rise to a
sense of shared understanding and community that is embodied in the dancing
movements. As Crouch(2002, pp. 213-4) says: “makingparticular dance movements . . . [is]
part of a repertoire of social engagement and friendship”.
There are no conditions set to joining in and it appears underpinned by a desire for
unity as those dancing encourage the involvement on the dance ?oor of those not
participating. The freedom and ?ow associated with dancing and the building of social
relationships or reaf?rmation of them has resonance with the imitative rites of
Australian Aborigines described by Durkheim. He asserts that ceremonies in which the
totem animal – Kangaroo, Emu, etc. – is imitated in movement “does not limit itself to
expressing this kinship; it makes it or remakes it” (Durkheim, 1976, p. 358, emphasis
added). In addition the ease of movement and ?uidity of the body associated with
dancing, as it is practiced in the resorts, is in contrast to the control that the playing of
the game as part of the hotel entertainment demands. Rather, it is the embodiment of a
naturalness or ?ow in the establishment of social relations more generally. As a way of
building social relations it operates at both a broad level amongst strangers as well as
at a more localised level within the family. For example, fathers dance with their
young daughters as they carry them around the dance ?oor in a mock waltz.
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What dancing also does, as a ?uid movement of the body, is point to that adaptability
and spontaneity referred to by Agathon in The Symposium. In this respect order is
united with ?exibility, adaptability and creativity and the social order is refreshed and
re-anchored to a moral and ethical framework.
To summarize, there are concerted efforts in the two resorts by the tourism and
hospitality industries to build the framework in which social relations are to be made
and further to control and constrain those relationships whilst at the same time
promoting ideas of unfettered, instant and self-grati?cation. However, simultaneously
there are ?ows and movements through and across the boundaries of the commercial
structure that use the heightened sense of hospitality and eroticism as socially creative
and binding mechanisms outside of the modalities of the market.
Conclusion
Eroticismmay, of course, be considered froma variety of angles. Our own focus has been
largelyuponits social role, viewingit as we have done through lenses framed bya concern
with its relation to hospitality. As one would both hope and expect, however, there are
interweaving and interpenetrating motifs that link our own re?ections with those made
fromother perspectives. Indeed, it helps to sharpen the lines of argument presented here if
we approach them by way of brief references to two discussions of the subject with
different (though, we would argue, neighboring) points of departure from our own.
In her classic examination of asceticism and eroticism in the mythology of the
Hindu god Shiva, O’Flaherty (1973) speaks of the “pendulum of extremes” found in
the mythical narratives that surround the god. How, for example, is one to resolve the
apparent contradiction between living in the world and enjoying the pleasures of life,
on the one hand, and freeing the spirit through worldly renunciation, on the other? For
O’Flaherty, the way Hindu mythology embraces this and comparable quandaries is
not, as western thought might, to insist on a compromise or synthesis of opposites, but
rather (to use a chemical analogy) to “resolve the con?icting elements into a suspension
rather than a solution” (pp. 314-18).
The notion of suspension has a musical reference as well as a chemical one. Thus, in
Downes’ (2006) discussion of the erotic in the work of various romantic and modern
composers, he draws our attention to such musical techniques in Wagner as the
“characteristic dissonance foundat the topof eachmelodic wave” whichserves todepict (in
Tristan und Isolde) “the hero’s mythic-erotic encounter with young women”. Here, we
encounter “further dissonance through a suspended melodic pitch (which) reinvigorates
the harmonywitherotic yearning, destabilization, anda hint of peril” (Downes, 2006, p. 92).
We followclosely the spirit of the observations by O’Flaherty and Downes, despite our
differing points of focus. Using their mythological and musical eyes and ears it makes
considerable sense to viewmuch traditional hospitality, suggestively exempli?ed here by
ethnographic references to two acts of hospitality accompanying marriage rites, as
moments of suspension between one social and physical formation and another.
The notion of suspension, having as it does a number of different if overlapping
meanings, provides us with the means to conclude this essay. There are three points.
In “The law of hospitality” Pitt-Rivers (1977, p. 107) declares that:
The law of hospitality is founded upon ambivalence. It imposes order through an appeal to
the sacred, makes the unknown knowable, and replaces con?ict by reciprocal honor. It does
not eliminate the con?ict altogether but places it in abeyance and prohibits its expression.
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This idea of placing con?ict in abeyance – that is suspending it – provokes the
thought that the idea of suspension is a powerful one to attach to eroticism and
hospitality. Speaking sexually and musically, our own argument has been that, in its
classical and traditional forms, the erotic is to be found at and in those moments (which
could, as the Hindu ascetic knows, be maintained for some time) of sexual suspense
and harmonic dissonance before orgasm and harmonic resolution take place. We have
followed Pitt-Rivers in viewing hospitality as being pre-eminently concerned with
ordering and re-ordering – converting enemies to allies, non-kin to kin, and so forth.
