ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts general statements about the inhabitability of contemporary spatialities with an ethnographic account of day to day uses of the coastal hotel. It draws attention to the pressures and pleasures of sociality which inhabit the coastal hotel. The chapter focuses on the fleeting and mundane moments of hospitality, the network of performances of hosting and guesting that makes the coastal hotel livable. It examines dominant perspectives on contemporary spatialities, which tend to emphasize the inhabitability of the generic landscapes of late capitalism, and their suitability for the study of mass tourism. The chapter develops an alternative understanding based on Derridian notions of hospitality and Maffesoli's analysis of contemporary cultural life, opening up mass tourism to new forms of analysis which are less hostile to this tourist phenomenon. It gives an ethnographic analysis of practices of hospitality and inhabitability in the hotel pool, the main communal area in the coastal hotel.
