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This article seeks to define hospitality through its ritual practices so as to highlight its political meaning and function. Four features of hospitality may be drawn from ethnographic and anthropological accounts: the creation of a social relationship prior to practices of gift and counter-gift, the management and control of outsiders, and the classification of belonging. Largely neglected, considered to be “pre-political” and subsumed within the paradigm of sharing, hospitality nonetheless constitutes the first relationship of a political community with others such as foreigners or other outside communities. Shared by traditional societies and contemporary democracies alike, the recurrent problem of demarcating and legitimizing the community is the essential meaning of hospitality as an object of political theory.