“Guest in House… Worse than a Tartar”. The Ethnologist and the Hospitality Aporia

The title of the article is a combination of two popular Polish proverbs, with the first declaring that a guest is a form of godliness, and the second – that hospitality is torment; both attitudes are widely represented in paremiology since each is in its way justified by reality. What do the eternal symbols of the godliness of the guest, the other, the stranger actually mean, especially today, in an age of mass-scale influxes and migration? Was the guest really treated as a representative of the sacral / superhuman and the transcendent, or was this rather at best a metaphor of his inviolability? The text discusses various historical and ethnographic materials documenting the attitude in question. The problem of sexual hospitality is considered more extensively; apparently, the anticipated element of the guest’s sacral status does not occur in this custom, rather universal in the ethnographic past of various societies, and its local motivations and emic justifications are exclusively social.