Welcoming dangerous benefactors: incense, gods and hospitality in north-eastern Taiwan

Chinese festival ritual offers an extreme case of hospitality to outsider benefactors, to gods. They are invited outsiders. Their host is a territorial community of households represented by their divinely selected master of the god’s incense burner. Mediation to communicate with and separate from powerful guests is a courting of great power and avoiding its danger. Their welcome poses the danger of offence. To these points I add other sides and counterparts to rites of hospitality, such as rites of charitable feeding. I begin by arguing that the dangers of hospitality suggested by others in this volume are applicable in this case. Finally, I suggest how the terms in which I analyse these Chinese rites are applicable to other orders of hospitality.