Hospitality and exchange: Identity relationships between ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’ in Sardinia

Abstract

Islands have frequently been invoked as a central topos of anthropological inquiry. The idea that islands and their inhabitants were isolated from the rest of the world led to them being treated as living laboratories, ripe for the investigation of a supposed cultural and biological purity. In contrast, the history of Sardinia shows how the island and its inhabitants have historically demonstrated agency in their relationships within the Mediterranean space and beyond. Moving from the assumption that a social group elaborates its identity by experiencing the ‘other’, I use the concept of hospitality as a theoretical framework for its ability to encompass complex and correlated questions helpful in thinking about individuals’ and societies’ relationships with ‘intimacy’ and ‘otherness’. Following this perspective, the contribution aims to examine how, in Sardinia, practices of hospitality have been involved in shaping a feeling of belonging that, in this case, could be called ‘Sardinian-ness’. Specifically, I investigate how global phenomena such as mass tourism and transnational migration impact and change the cultural trait of traditional hospitality, and how these phenomena unfold in an insular context.