Reframing Hospitality: Cognition, Social Bonding, and Mimetic Criticism

Hospitality as a metaphor for a new paradigm of Bible translation has been put forward by a number of translation scholars. However, the reasons for their suggestion of hospitality as a new way of thinking are anecdotal and intuitive. This paper aims to recontextualize the problem of hospitality in translation theory using verifiable interdisciplinary approaches, namely evidence from cognitive science and anthropology. These interdisciplinary approaches—specifically, Dunbar’s number and René Girard’s mimetic criticism—will provide a more coherent and verifiable paradigm of hospitality for Bible translation