Nêpoinon: Ancient Greek and contemporary Hospitality (or why Anthropologists ought not to laugh at the Classicists)

The Mediterranean seems to be full of bad guests and even worse hosts, these days.

The study of migration, especially that of Sub-Saharan refugees/illegal migrants into Europe, has never been my focus as interest, strange as it may sound to an anthropologist-in-training from Malta. It was only when I did my fieldwork stint in Ceuta, that I was practically forced to take a look at the matter in slightly more detail.

You thought Malta was odd? Try this for size.

Malta and Ceuta share a number of similarities: Both are small; both share a long history of being conquered and re-conquered; both are active, strategic ports, bringing in all types of people from all across the lake and beyond. On a less positive note, both places have been marginal societies on the periphery of much larger political institutions (Ceuta - Spain - EU / Malta - EU/British Empire). Accordingly, they have both been kept under a tight political leash, gaining political recognition (based on a fiercely strong local identity and patriotism) in the recent decades. For reasons this entry will not go into (read my thesis, out December 2013), both consider themselves/are considered to be, at once, bridges straddling Europe (Christianity) and Africa (Islam), and thanks to their geographical locations, guard-dogs and buffer zones of the EU against the 'new' phenomenon of Sub-Saharan illegal migration.

Spot the difference!

So it surprises little that, given the generally same conditions, I heard things in Ceuta that largely resonated with those I had heard in Malta. Migrants, sub-Saharan and Moroccan border-workers (transfronterizos), are described as a danger (un peligro) to Ceuta. Ceutans have properly given their poor neighbours (vecinos) a hand, offering them jobs, state-welfare, assistance with any sort of abuse or other domestic problems, first-rate health care (many Moroccan women give birth in Ceuta/Spain) ... and they are still around! Not only are they still around, but they demand more - ever increasing access to Spanish resources, ever increasing protection and access. The Moroccan is a bad guest - a 'moro' - who not only over-stays his welcome, but also brings his friends to the party uninvited and consumes resources - jobs, welfare, funds - that threaten the Host.

This also makes locals angry: because the big northern dogs seem passive while the uninvited guests eat all the cake.

But the bad guest is complemented by a bad Host, on two levels:

1) Both Ceutans and Maltese have been repeatedly embarrassed by researchers, studies and inquiries which claim that guests, refugees and illegal migrants have been treated increasingly poorly while their legal situation is resolved. I do not know about Malta, but in Ceuta such accusations deeply touch local citizens, who actually insist that they're the victims in this story.

Like this, but less cute.

They develop concepts of a 'ceutan reality' (realdad ceuti), the idea that only locals really know what is going on. It de-legitimizes the academic outsider (de fuera) and is deeply annoying to an anthropologist.

2) Both are accused for keeping their guests for inappropriate amount of time - delaying the progress through which the guest can leave and carry on with his journey. Exceptional work by tons of researchers have described the small border towns of the Mediterranean as waiting rooms. But without entertainment.

I would want to leave that place too.

Now, the interesting bit is that all of this is often discussed in terms of laws and constitutions and regulations. In effect, I would hazard to say that all this migration business seems to both Ceutans and Maltese as being an new thing (algo nuevo). Most Ceutans recall that problems really started in 1986, when the Inmigration act was passed. In both cases, the legal structure has failed to accommodate the patterns and movements we are seeing. The result is one of dissatisfaction, confusion, scratched heads and the idea that national integrity is slowly being undermined by the invading and increasingly hostile other.

The fact is that what we have talked about is not new.

 Not at all.

 It is rather the main theme of one of the oldest stories of the Mediterranean - the Odyssey. I would also risk my neck to say that while anthropologists have largely entered the confusing world of legal rights and obligations, they have also ignored the complicated but invisible world of the classics. Anthropologists have shunned the classicists, those weird cousins apparently cut away from society, translating and re-translating cool tales from the past and having conversations with themselves no one can understand. But I think they might offer us some concepts that might still be useful for us. Really.

"But, honey! Odysseus..." "NO!"

Thus enters a certain Harry L.Levy, with his 1963 article "The Odyssean Suitors and the Host-Guest Relationships". Levy is primarily (of course) writing to fellow classicists, because he thinks that Odysseus' killing spree at the end of the book - where he massacres the suitors who for ages had been feasting using his resources while trying to get it on with his wife - was a little bit...out of character.

His main point does not interest us, but his argument does. For as he goes along, Levy gives us three main components to the Guest-Host relationship we anthropologists have called 'hospitality'. And they strongly resonate with our current situation.

