Cultures of Welcome: What Odysseus Can Teach Us About Hospitality
Editor: Caroline Wiedmer - Franklin University Switzerland
Caroline Wiedmer’s paper investigates the welcome culture on display in today's Switzerland in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Its interest is in the notions of conditional and unconditional hospitality as conceptualized by Jacques Derrida, and the degree to which these different cultures of welcome are handed down to us in texts such as Homer's Odyssey and Plato's Apology, which in turn find echoes in the national and supranational narrative strands in Switzerland in the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries. Within the context of the war in Ukraine and the asylum regime put in place for those fleeing it, the article focuses on the policy of the so-called S-status, in place to offer unbureaucratic shelter that neither overwhelms the system nor focuses on the narratives of individuals, as an example of unconditional welcome. The difference between the two sorts of welcome lies in where you locate the motor of the narrative; this in turn has implications for how intersections of racism and sexism play out.