Thinking about Hospitality, with Derrida, Kant, and the Balga Bedouin

While doing research on hospitality in Jordan, I began to notice odd affinities between Bedouin understandings of this concept and certain trends in metropolitan political philosophy. Why, I wondered, does Derrida sound like a Bedouin when he writes about hospitality? What are "Arab Bedouin" doing in Kant's discussion of universal hospitality? By putting Bedouin stories into conversation with European political thought, I will illustrate the deep, thematic similarities that pervade these traditions. The similarities, I argue, are based on historical relations, but also on a shared desire to locate human interaction in idealized spaces that transcend the political and moral systems in which we live.