Emily Höckert | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

How do hosts and guests welcome each other in responsible tourism encounters? This is the question addressed in Ethics of Hospitality, an ethnographic study on tourism development in coffee-growing communities in Nicaragua. The research follows the trail of development practitioners and researchers who came to the communities with a desire to help, teach and study the local hosts. On a broader level, it is a journey exploring why these guests, as well as tourists proper, expect unconditional hospitality in their encounters with rural communities. The analysis put forward in the research suggests that hospitality, responsibility and participation all require a readiness to interrupt one’s own ways of doing, knowing and being.