1. On how to be a good guest: 

Being a good guest has nothing to do with reciprocity, Levy argues. Being a good guest does not involve offering hospitality to people who had offered you theirs in the past. Rather, a guest is someone who "does not overstay his welcome, and has due regard for the substance of the host, who on his part must offer it freely".

This is something that I've heard to the point of disgust in Ceuta. But in the context of state assigned legal rights and statuses, these discourses are either ignored, or, worse still, seen as undisciplined residues of emotion and anger that have failed to submit to proper bureaucratic regulation and process. It is easy to label such attitudes as 'racist' - the hatred/fear of the other - as the Ceutans are very often labeled, but I argue that this gets us no-where. The mechanics of hostility towards the stranger must be analysed at the deeper levels of exchange, belonging and ownership - something anthropologists excel at.

First and foremost, the good guest should wear clothes at his host's house

2. On how to be a Good Host:

This is where things get interesting. I quote Levy who in turn quotes Menelaus when hosting Odysseus' son:

"Telemachus, I really shall not hold you here a long time, eager as you are to return home. I should even blame another man who, as host, loves too much or hates too much: everything is better in moderation. It is just as evil to push out a guest who is unwilling to leave as it is to retain one who longs to depart. One should entertain the guest who is present, and send on the one who wishes to go" 

This is an interesting concept: the idea that a host can be a bad host for being too much of a host. It is hard to encounter in daily discourse, though.

The Odyssey, however, is full of it. Just to give one example which reminds us of Malta, Hermes (the messenger god) becomes terribly angry at the nymph Calypso for keeping Odysseus trapped on her island, instead of letting him continue on with his journey. He tells her not to be selfish and let the good fellow go... other men will pass by her island, eventually. And, presumably, at that time self-satisfying alternatives existed already.

 I would like to be hosted by a bad host, too.

The idea that locals are 'bad hosts' because they keep migrants from moving on, is widespread in discourses about migration. Yet they are often overlooked until until one really starts to talk to the migrants themselves. And in a parallel case, quite like Odysseus, we have migrants, who, while grateful for the support and resources given to them, also become increasingly hostile to the structures that keep them bound. In Malta we therefore have repeated burnings and break-outs. In Ceuta, we have encountered break-away groups who live in the mountains and the hills and violent street fighting.

Through such discourse, the rescuer also becomes a racist, selfish host whose only desire is to stop the migrant and break him/her down.

Such dynamics cannot be ignored. We seem to have systems of law that are locking locals and migrants into a stalemate where one feels like a bad guest and the other feels like a bad host. More importantly, these attitudes are completely ignored and unaccounted for.

3. Nêpoinon

What happens to people who do not follow the rules of hospitality? In the Odyssey it is Nêpoinon - revenge without retaliation.

In Greek myth, the gods protect the stranger. Refusing a stranger is dangerous indeed.  Levy quotes one of the suitors, who reproaches the suitor chief, Antinous when he strikes Odysseus, who enters his own household disguised as an old man: "Antinous, you did not do well in striking the wretched wanderer. You are doomed if by chance he is some god from heaven!"

Similarly, because bad guests eat the livelihood of their host, and thus rob him of his ability to live (also known as murder), the gods tend to take revenge.

In both cases, of course, the gods, being all-powerful, can inflict violence which cannot be reciprocated. It is the final word. That's what makes them gods. 

Old man?! OLD MAN?! Reciprocate this...

We live in a system of hospitality which has been deserted by the gods. The divine law (themis) that has regulated hospitality and made it work, has been replaced by a secular law that seems unable to engage with such dynamics. The result, as I pointed out, is a sense of dissatisfaction without end - a negative reciprocity of bad hosting and bad guesting.

So why is the Odyssey important?

I conclude on two points: First, because the Mediterranean has seen a wealth of new ethnographies that have observed a rather interesting phenomenon in the Mediterranean. James Verinis, Liliana Suarez-Navas, Maurizio Albahari....have all noted how within the legal gaps, existing local institutions are dispensing rights other than those of the state. Guests are recognized as hard-working, diligent and loyal and, sometimes, slowly, integrated into daily life on an individual albeit slow level. In due time, they might be symbolically incorporated in physical or fictive kin rituals (husbands, godparents etc) and might even end up running them! Hospitality is important, because it is just as real as State law and sanction, and is also the a powerful force behind practical integration or rejection.

Second. It is especially important because in this day and age, we do not have Nêpoinon. Hospitality, has been stripped of its legal authority. If Zeus doesn't guarantee order, then, well who will?

Just us, I think.
Which is why we need to read those meticulous translations again and again.