Hosting futures: dispossession and hospitality in contemporary Portugal

In Mediterranean Europe there has been a notable increase in evictions and foreclosures in the past few years. During these processes, families are ‘locked out’ of their pasts – incorporated into walls, objects, relationships, but also a wider world built on the possibility of anticipating and imagining futures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an informal neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon, I demonstrate that hospitality is capable, on the one hand, of re-connecting home and hope, and, on the other, of providing a convincing basis of regional comparison. My intention is to show that hospitality can be investigated as a «weapon of the weak».