ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides ethnographically based case studies that cast light on hospitality practices and the actors involved. Some of these practices can be understood as creating counterspaces, whereas others form the basis for discussing non-binary means of hospitality. The book shows how hospitality practices are both generous and excluding at the same time. This means that dismantling the welfare state and initiating a one-sided return of tasks to civil society is not an option, since the civil society context also contains explicit traces of inhospitality. The book suggests that Nordic Protestantism was characterized by its giving significance to an ethics that lies beyond the religious/secular binary. The significance of an ethics beyond any religious/secular binary lies in its encompassing the strength of inclusiveness compared to an ethics that promotes Christianism.