Hospitality & Society - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2014

Hospital meals have increasingly become part of the political and scientific agenda of the welfare discussions in Denmark and other European countries. This article employs non-representational theory to analyse hospitalityscapes in order to explore opportunities for adding value to the hospital meal experience. By drawing on research carried out in two Danish hospital wards, this article explores how hospitalityscapes are socio-materially constructed. The research strategy was based on performative participant observations, visual ethnography and semi-structured interviews. The empirical data reveal how the daily atmosphere could be changed by social activities such as a dancing nurse, or through artefacts such as meatballs or napkins in disruptive micro-events, creating a possibility for different hospitalityscapes manifested in cultural, humorous or social performances. The article suggests that a focus on disruptive micro-events might create opportunities for hospitalityscapes and add value to future hospital meal experiences.

The ethnographic focus of this article is on municipal strategies for the ‘immediate management of poverty’ (gia tin amesi antimetopisi tis ftohias) in the city of Thessaloniki, in northern Greece. These involve several food assistance practices: two daily soup kitchens, two social markets and a food bank. Diefthinsi Koinonikis Politikis/The Department of Social Policy also called Pronoia/Welfare sustains a dormitory for homeless people, clothing banks and provides health services to poor, unemployed people, who have no health insurance (aporoi, anergoi, anasfalistoi). Although municipal policies aim to comfort poverty, hunger and deprivation, it is argued that there is a failure in meeting the basic prerequisites of hospitality and fair treatment as claimed. The landscape of food assistance in the city is characterized by tensions and contradictions: internal divisions, antagonistic discourses and power relations seem to be present at all stages. All of the above create a complicated picture of food assistantship and provision, and it remains questionable whether the Municipality’s initiatives provide long-term solutions to the growing problems of poverty and hunger. The main argument supported is the overall disempowerment of food assistance experience, which inevitably leads to an inability to provide comfort and to ‘host’ as initially aimed. The ethnographic case presented becomes the starting point for the analysis of the ethics of food production and consumption and the right to food, a deeply politicized issue and a basic human right, according to international conventions. Consequently, issues of power, exclusion and inequality are posed and problematized. Overall, the article adds to the documentation and the discussion of emergency food assistance in Greece.

The concept of ‘work for food and accommodation’ is part of a significant social trend in contemporary societies, of the slow food, sustainability and back-to-the-land movement. It is an alternative form of travelling and hospitality as much as it is part of an alternative economy that deliberately avoids encounters governed by the logics of the market, where people seek alternative ways of engaging with, and relating to, others. Taking the international World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) movement as my empirical context, I investigate the nature of hospitality in the work-exchange relationship by analysing how participants negotiate their social and economic relationships through food and reciprocity. Based on ethnographic research, this article discusses power and boundaries, social control, inclusion and exclusion, and exchange and reciprocity between hosts and helpers, demonstrating how the host–guest dichotomy dissolves when the boundaries between production and consumption become blurred. I argue that food and beverage, hospitality and mutual help play a significant role in establishing, negotiating and nurturing these exchange relationships between barter and gift exchange. There is a dearth of research on work-exchange that this article addresses. Drawing on insights from ethnographic and other social science research alongside theoretical discussions of hospitality ‘as a way of relating’, the article aims to contribute new ways of understanding and theorizing the work-exchange encounter.

Conceptualizations of hospitality have often been framed along with binary oppositions, envisaging this phenomenon either as a philosophical universal abstraction or as a social practice, to be approached mainly from a functionalist perspective. As a result, hospitality has been presented as an ambivalent and paradoxical phenomenon, hard to understand and enact in everyday life because of irreconcilable contradictions lying at its heart. This article highlights how such dichotomies appear to be fundamental features of Georgian hospitality. Hospitality is perceived and defined as a national tradition, following norms reproduced throughout time and space. Hospitality features are attached indifferently both to individuals and to households, and to the Georgian nation as a unitary entity. However, tradition is intertwined with pragmatism. Far from being a timeless cultural institution, hospitality stems from social actors’ changing meanings and purposes, embedded in specific spatial and temporal contexts. As a form of reciprocal exchange, hospitality establishes social networks that develop upon relationships of solidarity and trust. However, hospitality has a competitive nature, which fosters exclusiveness and reproduces inequality. Drawing upon anthropological literature and ethnographic data collected in Georgia and London, this article attempts to deconstruct mutual oppositions through which hospitality is often analysed. The apparently inherent ambivalence detectable in hospitality does not turn this phenomenon into an unsolvable conundrum. Instead, pointing at Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and misrecognition, the article suggests that ambivalence can be handled not through a series of radical antinomies, but by focusing on social actors’ understandings and agency.

Postcards have a long association with holidays, leisure and travel. These constitute a rich and diverse source of data for researchers with interests in many fields – for example, social and food history, human geography, tourism, ethnography, anthropology and hospitality. The aim of this research is to show how postcards from the early twentieth century provide a visual record and historical legacy of commercial food production, traditional dishes and domesticity. A selection of early twentieth-century photographic picture postcards depicting food in the context of regional tourism and hospitality are utilized to demonstrate provincial culinary identity as well as differentiation in the counties of Devon and Cornwall in the south-west of England.

Food and Drink: The Cultural Context, Donald Sloan (ed.) (2013) Woodeaten, Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers Ltd, 245 pp., ISBN: 9781908999047, p/bk, £29.99

Semiotics of Drinks and Drinking, Paul Manning (2012) London: Continuum, 245 pp., ISBN: 9781441137746, p/bk, £24.99

Educated Tastes: Food, Drink and Connoisseur Culture, Jeremy Strong (ed.) (2011) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, xxii+292 pp., ISBN: 9780803219359, p/bk, £23.99

Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV and Anita Mannur (eds) (2013) New York and London: New York University Press, 444 pp., ISBN1: 9781479810239 (cl), ISBN2: 9781479869251 (pb), p/bk, $20.35, Kindle, $11.99