Migrant Hospitalities in the Mediterranean

Reviews / Votes

"This tour de force of transversal analysis, comparison, and reflection exposes the double bind of hospitality from the gestures of comprehension in an Athenian public hospital's maternity ward, through mortuary practices and commemorative discourses for dead strangers and drowned kin, to the ritualistic institutionalization of minimal hospitality in Lampedusa. By leaving no assumption unexamined, Grotti, Brightman and their collaborators have made the anthropology of hospitality, the ethnography of the ongoing migration dynamics in the Mediterranean, and transregional scalar processes shine in each other's light."-Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, USA

" Migrant Hospitalities in the Mediterranean hosts the reader across various locations of migrants' routes and encounters. This set of ethnographically-thick accounts of migrants' reception or rejection at Europe's southern threshold offers a fresh view on hospitality by approaching migration as a passage from 'death to a new life'. The volume invites us to rethink and rearticulate decades-long debates on migrations and hospitality, given a substantial increase in recent migrations in the region and their humanitarian consequences."

-Natasa Gregoric Bon, Assistant Professor, Institute of Anthropolgoical and Spatial studies, Research Centre SAZU, Slovenia

"This book addresses the pressing need for more research on hospitality and hospitality practices, a need that has become more pronounced now, at the end of a decade characterised by increasingly polarised debates on irregular migration and border control. Anthropology is an excellent avenue for this, and indeed this book builds on the work of other anthropologists revisiting the concept of hospitality in recent years. The book is a welcome addition, both for its conceptually sophisticated approaches to the concept of hospitality and for its empirically rich, ethnographicallygrounded case studies of migrant hospitalities in the Mediterranean."

-Daniela DeBono, Associate Professor fo International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmö University, Sweden