Hospitality 5

Intellectual Hospitality is Different than Gift Giving

Whereas the gift economy is based on distinction and exchange between known entities, the relationship of hospitality is more firmly predicated on the indistinguishability between guest and hose and the possibility of encountering an unknown entity. (137)

For example:
Not one of the folks involved in the teaching of the classes was ever a known entity. Even more, we are engaged in this relationship specifically because we do not know each other. The point is to share our cultures: social, academic, and institutional. Thus, it follows that while each of us is important and may have a place in the history of the Sharing Cultures Project as having accomplished certain tasks, as an individual, no single person is the Sharing Cultures Project. This project does and can and will exist without any of us, as long as there is a continuing invitation to the next stranger, the energy and desire to continue the negotiation. One of the frustrating things is that this makes it feel as if, to some degree, we start over every semester. It is difficult and emotional work. I know it is out of synch with the other elements of the university/academia because of how much time it takes us all to participate and teach in the Sharing Cultures Project. Intellectual hospitality requires time and exchange and the freedom to have the interaction take as long as it needs.

Another example:
The involvement of students – different ones every semester who do not know each other – maintains for the project a status of constantly requiring hospitality for success. This is not a student exchange. There is no intellectual hospitality there. A student exchange is interested in providing "guest" students an experience that will make them specifically better able to succeed in the world in a particular and capitalist way. This project is something else. Whereas there is some evidence of this hospitable exchange, I do not want to suggest that students are able, upon hitting the door, to engage in intellectual hospitality in a fully realized way. This class, however, does prepare them for intellectual exchange that is not about domination, but about mutual negotiation. We believe that by priming our students to seriously hear, exchange, and incorporate with their ideas ones that differ from theirs, this class prepares students to write and to learn in ways that move well beyond skill-building. Most writing classes do not prepare students to exchange with the ideas of others; we ask them to persuade. We do not ask students to host the ideas of another person; we ask them to inform folks of their ideas. Here, we hope to not only prepare students for the possibility of encountering an unknown identity, but to have a sense of what can be done, of how they might effectively and humanistically communicate with that unknown, to integrate and incorporate their ideas and ways of knowing with their own. In this way, we can truly work toward an understanding of the power and possibility of diversity.