Hospitality, Friendship, and the Outsider in Highland Sardinia

Hospitality in central highland Sardinia is a key cultural idiom that structures community life and accompanies daily interactions among all social actors. Its meaning varies according to the relationship between the parties involved in the exchange, with social distance a primary variable. Based on field work conducted over a period of thirteen months in 2002 and 2003, this paper examines practices of hospitality in the village of Orgosolo in light of some characteristics that Eric Wolf (1957, 1986) attributes to the “closed corporate community.” A reworking of Wolf's classic formulation permits insight into how practices of hospitality maintain the exclusiveness of the moral community vis-à-vis the outside world, and incorporate outsiders into a special category which neutralizes the danger they initially present, thus exempting them from local standards of interaction that are driven by an egalitarian and competitive ethos.