2Paradoxes of Hospitality

“A Shining Example of African Hospitality”

In June 2017, during the first celebration of World Refugee Day since the Global Summit, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi was visiting a refugee camp in the Gambella region in Ethiopia. Grandi announced, “We must help Ethiopia to carry out this heavy responsibility and also be inspired by Ethiopia because it is a very shining example of African hospitality and international hospitality” (Xinhua 2017, emphasis added). UNHCR’s selection of Ethiopia for its 2017 World Refugee Day celebrations was surely not accidental. Ethiopia is often held up as a model of refugee management. As European countries continue to seek solutions to the refugee crisis by attempting to prevent migrants from arriving on their borders, the hospitality of countries like Ethiopia is intertwined with the emergent political economy of the global humanitarian-security-development nexus.

Hospitality shapes the relationship between refugees and the hosting state on micro and macro levels, from the daily encounters with teachers and aid workers to the discursive framing of Ethiopia’s participation in global migration compacts. The first of three key principles in Ethiopia’s practical application of the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) is “to maintain its longstanding history of hospitality in hosting refugees” (UNHCR 2018d, 4). Thus, at the very moment that walls went up around countries of the Global North, Ethiopian hospitality was celebrated and rewarded. Indeed, it seemed to stand in sharp contrast to the inhospitable ways that asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants were (and still are) treated in Europe and the United States. Yet the hospitality of hosting states in the Global South arguably operates within this larger system that offshores borderwork and stalls refugees in places that cut them off from meaningful livelihoods and hopeful futures. As such, we consider hospitality here not only as the cultural form through which individuals and groups come to engage with and manage difference but also as a tool for social analysis, “a framework for teasing out the significance of geographies of confinement and imprisonment” (Lynch et al. 2011).

A rich literature explores this paradox of (in)hospitality toward asylum seekers and migrants in Europe (Agier 2021; Dikeç et al. 2009; Friese 2010; Rozakou 2012), where hospitality appears at the heart of debates about multiculturalism, and immigration and has been refashioned “as an ethico-political framework for analyzing the worldly realities of living amongst diverse others” (Dikeç et al. 2009). Far less attention has been paid to discourses and practices of hospitality toward asylum seekers and refugees in the Global South, in the context of “humanitarian bordering.” What does hospitality mean in a place like Ethiopia, which gains status as a generous host yet is experienced and perceived as a way station by refugees?

Hospitality is always a constraining condition in which the guest and host are engaged in a dance of etiquette; the host is responsible for making sure that the guest is comfortable, and in return, the guest is responsible for being courteous, well-mannered, and thankful. In other words, guests are not to make too many demands or make the host feel they are not hosting well. They are certainly not to make waves. The strain that this dance between guest and host places on both parties is one of the reasons the condition of hospitality is usually temporary. Can people be hosted as guests indefinitely, given that the very nature of hospitality is supposed to be temporary or at least impermanent? In Ethiopia, this paradox is further complicated by a twining of hospitality with security discourse in the context of turbulent regional politics, which has made the long-term likelihood of local integration even less certain.

Focusing on Ethiopia’s role as host state, we illuminate the paradox of hospitality by exploring the cultural and political context of being an Eritrean guest in Ethiopia. Anthropological theories related to hospitality and gifting illuminate cultural etiquette and ritual performances around being a guest and host but also expose the performativity of both roles. Ethiopia benefits from being perceived in the international community as a good host, but this role is more complicated at the regional level. There is a complex history of Eritrean belonging and identity in Ethiopia—a history in which the legal status of Eritreans in Ethiopia has changed several times since Eritrea gained its independence—and, depending on the political circumstances, their insider/outsider status has been inflected with an array of mutable attributes.

The lived everyday experiences of refugees in Ethiopia further illuminate tensions and pressures in the host-guest relationship. The sluggishness of bureaucratic time makes refugees feel that their immediate needs do not matter. In other words, they feel less than well hosted but unable to complain, in part due to cultural patterns that expect that a guest will be thankful (and not call attention to their needs) and in part due to political histories in which Eritreans have been violently unwelcomed in Ethiopia in the past. The temporality of hospitality in this context is also one framed by their precarity, as “guests;” Eritreans were once citizens, then enemy aliens, then refugees, and may once more face renewed conflict and dangerous recalibrations of belonging and exclusion.

By exploring the cultural and political contradictions inherent in the performance and practice of hospitality, we ultimately argue that hospitality, which posits temporary and partial belonging, is the antithesis of local integration, which posits permanent and full belonging. The very act of hosting and welcoming refugees as guests thus complicates the binary of staying and going. If the array of policies discussed in the last chapter are indeed intended to support Ethiopia’s “shining example of African hospitality” (McDubus 2017) and if hospitality is, by definition, the antithesis of belonging, do those policies not inevitably strain the guest-host relationship and impede local integration?

Hospitality and Refugees: The Tyranny of the Gift

We were both introduced to Eritrean hospitality for the first time when we arrived in the country in the mid-1990s as Peace Corps volunteers. Amanda’s Peace Corps group arrived in 1997 and, on stepping off the plane, was warmly welcomed on the tarmac by women wearing zuríya—traditional white dresses edged in colorful embroidery. They stood to each side with large smiles, ululating and tossing popcorn in the path of their arriving guests. Toward the end of Jennifer’s Peace Corps term, Hillary Clinton paid a state visit to Eritrea and was greeted with a similar ritual. The hospitality in Eritrea extended far beyond staged diplomatic performances on the tarmac or at the US embassy. People stood to insist that we take seats on crowded public buses, saying “you are our gasha [guest].” When Amanda left her ID card behind on a trip to visit friends many hours away from her town, it made its way back to her, passing from stranger to stranger until someone dropped it at the school where the American guest was teaching. The performances of hospitality that surfaced in so many places in Eritrea in the early postindependence years were deeply rooted in cultural values surrounding the guest-host relationship and in concepts of home and sociality. Indeed, hospitality is fundamental to how people identify and relate to each other across culture groups in Eritrea and Ethiopia.

