Hospitality in Early Modern France and Tokugawa Japan: Concept and Practice (HOST-FJ)

The study of hospitality is an urgent endeavour at a time of increasing conflict and when debates over asylum seekers and immigration generally pose a key challenge to the UK, the USA, the EU, and Japan, as well as to the world at large. This is because attitudes towards strangers, foreigners, and difference in general play a vital role in shaping how a society understands and provides hospitality.

By comparing the function of hospitality—defined as the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, and strangers—in two past societies at a time of fracture and division, this project will provide vital historical perspectives on today’s problems.

The project has three central scientific aims:​

• to demonstrate how central hospitality was to the functioning of the state, to religion, to the economy, and to people’s lives in the 17th century through the use of comparison.
• to undertake a historical investigation into how hospitality was understood and practiced in early modern French and Japanese cultures.
• to draw out hospitality’s potential for reconciliation by connecting the study of hospitality with memory of civil conflict and state reconstruction.

PI: Marc W. S. Jaffré

HI: Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico (ISIG), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) and the International Center for Japanese Studies (国際日本文化研究センター)

Funded by the European Union (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions [MSCA] global fellowship, Grant agreement ID: 101273264)