ABSTRACT
This chapter explores anthropological debates about hospitality in relationship to ethnographic and historical work on Central Asia. It focuses in particular on the complex role of rituals of hospitality in the conduct of fieldwork, the significance of the state and state actors in determining the shape of encounters between guests and hosts, and the long-standing significance of commerce to the types of spaces, institutions and social relationships of significance for hospitality in Central Asia. A central argument of the chapter is that the commercial aspects of hospitality provision in Central Asian history makes its enactment distinctive in important ways from the societies of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where hospitality has largely been regarded by anthropologists through the lens of moral concepts such as honour and masculine forms of individual autononomy.The chapter draws on the author’s fieldwork experiences in northern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in order to shed light on these issues.