The guest-host relationship also challenged the preconceived ideas that one might have about the role of American volunteers traveling to Africa to aid those ostensibly in need. If it hadn’t been obvious prior to our arrival, we would have both quickly realized that we, alone and lacking the experience that Eritrean teachers had in the classroom, were the ones in need of care and aid. Hospitality shifted the axis of gratitude. As Peace Corps volunteers, we learned to perform the role of a gasha, accepting food appreciatively, welcoming the smell of roasting coffee beans in the coffee ceremony, never asking for anything until it was offered, and bringing a small gift of biscuits, coffee beans, or ảreqí (anise alcohol) to people’s homes. Being a good guest included letting people host us and feed us (sometimes way too much). The role of gasha also involved expressing gratitude by participating in community events or working hard to fill teaching responsibilities. Learning to be hosted and perform one’s role as guest properly was essential to deepening professional and personal relationships. Gasha was a complex and sometimes delicate performative role, and hospitality was the relational framework that carried principles and practices of hosting from the intimacy of the home into the public sphere. Returning as ethnographers to the region at various times has also meant navigating hospitality as the unavoidable condition that makes ethnography possible. Anthropology itself is “inhabited by the paradoxes of hospitality” (Candea and da Col 2012, 3); anthropologists are guests and later hosts of stories and experiences.¹

As a relational framework with deep cultural resonance, hospitality is a “shared language of human interaction that can move from local to transregional frames of analysis” (Shryock 2012), but it also draws from local practices and values related to kinship, food sharing, and the symbolic substance of home and connection to land (Tesfay 2016). Sába Tesfay describes the centrality of gifting, food provision, and social calls in Eritrean Tigrigna culture as part of a complex of hospitality through which people reinforce social relations, obligations, and belonging. This cultural form, she argues, is supple and extends over space to involve diaspora communities. Through phone calls, visits, cash remittances, and marriages, diasporas remain integrated in a diffuse mechanism of social reproduction. These exchanges also shore up the rank and prestige of particular families, reproducing differences in status and social capital. The larger the feast hosted to celebrate a wedding or significant event, the higher the status of the event, which also creates a broader web of reciprocity toward the hosts.

Sharing food is central to local practices of hospitality and consequently to crafting relationships. Norms around gifting, particularly food provision, provide a way to redistribute resources in the absence of a labor market or public health services (Habtom and Ruys 2007). As a Peace Corps volunteer, Amanda remembers journeying back to her town early one morning. Waiting for the bus to leave, she pulled out a large piece of flatbread to eat for breakfast. Thinking it would be rude not to share with the man sitting next to her, she pulled off a piece for him, but instead of eating it, he took only a crumb for himself before passing the bread up to the next person. The bread passed from person to person on the bus, until everyone had a small piece. This act of sharing effectively extended generosity beyond its original recipient, not only distributing the gift to a larger number of people but also enabling the original recipient to play the role of medium between the giver and a broader group of beneficiaries. Ritually, this sharing binds people together in the collective experience of giving and receiving, which is routinely reproduced in coffee ceremonies and shared meals. Children are taught from a young age to share and serve others and therefore to not be proprietary with food.

These exchanges go far beyond an economic calculation or even immediate sustenance. As Lisa Cliggett argues in the context of economic instability in Zambia, maintaining relations through small, seemingly insignificant gifts is also about maintaining a right to belong and access future support (Cliggett 2003). Similarly, in multiethnic cash-cropping areas in the Ethiopian highlands, performances of hospitality entail a critical redistribution of food and resources and involve emotional registers through which relationships and senses of mutual obligation with nonkin are reinforced (Matsumura 2008). Hospitality and sharing resources are thus deeply rooted in cultural values that are perceived as timeless and traditional yet adapt to provide a form of social reproduction even in the face of economic and political insecurity, migration, and displacement. Additionally, complex power dynamics undergird these exchanges.

Anthropologists have long been inspired by Marcel Mauss’s germinal work focusing on the gift to explore relations of power and sociality that undergird acts of exchange (1990). Acts of exchange, or reciprocity, are the mechanisms through which social roles and relations are made solid. Exchanges are moral transactions that maintain relationships, and gifts demand reciprocation in material or symbolic ways.² Hospitality is deeply entwined with theories of the gift; both “hold the incomplete and partial function of grasping the complexity of situations that relate the self to the other” (Kawano 2020, 512). Hospitality, however, raises complex questions about issues of sovereignty, alterity, and belonging. It operates as an ambivalent regulatory mechanism and a way to produce moral subjects in the context of social change. Consequently, exchanges made in the framework of hospitality shape social relations in a particular way. As Andrew Shryock argues in the context of Jordan, hosting becomes a test of sovereignty—being “able to feed others, project an honorable and enviable reputation, and protect guests from harm” (Shryock 2012, 20). At the same time, the guest-host relationship is asymmetrical; guests are prisoners of the host, dependent on them for protection and respect until they leave, at which point the guest has the power to shape the host’s reputation.

The guest-host relationship reinforces the subordinate and liminal status of refugees. For example, Katerina Rozakou (2012) investigates hospitality as an asymmetrical relation of power in Greece’s hosting of refugees and asylum seekers. Asylum seekers must conform to particular ideals of behavior to remain welcomed as “worthy guests”—apolitical bodies dependent on the humanitarian gifts of the host. Similarly, Barbara Harrell-Bond points out that norms of exchange undergird refugee food provision in ways that tend to remove accountability for the adequacy and appropriateness of the “gift” to refugees from donors but reinforce notions that refugees themselves should be held accountable for using food aid in ways that donors feel is most appropriate (Harrell-Bond et al. 1992). Consequently, in many places, refugees have been criticized for selling rations to diversify their diets, even if this is what is necessary for survival.

The guest-host relationship, as we explore here, is also mediated by regional politics, culture, and history, which becomes clear through an examination of the micropolitics of hospitality toward refugees in northern Ethiopia. The role of the host is to provide for the guest, an act of gifting that creates lopsided relations of status, power, and obligation. The role of the guest is to be appreciative but also deferential. As an act of exchange, hospitality is also an act of power and a tool of social control. Although hospitality toward refugees is rooted in humanitarian principles of assisting those in need, exchange is never simply altruistic. And in the context of humanitarianism, the power of the guest to return the favor is indefinitely deferred. This is particularly interesting to think about in terms of how Association for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA) representatives used the language and framework of hospitality. The narrative of Ethiopia as a good host of refugees was ubiquitous in news and policy documents and framed the ways in which ARRA officials described their work. One of the officials we met with in Addis Ababa described the essential role of Ethiopia as a good host to refugees: If treated well, he reasoned, refugees would contribute to long-term regional peace, becoming ambassadors on return to their countries. If treated poorly, he asserted, “they would not forget.” But the ultimate give-and-take of hospitality is suspended when refugees are made to wait indefinitely.

