Sociologies (Mar 2018)
Le pain merveilleux de l'hospitalité
Abstract
In order to clarify the misunderstandings that may lead to conclusions in terms of the "opening" or "closure" of societies, this article offers a secondary exploitation of a survey conducted by Nina Kareva on the hospitality that Russians received abroad as well as foreigners hosted in Russia. Such experiences and their troubles are often referred to the diversity of customs. Our perspective is different. Just as Kareva has revealed structural and asymmetrical features of the reciprocal engagements of the host and the recipient, we compare the hospitality test with structural constructions of political communities, the grammars of commonality in the plural which several international comparative research programs helped us to identify. It serves to illuminate the story of a Russian hosted in the United States in the 1980s as well as the reactions it prompted from an international audience of sociologists, and to draw some lessons on recent history.
