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In the oral traditions of Jordan's Balga tribes, one event occurs many times: local shaykhs are invited to a feast by the Turks, and at this feast the shaykhs are attacked, arrested, or killed. Sometimes it is the Ottomans who are betrayed by their bedouin hosts. Either way, they should have seen it coming—that is usually the narrator's conclusion—but the lure of hospitality was strong. Something about these encounters was worth the risk of ending up in manacles, or dead.

Talk of hospitality often turns to the problem of bad guests and bad hosts. This trend holds whether the speakers are Balga Bedouin in Jordan or political theorists in Europe, and it would seem that bad hospitality accumulates in the gaps created by shifts in scale, as houses absorb other houses, or nation‐states and their citizens compete to control the concepts and practices that define house, host, and guest. Moving from Bedouin history to metropolitan political theory, I show how bad hosts and guests break hospitality apart, revealing its component parts and how they work.RésuméQuand on parle d'hospitalité, que ce soit avec des Bédouins Balga en Jordanie ou avec des politologues européens, le débat s'oriente souvent vers le problème des mauvais hôtes et des mauvais invités. C'est à croire que la mauvaise hospitalité s'accumule dans les vides créés par les changements d'échelle, lorsque les maisons absorbent d'autres maisons, lorsque les États‐nations et leurs citoyens se font concurrence pour contrôler les concepts et les pratiques qui définissent la maison, l'hôte et l'invité. Passant de l'histoire des Bédouins à la théorie politique métropolitaine, je montrerai ici comment les mauvais hôtes et les mauvais invités déconstruisent l'hospitalité, révélant ses composantes et leur manière de fonctionner.

In noting that Joseph Massad's identity as a Palestinian Jordanian should be central to any critical evaluation of Colonial Effects, I am taking seriously his claim that writing the book entailed, for him, a gradual "coming to terms" with this identity. I am also reapplying Massad's own interpretive method. "Throughout the book," he tells us, "you will notice that I identify the geographic origins and the religious and ethnic backgrounds of people. This is done deliberately" (p. 16). Why? Because such specificity is needed to "interrogate" the claims people make about "Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture" (p. 16). I find it bizarre that Massad would cry "foul" when I conclude that his own (self-announced) "subject position" influenced his thinking on these topics.