These dynamics play out across scales, including at the micro level. During homestays throughout both of our Peace Corps trainings, we quickly learned the delicate etiquette around meals that required allowing one’s host to perform extensive generosity by insisting that guests eat more than they could, then drink a few more beverages, and then eat some more. Meanwhile, the guest was not simply expected to eat and appreciate the food but also to show appropriate reserve, shyness, and deference, a concept that does not translate easily into English but is captured in the Tigrigna word qelíálem. After pushing more food and drink on the guest, the host would often insist that the guest should not have qelíálem and therefore should feel free to eat and drink without hesitation. And, when the guest was truly ready to stop eating, they often declared, “Tsegibe, bízey qelíálem” (I’m full, really, without qelíálem). Generosity and qelíálem coproduce the performativity of the guest-host interaction.

This complex interplay of over-the-top generosity and qelíálem is a kind of dance of etiquette that is central to understanding guest-host relationships in Eritrea and Ethiopia and also illuminates refugee-host relations. Qelíálem refers to a demeanor of shyness, hesitation, and deference that is simultaneously idealized and eschewed. Although qelíálem is seldom described as a virtue, in the broader cultural context of highland Eritrea and Ethiopia, an absence of it—manifested, for example, by stating one’s needs too boldly—would be off-putting and disconcerting. For newcomers to Eritrea culture, failing to grasp this delicate dance between performances of generosity and qelíálem could have problematic results. At best, a guest could wind up with an uncomfortably full stomach. At worst, the guest might deplete the host’s scarce resources, as the host might likely feel compelled to offer what they could not afford. If performed correctly, qelíálem allows the host to magnanimously perform generosity that may be beyond their means without actually depleting their resources. It thus creates a symbiosis between host and guest that simultaneously equalizes relations and reinforces power differentials. It equalizes because it places guest and host on the same footing vis-à-vis their wealth, allowing the host to display abundance through generosity, even if the guest is wealthier than the host or if the host is quite poor. It reinforces power differentials by compelling deference in the guest. While the guest appears to be the one positioned to refuse or accept the gift, in reality, this etiquette empowers the host because it inhibits the ability of the guests to state their needs. The guest is expected to anticipate and attend to the host’s feelings. In Ethiopian highland (Amhara) culture, the concepts of yulugnta and megderder function similarly. Megderder is used to refuse food, while yulugnta refers to a general disposition of deference and can have political implications. In her work on citizenship in Ethiopia, Lahra Smith (2013) notes the power of yulugnta in limiting political participation and leading to performances of deference among disgruntled youth.

Although the word itself was not used, the concept of qelíálem showed up repeatedly in Eritrean refugees’ commentary on being guests in Ethiopia. Expectations of proper deference framed guest-host relations between refugees and their hosts and had the potential to obscure refugees’ needs. The power differentials that are created through gifting take on a particular temporal and spatial dynamic when the gift involves hosting the Other. As Rozakou explains, “As a form of gift, hospitality includes the stranger in the social world of the host, though it is a temporary and conditional inclusion in which the host holds the monopoly on agency” (2012, 565). Hospitality folds strangers into a hierarchical sociopolitical schema while containing the possible danger that they represent. This framework can help illuminate how refugees in Ethiopia are positioned at the intersection of security and hospitality and how Ethiopia’s role as a refugee host is deeply intertwined with its diplomatic performativity regionally and internationally.

Hospitality, Refugee Hosting, and International Relations

In a region that has faced protracted conflict and political upheaval, Ethiopia has a long history of both producing and hosting refugees. Hospitality toward refugees has been a remarkably consistent feature of Ethiopian statecraft across this history, dating from the era of anticolonial struggle, when the country welcomed leaders of African independence movements (Reno 2011). Across successive governments and regime types, Ethiopia has adhered to international protocols and standards where refugees are concerned, including the 1951 UN Convention of Refugees, the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) 1973 Convention. Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that Ethiopia continues to position itself at the front lines of changing global refugee/migration management paradigms. Making countries like Ethiopia a central player in an array of global migration management initiatives is appealing not only because the country houses a large number of refugees (over nine hundred thousand registered refugees and asylum seekers from more than nineteen countries) but also because it has been seen as a stable and cooperative partner (World Bank 2018). Thus, Ethiopian hospitality toward refugees shapes the relationship between refugees and the state and operates as a relational framework between actors in domestic and international spheres.

Ethiopia’s refugee management practice arguably is framed by the twin poles of hospitality and security, making it an ideal international partner under the emergent paradigm of the humanitarian-security-development nexus we discussed in the last chapter. Since the 1960s, Ethiopia’s refugee hosting has been attached to the country’s security apparatus, as Alebachew Kemisso Haybano notes in his detailed history of refugee hosting in Ethiopia (2016). As Haybano tells us, ARRA was created by the communist Derg regime in 1988 and attached to the security apparatus under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. When the Ministry of Internal Affairs was disbanded, a new security entity—the Security, Immigration and Refugee Affairs Authority (SIRAA)—was created, and ARRA became a semiautonomous entity under SIRAA. In 2013, SIRAA was repealed, and ARRA was placed under the newly created National Intelligence and Security Services. While ARRA itself has always remained a semiautonomous unit responsible for refugee and returnee affairs, its linkage with the security apparatus has remained unchanged (Haybano 2016).

Paired with security, the regional politics of hospitality have also been central to Ethiopian refugee hosting. Ethiopia has always had an open-door policy toward refugees; however, despite the country’s lack of securitized borders, the relative openness of the door is always calibrated by politics. What this means is that while Ethiopia is expressly open to all refugees from all places, historically the freedom to move and work has been limited, and most refugees are still housed in camps (Haybano 2016). Ethiopia’s approach to refugee hosting has thus always been situated at the intersection of humanitarianism, security, and regional politics. What is new(er) in Ethiopia is the country’s use of its status as a large refugee-hosting state to position itself as a global player and, in following the initiatives discussed earlier, its increased emphasis on local integration and development.

At the same time, people-to-people relations have always been a core component of Ethiopia’s refugee hosting. Ethiopia expressly describes refugee hosting as a form of grassroots diplomacy, whereby it will create better relationships with its neighbors down the road by being hospitable to refugees. In the twenty-year period of frozen conflict that existed between Eritrea and Ethiopia up until June 2018, Ethiopia adopted a prima facie policy toward accepting Eritrean refugees, and in the absence of normalized relations between the countries, Ethiopia arguably established a relationship of hospitality with Eritrean citizens in an attempt to win over the “hearts and minds” of its neighbors (Connell 2012). Representatives from ARRA consistently described refugees as future “ambassadors” who would ultimately return to their country of origin with positive and familial-like ties formed with the Ethiopian state. In Ethiopian government media publications, explicit connections have been made between policies intent on welcoming Eritrean refugees and peace building (Abebe 2017; Gebru 2017).

