A Portuguese urban vegetable garden under the gaze of hospitality

Abstract

This work concerns an urban vegetable garden in the north-west of Portugal and aims to describe the hospitality surrounding this environment. This study resulted from a two-year field investigation, which was methodologically driven by ethnography and supported by the anthropology of food. The concept of the semiosphere, linked to the semiotics of culture, was used as a reference to analyse the codes of hospitality that circulate in this space. This allusion helped emphasise the boundary separating the vegetable garden from urban texts and enunciating the collective memory established there, aligned with a group of mostly older people. These themes contoured dynamics that elucidated a hospitality profile, which was confronted with the four unwritten laws of hospitality proposed by Camargo. With this, it was concluded that the hospitable profile of this semiosphere emphasises the asymmetry law that the guest must respect the host’s right to space.