a house meeting this evening during which we get to talk a about guests and hospitality.<\/p>\n
1\/ mihui remains with us. a bit of a strange transition. she came to the house through her old school friend cynthia, who actually insists on charging her rent for the month that she’d be staying. a month in which cynthia is kind of pushing her to find a job, a house, a life, while mihui wants to catch her breath after NY law firms and hang out unemployed for a while. then came the moment we realized: she could live in my room in august, and in mar\u00c3\u00ada’s in september, when we’re back in europe. the question of rent is brought up and of course mar\u00c3\u00ada and i insist that there is no need for mihui to pay rent to us (remember marie curie…). the situation is a bit uncomfortable. for cynthia – who must be interpellated in some way – and also a bit for leta who seeks to keep peace. but mihui remains with us.<\/p>\n
2\/ i bring up how offensive cynthia’s remark<\/a>, in front of a guest (cooking for the whole house…) was. this is how she takes my comment. first it’s about a deeper meaning, an underlying problem of negative energy between both of us. i resist the non-acknowlegement of what happened in the kitchen. when i explain again why i find what happened unacceptable, it becomes something else (aided by peace keeper leta): cultural difference. what in “my culture” is not done is an innocent situation from cynthia’s perspective. (leta affirms, yes, for her friend jenn from new orleans it would also be not done – do you see the connection? – but in california it is different.)<\/p>\n you know what, i settle for this. why? perhaps cause part of me got convinced that sociability and notions of community in this place are far off from the things i feel connected to and that it’s impossible to tackle the whole of it. “my culture” then becomes a way of protecting some things to which i’m very attached and unwilling to compromise. moreover, “cultural difference”, “different life-styles” is a language that is understood here. it works. it worked before – when i was hesitating whether i would live into this house or into the student coop i had a conversation with leta in which i insisted that i could only join the house if it was able to accomodate the fact that i would have lots of guests for long periods of time and that i would be back to europe for substantial periods of time. the particular discourse of communal living in the washington house is about “supporting each other life-styles” and this is how leta translated my concerns at the time: if that is your life-style and we want you in the house then that means we are willing and able to support your life-style. with the beautiful mar\u00c3\u00ada connection-companionship and the flow of our beautiful guests in the last two months the house has changed a lot. having a shared ground between us that enables another kind of daily communal living makes all the difference and works in contagious ways. but somehow i don’t expect that we’ll manage to create that kind of common ground between all of our house-mates. i wouldn’t even know where to start with lost-in-new-age cynthia’s relationship to money. and this is where “culture” (oh… not for a moment do i think that hospitality is a “flemish” or “european” thing, don’t get confused with this part of the story…) and “life-style” seem to work.<\/p>\n let there be no misunderstanding: i would like it to be otherwise. “different” has a negative function here: protection, liberal public space in which we tolerate all our differences, cultural relativism, suburbia-subjectivity. i mean, really, what would be the formulation if we’d be describing this “culture” cynthia claims to be different: so your culture or life-style is about charging excessive rent to unemployed old-time friends and asking money when someone joins us for a meal? interesting, adds the anthropologist, tell me more of these cultural habits of yours…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" a house meeting this evening during which we get to talk a about guests and hospitality. 1\/ mihui remains with us. a bit of a strange transition. she came to the house through her old school friend cynthia, who actually insists on charging her rent for the month that she’d be staying. a month in … Continue reading “house meeting”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}