We can better understand Ethiopia’s participation in initiatives such as the Khartoum Process and the Global Compacts when we appreciate how the relationship between the Ethiopian state and its refugees (Eritrean refugees in particular) is determined by Ethiopia’s wish to position itself globally as an important refugee-hosting state, its desire to perform regionally as a generous host, and its ongoing emphasis on security. The Khartoum Process, which we discussed in more detail in chapter 1, positions Ethiopia as a state that can benefit from development funding to encourage refugees and migrants to stay but also provides some financial support for security. Similarly, the pledges made during the 2016 Refugee Summit placed Ethiopian hospitality at the center of the world stage at a politically opportune moment.

As Ethiopia was cohosting the summit in New York, the state was facing widespread domestic unrest at home, and its crackdown on political dissent led to highly visible critiques leveraged by Ethiopian émigrés and refugees (Human Rights Watch 2016). While the regime change in 2018 promised democratic reforms and a loosening of state control over political opposition and media, domestic politics continue to be fraught with conflict and internal displacement. Ethiopia produces its own refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in numbers that, at times, have constituted a humanitarian crisis. In 2019, over three million people were displaced by conflict, making Ethiopia the global leader in IDPs. Since then, war in the Tigray region brought violence, hunger, and death to refugees and local Ethiopians—something that we take up in the conclusion. For a country that asserts itself as the only peaceful place in a turbulent region, this raised concerns about whether Ethiopia is the benevolent and stabilizing force that its allies have long imagined it to be (Gettleman 2016). A spokesperson for Refugee International, a nonprofit based in Washington, DC, responded to the news that Ethiopia was forcibly returning citizens who had been displaced by ethnic conflict in the southern Gedeo Zone by saying, “The irony is that the Ethiopian government has been receiving international praise—deservedly so—for its increasingly progressive policies toward refugees, including promoting their right to work and access national services. But the way it’s treating its own displaced citizens is not only shameful, it’s inhumane” (Refugees International 2019). While these forced returns garnered criticism, the open-door policy toward hosting over nine hundred thousand refugees from surrounding countries garnered praise and furthered the assumption among the international community that Ethiopia was a reliable partner in humanitarian and migration management initiatives. Thus, Ethiopia’s role as host exerted and consolidated its status as a stable actor capable of providing security to those in need. This can help to explain why, throughout a time of profound political transition, Ethiopia’s policy toward refugees remained remarkably consistent. During a period of domestic turmoil, Ethiopia claimed international political legitimacy through these projects of humanitarianism.

Ethiopia’s recently expanded role as host under new migration management paradigms functioned as a performance of hospitality that simultaneously promoted Ethiopia’s international reputation, garnered resources, asserted the country’s centrality to regional peace building, and attached it all to the security apparatus enabling it to simultaneously welcome and control “outsiders.” At first glance, the combination of security and hospitality might seem fraught, but arguably, security is integral to the host-guest relationship. Hospitality is frequently mobilized as an ideal, one that communicates a notion of sacred duty or obligation toward protecting and caring for the stranger, but it is also deeply associated with notions that that stranger could be a threat. Jacques Derrida’s model of pure or unconditional hospitality involves “the exposure to the demands of the Other that comes to serve as an ideal against which the worldly politics of territorial inclusions and exclusions can be evaluated and judged” (Dikeç et al. 2009). Consequently, the ideal of hospitality potentially serves as an ethical framework to expand asylum provision and include refugees in social services, such as public education systems, where they may otherwise face discrimination (Perumal 2015). However, Derrida also describes how two figures of hospitality—unconditional and conditional—exist together, and in between these two figures are the grounds of debate about immigration (Derrida 2005). Indeed, hospitality derives from the Greek term hospes, which means both friend and enemy (Lynch et al. 2011). As a cultural form involving the management of difference embodied in the figure of the Other, hospitality pushes us to consider both inclusion and exclusion, welcome and hostility, order and disorder. It pushes us to “reflect on broader questions about citizenship, rights, and the ethical treatment of strangers” (Lynch et al. 2011).

Practices of hospitality shore up the power of the state by setting boundaries between insiders and outsiders and exerting sovereignty over the stranger. Rather than unconditionally including the stranger in the political system, hospitality reinforces state power by producing and controlling the stranger as temporary guest. The positionality of the guest is vulnerable, particularly against the backdrop of volatile political transformations. This is aptly illustrated by the changing position of Eritreans in Ethiopia, which we now turn to.

From Citizens to Guests: Eritreans in Ethiopia

What it means to be Eritrean in Ethiopia has undergone profound transformations. Understanding these shifts is essential to being able to grasp the particular political configuration and the vulnerability of being an Eritrean refugee-guest in Ethiopia. Many Ethiopians still imagine Eritrea and Eritreans to be a part of Ethiopia, but this imaginary has historically led to confusion, ambiguity, anger, and violence around the question of Eritrean belonging. Eritreans have been, and continue to be, configured alternately as insiders, outsiders, enemies, special friends, and guests. This configuration plays out through shifting categories of legal citizenship but also in the gray area between the written law and the use of force on behalf of the state.

The number of Eritreans and people of Eritrean descent in Ethiopia has always been hard to pin down due to migration, intermarriage, and a porous border throughout much of the Tigrigna-speaking regions spanning the two countries. This was particularly so before Eritrea became independent while under Ethiopian rule. Prior to the 1993 referendum, the Eritrean embassy in Ethiopia enumerated the Eritreans living throughout Ethiopia and placed the number at 160,000 (Kibreab 1999). At the time of the border war, Ethiopia estimated that there were approximately half a million Eritreans in Ethiopia. Others note that the population prior to the deportations was probably closer to 130,000 (Kibreab 1999).

In 1991, Eritrea immediately began governing as a sovereign entity distinct from Ethiopia, but at this time, the question of the citizenship and nationality of Eritreans residing in Ethiopia was not clarified. There was never a process in place to determine the citizenship of people of Eritrean descent in Ethiopia or for Eritreans in Ethiopia to formally declare or renounce their Ethiopian or Eritrean citizenship (Campbell 2013; Human Rights Watch 2003). The citizenship status of Eritreans in Ethiopia was a legally gray area, but in practice, Eritreans living in Ethiopia believed they could legally retain their Ethiopian citizenship even if they felt Eritrean. Ethiopia, which at that time had undergone a radical political transition of its own, did not disavow Eritreans of either the notion that they were Eritrean or the idea that they could hang on to their Ethiopian citizenship.

