The Alterity of Deep History and the Hospitality of Things

Hospitality, the ethical basis that structures social life, is explored for insights into alterity in deep history. Anthropologists, phenomenologists, and geographers have highlighted the importance of hospitality. Archaeologists have not. The principle of hospitality is applied here to deep and recent history using the concepts of sticky objects and place-saturated spaces. An analogy is drawn between hospitality required when encountering Strangers and the discovery of strange objects. Hospitality makes the unknown, known, and the strange, familiar. The rules of hospitality create a threshold between the present and the past contained in the embodied metaphor, THE WELCOMING EMBRACE. It is argued that an emphasis on hospitality embraces the alterity of the past and provides a way to explore its many spatial and temporal proximities. Hospitality, I argue, is fundamental to the acquisition of new knowledge about the past. I examine two objects, the Akan drum and Gray’s Inn handaxe, for their histories of hospitality. Changes in how these objects are understood occurred in private collections and public museums; place-saturated sites of hospitality that contain sticky objects of recent and remote time.