Thus, it is clear that any single act of hospitality is necessarily underpinned by
elements of structural suspension until it has successfully run its course.
Secondly, the hospitality on offer in the hotels and bars of Magaluf seems, at ?rst sight,
to be at variance with the classical and/or traditional conceptions of the erotic and
hospitality as we have considered them here. Not much, if anything, seems “suspended”
here (except, of course, the sublimated senses of pleasure and sexual desire described by
those sociologists, supported by the Pope, who see the market as harbinger of the death of
the erotic.) On second sight, however, perhaps all that Magaluf actually offers is a
temporary break inthe shape of brief fantasies of potentiallyunlimited sexual availability.
As such not much of a challenge is really mounted to the prevailing and repressive
demands of an overall system running on the fuel of sublimated short-term pleasures in
favor of the imaginedlonger-termsatisfactions derivingfromownershipof the products of
the market. Perhaps, Magaluf serves the market rather than challenges it.
But, thirdly, there is a much more interesting sense in which the termsuspension is an
apposite one with which to conclude. We have attempted to argue that whilst the market
induced intensity of physical and social intercourse in Magaluf seems to turn both
hospitality and eroticism on their heads, currents of opposition and potential resistance
may be discerned. Offers by tour promoters of the kinds of instant availability we have
described of everything, including sex, food, and drink, may symbolically and routinely
be turned away by the tender holding of hands in the midst of a frenzied game of
alcoholic over-consumption or in the ?uidity and sociability of the dance ?oor. In this
context, we recall the remarkable occasion when an all night rave was held at the largest
disco in Magaluf. All the pro?ts were donated to the Municipality of Calvia (of which
Magaluf is a part) to contribute to a ?ghting fund to repair the extensive damage done to
the neighboring national park following a ?re that had destroyed many trees there. It was
commonlysaidthat the ?re was startedbyagents of propertydevelopers who were piqued
at the refusal by the council’s planning authorities to grant permission to develop in the
park. The atmosphere on the dance ?oor was electric as moving pictures of the ?re were
?ashedonits interior walls. Onthis occasionthe eroticismof the dance ?oor became linked
directly to an enthusiastic and essentially political expression of revulsion with the
dominance of the market and its principles. Here, the “pendulumof extremes” was felt by
the dancers to have swung way beyond any acceptable boundary. That year the deputy
mayor of Calvia described the relation between those who sought to preserve the public
spaces of the municipality in the face of those who would turn them all into their own
private domains as a “war”.
We have followed those sociologists discussed earlier in this piece in their insistence
that eroticismand sexual disposition are intimately related to forms of political economy.
In so doing we may suggest that there is another con?ict taking place in those parts of the
municipality we have discussed here. Activities in Magaluf’s spaces of hospitality do not,
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in Pitt-Rivers’ formulation, eliminate the con?ict: they merely suspend it. The con?ict is
between truly erotic possibilities onthe one hand(with all their social, political, and ethical
implications) andthe sexual andpolitical prospects derivingfromthe appeals of Magaluf’s
tour operators, on the other. Its resolution might be less clear-cut than we might have
imagined.
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About the authors
Hazel Andrews is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Leisure in the Centre for Tourism Consumer
and Food Studies, Liverpool John Moores University. She has a masters in International Tourism
Policy and her doctoral thesis was an ethnographic study of British charter tourists to Mallorca.
She is interested in constructions, representations and consumption practices relating to
identities, with particular focus on space, the body and food and drink cultures. Hazel Andrews is
the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]
Les Roberts is a cultural geographer and theorist whose work examines the broad intersection
between ideas of space, place and mobility, particularly in relation to ?lm. His doctoral research
examined historical and contemporary spaces of travel and migration in European ?lm, and has
formed the basis of a number of publications. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher
at the University of Liverpool on the AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project City in Film:
Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image.
Tom Selwyn is a Professor of Anthropology, specialising in tourism and hospitality, at London
Metropolitan University. He presently directs a European Commission TEMPUS programme in
pilgrimage, tourism, and the cultural industries at the University of Bethlehem, Palestine, for a
consortiumof universitiesinthe UK, Malta, andFinland. He is widelypublishedinthe areaof tourism,
hospitality, landscape, imagery, and the anthropology of coastal zones. He was on the co-ordinating
group of the recently completed ECMED-VOICES programme in the Mediterranean region, his main
geographical research interests being in the Eastern Mediterranean. He is honorary librarian and
council member of the royal anthropological institute.
IJCTHR
1,3
262
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