In 1993, Eritreans around the world voted in a referendum for independence. In Ethiopia, the referendum on Eritrean independence did not lend any clarity to citizenship questions. Instead, citizenship continued to be a gray area. Seventy-eight polling stations were set up in Ethiopia, and 57,706 Eritreans in Ethiopia voted in the referendum (Kibreab 1999). At this time, Ethiopia did not require Eritreans to renounce their citizenship. Eritreans who voted in the referendum continued to live, work, and function as if they were Ethiopian citizens (Campbell 2013; Human Rights Watch 2003).

In May 1998, tensions over disputed sections of Ethiopia and Eritrea’s shared border erupted into an all-out war. Through the border war, it appeared that Ethiopia was intent on delineating both territorial and identity boundaries with Eritrea, leaving a large number of people feeling trapped “in between nations” (Riggan 2011). For the first time, Ethiopia rejected the membership of Eritreans in the national polity. The rationale for the expulsion was that by virtue of voting in the referendum and engaging in a number of other nationalistic activities, Eritreans had chosen Eritrean nationality and therefore were foreigners in Ethiopia (Legesse 1998; Klein 1998; Human Rights Watch 2003; Amnesty International 1999).

The deportations were a watershed moment in determinations of not only citizenship and nationality but also belonging. In an interview with Radio Ethiopia on July 9, 1998, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared, “As long as any foreign national is in Ethiopia, whether Eritrean or Japanese . . . [he/she] lives in Ethiopia by the goodwill of the Ethiopian government” (Kibreab 1999). This quotation is significant because the prime minister indicates, publicly and for the first time, that Eritreans in Ethiopia are not Ethiopian and casts them as guests who can be disinvited. The deportations themselves then signified that Ethiopia intended to treat individuals of Eritrean descent not only as aliens but also as citizens of a hostile enemy nation and effectively as unwelcome guests. This was both a declaration of enmity and an assertion that, for the first time, Eritreans did not belong to Ethiopia. When deported, their documents were stamped, “Deported, never to return” (Campbell 2013, 95).

In August 1999, the Ethiopian government ordered all Eritreans above the age of eighteen who had voted in the referendum for independence to register and obtain an alien residence permit. They were given a residence card stating that they were Eritrean, even if they were born in Ethiopia (Campbell 2013, 46). This illustrates the Ethiopian government’s retroactive claim that Eritreans who had voted in the referendum were of Eritrean nationality, not Ethiopian, by virtue of voting in the referendum, despite the fact that there had never been a process in place for them to renounce Ethiopian nationality. From this point on, people who had voted in the referendum were regarded as having Eritrean nationality.

The mandate that all Eritreans register as alien residents was implemented in an arbitrary manner. Some Eritreans were targeted; others managed to keep their identity obscured. For their own safety, some Eritreans hid their Eritrean identity from authorities, sometimes at great risk. Several of Jennifer’s interlocutors told stories of having to change jobs, avoid friends, and move to a different part of the city, sometimes several times, to avoid someone finding out that they were Eritrean and reporting them to the authorities. Many eventually fled to other countries to avoid persecution.

By 2003, Ethiopia had gradually begun to warm up to Eritrean people but not to the Eritrean government. The number of Eritrean refugees fleeing to Ethiopia gradually began to increase, leading Ethiopia to establish the Shimelba camp to house Eritrean refugees in 2004. However, questions of the nationality of people of Eritrean descent remained unclarified until the Ethiopian Nationality Law Proclamation of 2003, which restates that “a person shall be an Ethiopian national by descent where both or either of his parents is an Ethiopian” (Proclamation No. 378/2003). The proclamation also states that “any Ethiopian who voluntarily acquires another nationality shall be deemed to have voluntarily renounced his Ethiopian nationality” (Proclamation No. 378/2003). This means that people of Eritrean descent in Ethiopia who either voted in the referendum, were registered as alien residents, or were deported have been retroactively classified as Eritrean, not Ethiopian.

Eritreans have alternately been citizens of Ethiopia, enemy aliens, and refugees/guests. They have moved in and out of stages of being welcomed and expelled, but more importantly, the modality of belonging shifted to one in which hospitality came to frame the regional political relationship between refugees and the hosting state. Hospitality entails a recognition and management of difference. As such, it is a new modality through which Eritreans are seen to belong in Ethiopia but not to Ethiopia. Hospitality thus reinforces their precarity in a country that has previously oscillated between the forcible incorporation of Eritrea (and Eritreans) into Ethiopia and the violent rejection of Eritreans as enemies. Ironically, although the discourse of hospitality posits an extension of welcome and protection to refugees, it also serves to depoliticize them. They are cast as guests who should be grateful for protection rather than as people who might demand rights of and from the state or who had been victims of that same state (Fassin 2012).

The Micropolitics of Hospitality

“Where can they go?” mused a representative from the aid organization attached to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. We asked him about Eritrean refugees and onward migration, and he balanced the lack of mobility of Eritreans who remained in Ethiopia against the hospitality offered them there: “Better to be here comparatively. Our people are good for guests. At least we don’t loot them. At least we sympathize. So, they prefer Ethiopia.”

The narrative of hospitality draws from cultural practices that span the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia and form part of people’s self-identification. As many Ethiopian aid workers and government officials asserted, Ethiopians are good for guests. Indeed, refugees often said as much, but this guest-host relationship, as we have noted throughout this chapter, is riddled with paradox. Hospitality involves a warm welcome and protection, but it also involves security, dependency, and, often, a neglect of basic needs. It contains inherent contradictions due to its temporality that renders guests as temporary while shaping the parameters of expected behavior. It also masks the broader context in which the mobility of refugees is constrained due to the risks posed by structural and direct violence.

Here, we explore these contradictions first by looking at guest-host relations as they play out between camp refugees, local community members, and Ethiopian aid and administrative staff. We then further explore this dynamic with two main examples—students who are “gifted” with scholarships to attend university and refugees who are the recipients of permission to live “out of camp.” In both cases, the etiquette of generosity and qelíálem obscured the fact that refugees had real but unmet needs and interlaced the (anti)politics of being a refugee with the positionality of Eritrean guest-hood in Ethiopia.

Cartographies of Care and Segregated Communities

Hitsats refugee camp in northern Ethiopia was known for its heat and malaria. Settled in a dust bowl and divided from the town by a thin trickle of river, the camp sat under the glare of the sun, and everyone moved as slowly as possible during the hottest stretches of the afternoon. We began each period of fieldwork in Hitsats by checking in at the ARRA office to get permission to enter the camp. The ARRA office was located across a bumpy dirt road from the camp. ARRA shared a compound with a large structure for processing new arrivals and a massive World Food Program shed where rations were distributed. Beyond the offices where we checked in, laundry was often hung out to dry in front of dormitories housing ARRA employees, including Ethiopian school teachers that were working in the camp. The residences and offices of various INGOs were situated farther up the hillside away from the camp and somehow obscured from view.

