Guests and hosts in an athens public hospital: Hospitality as lens for analyzing migrants' health care

Abstract

Based on six months of ethnographic research in the maternity clinic of a major Athens public hospital in 2017, this chapter employs the conceptual lens of "hospitality" to analyze relationships that formed around the care of pregnant migrants arriving in Greece since 2015. Permanent health-care personnel, mostly midwives, are the hosts; guests include migrant women, NGO workers that accompany them to the hospital, Greek Roma maternity patients, obstetrics residents, and the native ethnographer herself. The focus is on pregnant migrants; the other guests provide comparative fodder to flesh out the subjectivity of the hosts. Through an ethnographic reconstruction of the microcosm of the clinic as a space of care, sovereignty, and everyday life, the chapter takes on two theoretical issues: the problem of scale and the argument that the hierarchical character of hospitality is incompatible with a rights-based framework. Critiques to the use of the host-guest trope as a frame for the analysis of relations between migrants and receiving states and societies are well heeded. Yet I demonstrate that guest-host dynamics are very much operative in the interaction between state-employed, permanent health-care personnel and migrants. My analysis highlights the limits and capacities of hospitality's scalar transpositions, as well as the critical potential of hospitality as a lens that elucidates how legally guaranteed migrants' rights are accessed and granted in practice; hospitality and rights thus emerge as complementary rather than opposing structural and explanatory frameworks.