Short Abstract

This panel explores "xenophilia" as an mode of engagement through which anthropologists can enrich and reconfigure processes of staying, moving and settling, inviting us to think and theorise spaces where people develop strategies and schemas to generate or welcome stranger-ness. ​

Long Abstract

Contemporary and historical processes of staying, moving and settling are giving way to increasingly heterogeneous milieus of social hybridity punctuated by people developing a more sustained relationship with the strange, alien, uncanny and unfamiliar dimensions of the mundane - whether this relates to another person, object or entity. Anthropologists have extensively explored such processes through notions and concepts of cosmopolitanism, border-work, ethics and mobility. We suggest that "xenophilia" (Napier 2017; Borneman and Ghassen-Fachandi 2017) can provide an apt prism through which anthropologists can enrich and reconfigure such fields of literature. On the one hand, xenophilia's links to hospitality (philoksenia) are apparent and urge us to rethink the latter as mediated by global processes of staying, moving and settling. On the other hand, understood as the reverse of philoksenia, xenophilia invites us to think and theorise spaces where everyone and everything has the potential to appear as strange, and where people develop social, cultural and ethical codes of conduct to regulate such everyday encounters with strangeness. This panel invites contributes which seek to ethnographically and theoretically develop the concept of xenophilia as an emergent, contemporary phenomenon, or as a historically sustained one. Contributions can focus on, but are not restricted to, cases of otherness, ethno-historical and cross-cultural explorations of welcoming the other, human relations with spirit-worlds, ethics, xenophilic spaces and material culture.