On our third or fourth visit to the camp, we were hosted by an INGO that had recently begun working in Hitsats and did not yet have a building of its own there. Our INGO contact took us to the International Rescue Committee compound in search of a bathroom. Although the compound itself was rather desolate (indeed it was full of piles of not-yet-used playground equipment), we were immediately struck by the view from high up on the hill and the cool breeze that relieved some of the oppressive afternoon heat. We sat on a shaded porch and gazed toward the sprawling dust bowl of the camp below us. A brand-new UNHCR residence perched above us, shimmering on the edge of the escarpment. It was literally both on top of the camp and tucked away from view, existing in what seemed to be a completely different ecosystem.

The social cartography of the camp becomes apparent if we consider one category of actor who, in theory, should be able to move across these separated spaces—teachers. In the Hitsats camp, half of the elementary school teachers were ARRA employees who were paid a salary to teach, and the other half were refugee incentive workers. When we asked if teachers socialized together, we were always told that they did, but when we asked where, our interlocutors, both refugees and ARRA workers, hesitated, saying that salaried teachers tended to only go into the camps for special events, like baptisms. Whenever we went to the canteen in the ARRA compound next to the dormitories, we noted a strong sense of sociability between Ethiopian teachers and other ARRA workers, but no refugees were present. Eating together and food sharing are a particularly important way of building community (Tesfay 2016). But the cartographies and geographies that separate refugees from humanitarian workers, including Ethiopian and Eritrean teachers, also make it difficult to engage in practices that establish relationships of reciprocity.

This separation between refugee and Ethiopian teachers was not unique to Hitsats, nor was it purely spatial. When Jennifer once asked an Ethiopian teacher to help her find a refugee’s house in Mai Aini camp, he accompanied her but was clearly uncomfortable. He had never really been in the camp itself before, despite the fact that it was right across the street from the school where he had been working for over two years. He hesitated before entering a bar to get directions, an encounter that he rushed through awkwardly in broken Tigrigna. In the refugee’s house, he sat uncomfortably on the edge of a low concrete bed.

The lack of intimacy built into the cartography of care arguably also frames the micropolitics of hospitality vis-à-vis camp-town relationships. Whenever we arrived in the camp, we received news of refugee-host relations. The fact that camp administrators and refugee staff repeatedly brought this up, even when we had not asked, shows the importance placed on this relationship. Like a weather report, this briefing seemed to shift according to a variety of somewhat predictable factors, namely the presence or absence of resources. A great deal is already known about how the lack of resources can strain relations between camp refugees and their host communities (Kibreab 1996), and indeed, we were often told that a scarcity of firewood or water was straining otherwise good relations between host and guest. But often, the presence of resources—and the humanitarian/bureaucratic requirement that refugees share resources—could also be a barrier to crafting enduring sociality between refugees and local communities. Even though relations between Eritrean refugees and local communities were typically quite cordial, there was little that would suggest the presence of the kinds of dense networks of reciprocity and sharing that Tesfay argues are essential for building community.

Both Mai Tsebri, which borders Adi Harush and Mai Aini camps, and the town of Hitsats, which was connected to Hitsats camp by a long gravel road, had grown from sleepy villages to bustling towns since the camps were constructed. The camps were a captive audience of potential consumers, at least some of whom had money to spend. Town residents could provide services to refugees and sell things in the camps. In Mai Tsebri, streets full of suitcases, backpacks, and winter coats seemed completely out of place for northern Ethiopia but were an indicator of lucrative markets developing in these towns around refugees’ onward journeys. Residents of Hitsats had started a thriving transportation business that started as motorcycle taxis and then turned into three-wheeled bajaj, which carried refugees to the town about a kilometer away and at times to far-flung parts of the camp as well.

The flow of economic resources, however, was mostly one directional. Refugees were not permitted to engage in the transport business in Hitsats. As we walked down the market street of the Mai Aini camp, we noticed a girl selling vegetables next to a refugee-run shop. Our refugee host that day noted that people from the camp could not sell in the town, but town residents could sell things in the camp. The one exception to this was the weekly Saturday market in Mai Tsebri, where refugees could sell rations to the local community. We met a handful of other refugees who were even more economically integrated and, indeed, buying and selling livestock. But for the most part, it seemed clear that given restrictions, the presence of refugees was a boon to the town’s economic development, but not the other way around.

The presence of refugees also brought in other kinds of resources. The mandate of several local integration initiatives, namely the CRRF and the Regional Development and Protection Program (RDPP), was that 70 percent of donor-funded services should go to refugees and 30 percent to the host community. Strict quotas determined that this percentage of host community members must participate in any service, from job training to university test preparation to schooling. Yet restrictions placed on refugee work and mobility meant that the outcome for these shared programs was very different. For example, as we explore in more detail in chapter 4, refugees who graduated at the top of their class from Ethiopian universities were relegated to working for incentive pay, while their Ethiopian colleagues advanced in their professional careers.

The proviso for distributing resources between locals and refugees also required joint educational opportunities at the secondary school level. Schools that were established in the camps (such as in Mai Aini and Hitsats) operated relatively smoothly, particularly as they incorporated local students and made previously unavailable educational opportunities accessible to surrounding villages. In Mai Tsebri, however, a different dynamic took shape. Refugee students from Adi Harush camp were required to attend the existing school in the nearby village of Mai Tsebri. Tensions emanated from the need to treat students differently because of their status as refugees, and the role that some refugee students and families assumed in asserting their needs. For example, refugees were not required to wear (nor did they have access to) uniforms, which are symbolically potent in shaping the notion of proper student behavior and discipline. While we detail these tensions in chapter 3, here we would like to point out that these events could be interpreted as refugees failing to perform their role as guest properly. By asserting that they needed something other than what the host community was providing, they were not acting as grateful guests.

As we noted earlier, sharing resources, particularly food, is an important index of relationality in Tigrigna communities. It delineates and creates social hierarchies but also binds communities together and forges networks of relationships. Within this system of gifting, sharing, and reciprocity, there are inequalities and social hierarchies, but there is a symbiotic relationship between giver and receiver that binds them together. They need each other, and while they may have different resources, they enable each other’s dignity.

In contrast, we would like to suggest here that, in the case of refugee-town/host relationships, there is a different kind of symbiosis in which giving and receiving are mediated through a humanitarian, bureaucratic intermediary and can therefore never fully create this relationality. There are rules, regulations, and laws that prevent town residents and camp refugees from engaging with each other in a truly reciprocal relationship. Thus, these networks of reciprocity are incomplete, meaning that refugees and hosts do not function as one community but as two distinct ones. Also, because refugees were limited in their ability to earn income, they had far less to share at a personal level. Their containment and legal restrictions on work limited their capacity to truly integrate with local communities by forming and cultivating reciprocal gift exchanges. Instead, refugees who called attention to their needs were seen as a burden, as bad guests without qelíálem who asked for too much.

