The Class Dimension of Hospitality: The Diversity of Dispositions Organizing Hospitality Practices

Abstract

This article looks at hospitality practices in the process of recreating and modifying social structure. The author seeks the general regularities and behavioral patterns that appear when people visit others and are visited, as well as how they speak of these visits, or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s language, the principles that organize practices that are part of the class habitus. For the purposes of the analysis, two comparative groups were selected: people with the highest and lowest levels of economic, social, and cultural capital. The analysis allowed several conclusions to be drawn. First, in addition to the class factor, the age or generational factor should be taken into account as it has proven to be relevant in terms of the diversity of practices. Second, the research showed that several of the practices studied were not differentiated between the groups; they turned out to be intense in the case of people with high and low levels of capital. Such patterns involved informality and freedom, the striving for agreement and group solidarity, and an aversion to aesthetics and decoration. Third, there were sometimes differentiating nuances – the general principle could be the same, but the justification or motivation behind it was different. For people with a high level of both types of capital, naturalness/honesty was an important justification and was contrasted to  falsehood, artificiality, and pretentiousness. This justification seemed to be a meta-principle that permeated many other patterns of behavior.