Hospitality and its many guises: figuring a typology for carpet salesmen

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1669288 (Table of Contents)

Types and typification are deemed to be part and parcel of everyday living as individuals navigate their daily lives and in the process, try to make sense of their encounters with the people and the world around them. This study takes up this need to typify by attending to the circumstances under which individuals, in this case tourists as guests and carpet salesmen as their hosts, resort to forming types as part of their assumed roles. It employs a mixed methodology which is based in part on a qualitative content-analysis of tourist reviews and topic-based forum discussions on the online travelling website TripAdvisor, as well as fieldwork conducted over several weeks in and around Sultanahmet. By using Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphors and his conception of social interactions through face-to-face encounters, this study lays the ground for elucidating how the many guises of hospitality are both performed by carpet salesmen and discursively propagated by tourists so as to contribute to the typification of a prevailing figure of the carpet salesman.