“We Are Thankful, but . . .”

The performativity of the role of grateful guest, of refugee qelíálem, existed in tension with refugee attempts to get their needs met. When we conducted focus groups with university students and others, they invariably began with a near-ritualized observance of gratitude toward Ethiopia as a host for providing them with the opportunity to live safely and to attend college in the country. They began with praise for Ethiopia and the opportunities they had there that were not available in their home country—opportunities to study, advance their education, and learn about specific topics like civics and democracy. Even when refugees were struggling to survive and enduring abhorrent conditions, their narratives were shaped by the expected gratitude that a guest extends to their host. As one male refugee who was struggling to get by in Addis Ababa under the out-of-camp program shared: “For two years I lived in a room which was a toilet for many years. The landlords just closed the opening and provided that space for lower rent. I have no choice than living there because it is the one that I can afford paying. I thank the people of Ethiopia very much for their hospitality. They are welcoming.”

Praise was often followed by a but and carefully couched critiques of what refugees lacked. For example, refugee university students were thankful for the opportunity to study in Ethiopian universities, but the stipend they received to buy books was not enough. They were appreciative of ARRA and UNHCR but they relied on their self-created refugee student organization for support and advocacy and really wanted that organization to be officially recognized to better facilitate its work. They were grateful for the opportunity to live out of camp but desperately needed protection from exploitation by landlords, business partners, and sometimes even the police. As one refugee noted bluntly, “We are thankful for the effort, but the money isn’t enough.” Another said, “The Ethiopian government has been generous enough to let us stay here, and we sleep safely with a roof over our heads, but that is not enough. . . . However hard we try to settle here, Ethiopia has a hundred million people to give jobs to and then they can help others.”

These critiques were typically tempered and framed by a ritualized enactment of praise that is part of the performance of the guest-host relationship. Just as Ethiopia portrayed itself as a good host, refugees seemed to play the good guest. The etiquette of qelíálem, as we noted above, was supposed to inhibit Eritreans from asking for what they needed. When they did call attention to needs, they failed at playing the good guest by exposing Ethiopia’s weakness as a host and feared being regarded as ungrateful.

The limiting nature of the guest role is reflected in the careful discourse of refugees themselves, but it is also reinforced by the expectations about refugee behavior held by aid workers. In part, this reflects what many scholars have noted is a broader undercurrent in humanitarianism that constitutes refugees as mute victims in need of assistance rather than fully human actors (Malkki 1996; Ticktin 2011). Yet the discourse of hospitality reinforces this expected subjectivity and the way it is embedded in hierarchical relationships. For example, at times the NGO provider community expressed resentment toward refugees who asked for too much. In interviews with aid officials in Addis, there was an attitude that refugees would ask for things endlessly, along with a sentiment that refugees sometimes felt like they had a right to things (such as resettlement) that were actually privileges they should be grateful just to have the opportunity to access. This sentiment also played out in the resentment that some of the aid workers held toward a few refugees who were elected to the Refugee Camp Council (RCC) in one of the camps. These RCC representatives began to demand payment for their time and efforts in administering the camp. This labor involved responding to long lines of people seeking their signatures for things like pass permits, gathering refugees to participate in aid programs, and carrying out other aid agency agendas. To do so willingly involved fulfilling one’s role as a good, worthy guest. To demand payment, voice complaints, or refuse to participate in requested services violated this role.

Welcome and Security

Many Eritreans reported feeling surprised on their arrival in Ethiopia that Ethiopians did not hate them. And yet, the border war—particularly the deportations—loomed large in people’s imaginations. Refugees noted that the vast majority of Ethiopians were welcoming and demonstrated tremendous hospitality, with one Eritrean university student stating, “One of the basic inviting parts in this area is social hospitality to the Eritreans. I expected before coming to Tigray, the issue we know from the news in Eritrea—I wasn’t expecting like this. This was very good for me. There is, I mean, collaboration between all the faculty and students in trying to help us.”

When he mentioned the news in Eritrea, the student was referring to the frequent propaganda of Ethiopian enmity that Eritreans are exposed to in their home country. They are led to believe that Ethiopians personally hate Eritreans and subsequently, many people arriving in Ethiopia expected to be met with hostility. Although Eritreans came to feel personally welcomed by Ethiopians, this sense of welcome was tempered by two things: an awareness that security was deeply intertwined with hospitality and a sense of bureaucratic invisibility.

Earlier in this chapter, we showed that ARRA and the roots of Ethiopia’s refugee-hosting bureaucracy are directly attached to the security apparatus. While this security apparatus generally remained latent in refugee lives, it always made its presence felt through various prohibitions, such as the ban on forming groups, organizing the community, holding political protests, or making demands. One way to look at this is that the security apparatus could be deployed to ensure that Eritreans would remain good, uncomplaining, grateful guests. As we have shown above, the logics of generosity on the part of the host and qelíálem on the part of the guest forged a cultural framework through which guest behavior was disciplined by the expectation that they defer to hosts, not complain or call attention to their needs, and be thankful. But in the face of severe needs, this cultural frame often fell apart. Refugees did complain, call attention to their needs, and organize themselves.

When the cultural logics of qelíálem broke down, refugees stopped acting like good guests, instead politicizing their needs and flagging the securitization of their status. The most extreme examples of this breakdown show up in Addis Ababa. Refugees explained that Eritreans generally got along very well with Ethiopians, but they also struggled and felt stigmatized. Landlords discriminated against them. Refugees were unable to work legally and were therefore exploited by employers. Additionally, they could only run a business with an Ethiopian partner, who might also exploit them. These limitations placed tremendous strain on refugees in urban settings. For the most part, refugees knew that they were supposed to not be angry, but sometimes the veneer of qelíálem and gratitude cracked. Many urban refugees shared stories of friends who were becoming exasperated with their lives. At times, this frustration manifested itself in such behavior as getting drunk, singing patriotic Eritrean songs, loudly complaining, and eventually getting in fights with Ethiopians.

