ON HOSPITALITY AND INNOVATION

Text topic: (Lack Of) Culture

Text author: Лана Павловић Алексић

The role of public hospitality emerges as important space for establishment of stability and change in a given culture. Hospitality in the public sphere is a public presentation of culture from one community to another, or from one prominent individual to another. Ritual of hospitality thus mediates cultural transmissions. Public hospitality, as a form and content of ritual exchange of cultural traits, influences innovative movements of cultural systems. Starting with such an assumption, one of the many possible examinations of the structure, characteristics and the interrelations between hospitality and innovation was undertaken in this theoretical article. Places of public hospitality (places of establishment of symbolic complementarities of two realities – two entities, us or them) and processes of innovation (continuous accumulation of changes) are portrayed based on examination of the mythic in cultures, fragments from history, history of ideas about hospitality and about what is strange, results of recent research of innovation in the fields of evolutionary anthropology and theoretical biology as well as on the hospitality and the critical views of the author. In conclusion, the differences in mastering and acquiring social and physical unknowns through structures and forms of hospitality create qualitative differences in cultural transmissions and in the potential for innovation of a particular community.