Paper short abstract:

The paper explores practices of hospitality, incorporation and encompassment among coastal fishing populations in South Western Madagascar. The author will argue that contact between different social entities does here not – or not necessarily – lead to the nullifying of ontological difference, but to the preservation and maintenance of difference.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores practices of hospitality, incorporation and encompassment among coastal fishing populations in South Western Madagascar. The author will argue that contact between different social entities does here not - or not necessarily - lead to the nullifying of ontological difference (as a means to contain and "dissolve" alieness into a homogenizing Self, as suggested by the metaphor of cannibalistic assimilation by Claude Levi-Strauss and others), but to the preservation and maintenance of difference, the encompassment of the "magic" of ontological otherness, which is a means to empower Self politically, socially and symbolically.

Magic in this sense relates to an ontological separation between Self and Other, and to practices to create sympathetic relations by means of ritualised evocation (metaphor, mimesis, representation, spells, bewitchment) and/or contact (metonym, contagion, travel, hospitality, inhabitation) with Other. Ontological difference is considered here a social construct by means of which social actors, through embodied practice and rhetoric performance, delineate Other from Self.

Through the study of the accommodation of tourists and other strangers, the author suggests that symbolic cannibalism, as a popular trope for cultural consumption in the cultural studies, militant social sciences and also the popular media, is not a good concept to describe touristic contact zones. Instead he will suggest the concept of 'encompassment' of the Other, which had earlier been used by Edward LiPuma and Michael Jackson and which allows us to think about tourist contact zones without assuming that contact leads to the ontological assimilation of Other.