A more moderate example concerns refugee attempts to organize, particularly around the camp setting. “We are not allowed to form groups. We are not allowed to organize,” was a common refrain that we heard, particularly among university students. Still, refugees in camps and universities formed an organization, provided support to each other, used their organization to advocate for themselves, raised funds, and planned activities for host and refugee communities. ARRA would not recognize their group officially or release funds to them directly, citing security concerns and Ethiopian law, which prohibited foreigners from forming political parties. In one particular instance, we conducted a focus group with Axum University students who had become aware of some rifts within the camps related to ethnic and regional origin in Eritrea. They decided to start a public education campaign about the importance of national unity. ARRA immediately put a stop to it and confiscated the flyers, saying they were too political. Because of these and other instances, refugees felt constrained. Where organizing efforts did work and could thrive, they were an incredible boon to refugees, making them feel that they belonged. But there was a widespread sense that this kind of activity was not allowed, particularly in the camps. Thus, part of the role of the guest is to be not only uncomplaining but also apolitical.

Eritreans were always aware of security formulations around their shifting role as Eritreans in Ethiopia and the fusion of this with economic limitations and the bureaucracy of hospitality. One refugee university graduate we spoke with echoed a common complaint about the limitations on their ability to achieve social, economic, and spatial mobility: “We saw the opportunities in Ethiopia, and they are not encouraging. We are not only second-class citizens, we are Eritreans. The Eritrea-Ethiopia relation affects us very much. So, it is not easy to get a job in Ethiopia. Security is the main issue. In Ethiopia, it is not encouraging.”

Refugees often talked about their future in combination with both the political and economic situation in Ethiopia. Although most did feel that Ethiopians were welcoming to them and expressed gratitude for being cared for, they also felt that pervasive surveillance and bureaucratic distance impeded their ability to advocate for themselves.

They described this bureaucratic “hospitality” as problematic. Refugee students assigned to Axum University arrived in fall 2016 to find that the university was not prepared for them. They were sent away. Through organizing and collective advocacy, refugees approached the university president and renegotiated their situation. The president later apologized for his lack of welcome and proved to be tremendously supportive of this particular group of refugees. But to get to that point, the students had to step out of their role of deferential qelíálem and ask for their needs to be met—to assert their status as students rather than guests. University students suggested that the mechanism of protection under ARRA was part of what impeded their ability to be treated as they had expected. As one student noted, “The basic problem still remains, we are under ARRA protection—the government of Ethiopia—but there is no authority that can speak with us [directly]. That is the main problem that remains. . . . I mean, as Eritreans we need to have our own organization to speak with the leadership. We need the guarantee of ARRA to speak with us and to create everything in this relationship.”

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed the cartographies of the camp that promote physical distance between Ethiopian staff and refugees, even when they are counterparts doing the same job. We noted the economic limitations that promote distance between refugees and host community members. Bureaucratized hospitality also creates distance. Refugee university students wanted to be respected to advocate for themselves and did achieve some success—for example, in the case of students assigned to Axum University. But where ARRA was concerned, they wanted a closer link, one that recognized their status and stature. They wanted to shorten the distance and be regarded as equals who had rights, not guests who had to defer to hosts.

Conclusion: The Slow Temporality of Hospitality

Hospitality, as we have shown, is rife with contradiction. While many scholars have observed this, particularly in the growing literature on hospitality toward migrants in Europe, these contradictions are amplified in the Global South, in countries that are envisioned as end points by policy makers but way stations by refugees. When we shift our perspective on hospitality to refugee hosting in Ethiopia, we are forced to center important questions about time, precarity, and danger in a different way, highlighting the tension between care and containment, security and protection, and the gap between the teleology of local integration and the temporariness of hospitality in a place where long-term stability and safety are deeply in question.

The presence of a bureaucratized hospitality that illuminates the performance of being a good host and neglects the needs of the guests only furthers mistrust in the host. In the previous chapter, we noted that the temporalities of development are longer term than the temporalities of humanitarian emergency aid. The telos of developmentalism is supposed to lead to something permanent and enduring. In contrast, hospitality is impermanent and temporary. Guests can wear out their welcome—particularly guests who are needy, fail to show the proper deference, and become too demanding. Slicing across temporalities of humanitarianism and developmentalism are the temporalities of bureaucracy, which are notoriously sluggish. Slow bureaucracy keeps the future permanently at a distance. One cannot plan to go to school when the building of the school is delayed. One cannot plan to get a job when the passage of the law that allows one to work is delayed. The temporalities of hospitality are thus temporary but also painfully slow and insufficient.

Arjun Appadurai asks, “How can hospitality toward the stranger be made a legitimate basis for the narrative of citizenship?” (2019). We would answer that it cannot. While hospitality displays political and cultural generosity, by definition, it cannot serve as a blueprint for belonging. Guests go home. They cannot strain the host’s resources forever. As we have emphasized here in the context of Eritreans in Ethiopia, the ongoing performances of qelíálem also strain the guest. Thus, over time, guests develop real needs that hosts may or may not be able to accommodate. As Shryock (2012) observes, it is in the slippage between scales that bad hospitality happens, like when people can only be hospitable in ways that the nation-state allows. In Ethiopia, this slippage happens when the slow temporality, material scarcity, and spatial hierarchy built into bureaucratic hosting prevent people from engaging in networks of reciprocity. And when bad hospitality happens, the stranger may no longer be a guest but is also no longer a stranger (Pitt-Rivers 2012). This slippage is a potentially dangerous one in the fraught regional and historical politics of belonging.

The resultant effect is a bureaucratized hospitality coupled with a political performativity in which guests are disciplined by both a cultural etiquette of deference and the security apparatus. The paradoxes of hospitality are particularly acute for Eritreans in Ethiopia, who face such profound ambiguities of belonging. They have belonged in Ethiopia in the past, and they fought—and to some extent still fight—against forcible inclusion in the Ethiopian polity. They have also been violently and suddenly ejected from Ethiopia and fear that that could happen again. It is thus not surprising that Eritreans would be wary of Ethiopian hosting and instead prefer to be negotiated with as equals.

Notes

1. The possibilities of ethnography are rooted in the complexities of hospitality, which mediate, facilitate, or block the efforts of anthropologists. Julian Pitt-Rivers explores the complicated relationship between ethnography and hospitality via his experiences conducting research in Andalusia, where the community suspected him of being a spy and reinforced a hosting relationship with him: “I was never allowed to escape from my status of being a guest, where I had no rights, into that of community member where I might assert myself, make demands and criticism, and interfere in the social and political system” (Pitt-Rivers 2012, 512).

2. Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col (2012) question what kind of work may have been done in anthropology if Mauss (1990) had focused instead on hospitality, arguing that while both gifting and hospitality involve tensions between friendship and enmity, improvisation and calculation, hospitality goes further in raising important questions about economy and time and negotiating the relationship between sovereignty, identity, politics, inequality, and belonging.