Paper short abstract:

This paper explores various biological and political barriers to hospitality in a U.S. hospital and presents the mediating role of chaplaincy and religion as a social and therapeutic counterbalance to such restrictions.

Paper long abstract:

The 21st century university teaching hospital in the U.S. is an often bewildering labyrinth of wards, theaters, and halls, demarcated by bold signs, computerized card readers guarding vault-like doors, and strict sartorial requirements. Much of this modern architecture reflects the development of germ theory, yet in the violent inner-city neighborhoods in which many of these medical centers are now located, administrators also justify barriers as vital safeguards against unwelcome individuals. Such seemingly unambiguous differentiations of inside/outside, sterile/infectious, resident/visitor, and giver/receiver present a rigid, even hostile view of the hospital as a place once promoted as a beacon of therapeutic hospitality. Through two years of fieldwork with a small cohort of chaplain trainees, my peers and I moved routinely among multiple types of individuals and situations across these demarcated spaces, connecting with patients and their families, surgeons, nurses, janitors, administrators, and others. Such mobility suggests not strict dichotomies but instead potentially porous social, physical, and epistemological boundaries. Chaplains appear to occupy a highly unique space as both employee (insider) and religious specialist (outsider, by biomedicine's standards), welcoming committee, liaison, escort, and bridge between the sacred and the secular. In this paper, I argue that chaplains, and by extension religion, traverse these divides on a regular basis as social and cultural mediators of various forms of hospitality. I contend that this role reflects important dimensions about power, access, and reciprocity in the medicalization-hospitality dialectic in the U.S. and can likewise add important taxonomic insights to religion-hospitality discussions in social anthropology.