Couches and canals : an ethnographic analysis of couchsurfing in Amsterdam

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Couches and Canals: An

Ethnographic Analysis of

Couchsurfing in Amsterdam

Name Alexander Bower UvA Student Number 10861491

Email alex_bower@hotmail.co.uk Thesis Supervisor Dr. I. L. Stengs

Degree Program MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology Department GSSS

Affiliation University of Amsterdam

Secondary Readers Dr. A. T. Strating and Dr. R. J. van Ginkel Date 21st June 2015

MSc Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University

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"Verklaring: Ik heb de UvA regels ten aanzien van fraude en plagiaat gelezen en begrepen [http://www.student.uva.nl/fraude-plagiaat/voorkomen.cfm]. Ik verklaar dat dit geschreven werkstuk volledig mijn eigen werk is, dat ik alle bronnen die ik heb gebruikt zorgvuldig en correct heb aangegeven, en dat ik volgens de regels heb geciteerd. Ik heb dit werkstuk, in deze of gewijzigde versie, niet eerder ingediend voor een ander vak of als onderdeel van een ander werkstuk."

"Declaration: I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy [published on http://www.student.uva.nl/fraude-plagiaat/voorkomen.cfm]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper."

Alexander Bower

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Abstract

Couchsurfing.org is a global hospitality network that seeks to create a community that encourages members to share their lives with each other through staying with local people. With a membership base of nearly 9 million members, Couchsurfing has become an important leader in the world of alternative tourism and an interesting source of

anthropological study. This thesis deals with some of the ways in which members use the Couchsurfing network within the city of Amsterdam. Based on three months of participant observation amongst hosts and travellers within the city, I seek to discover how hospitality is enacted by Couchsurfing members in Amsterdam and the practices that allow the community to continue to function. In doing this I focus on a number of different aspects of the

Couchsurfing phenomenon including the reputation system, member organised events, authenticity, and the importance of the reciprocal hospitality relationship between host and guest (c.f. Germann Molz, 2007). In particular I use the example of food as the carrier of hospitality through the sharing of culture and personal memory (c.f. Appadurai, 1981; Seremetakis, 1996) as well as the role that cooking can play in the building of relationships and reciprocity. There is also a dark side to Couchsurfing exhibited through events that are deemed to not be in keeping with the spirit of the network’s ideology. Whilst these actions include ‘extreme’ cases such as sexual assault, they can also be revealed through invasion of personal space and disrespect of property. I use the domain of the kitchen and food in order to highlight how tension between hosts and guests can arise.

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Acknowledgements

I want to take this opportunity to thank the people who have been instrumental in driving me throughout the last ten months to reach the finish line of this Master’s thesis.

First and foremost I wish to thank my thesis supervisor Dr. Irene Stengs whose support, encouragement, and honesty have proved invaluable in helping me write this thesis. Her continued guidance and patience have been invaluable and her criticisms have helped me strive to make this project something that I am proud of.

I also want to thank the other academic staff from the Anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam who helped me create a formulated research proposal and guided me on the right path – in particular Dr Alex Strating and Dr Adnan Hossein – who have at various points helped me strengthen my methodological and theoretical approach to anthropology and have kept this project from falling off the tracks

I am forever grateful to my friends and family for sticking with me through the constant complaining and frequent swearing. In particular Jess Dye and Brandon Moskun whose proof reading and editing have been beyond helpful. Adam Ronning, Sean Dugan and Jacob Harbich have been a continual source of strength and motivation and their support has kept me going when I wanted to give up.

The 2014-2015 cohort of the Master’s in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam have provided me with new ways of looking at things and their suggestions throughout the course of the programme have helped me mould this project into this final thesis.

Finally I am indebted to those members of the Couchsurfing community who took the time to talk to me and provided me with the inspiration for this thesis. Without them this work would not have been possible. They have truly shown me how a community can become a global phenomenon and I have had the privilege of making friends from all over the world.

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Introduction

It was the afternoon of August 13th 2014 and I was sat sweating on a low wall in a residential neighbourhood in the west of Amsterdam. I had a bottle of water in one hand and my phone in the other, which I was constantly checking to see whether I had received a new message. Next to me were a large backpack and a suitcase containing almost all of my earthly

belongings. After sitting in the heat for ten minutes my phone buzzed – ‘Just got on the tram. See you soon’. The text message was from Maarten, a Dutch marketing assistant in his mid-twenties. The wall I was sitting on was opposite his apartment. Fifteen minutes later Maarten walked around a corner. After we introduced ourselves he led me into his building and after hauling my luggage up six floors we entered his small apartment. There were four rooms in all – a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a dining room – and the place was not particularly tidy. Boxes were stacked against walls and the washing up had not been done in a couple of days it seemed. Maarten pointed at a folded up deflated air mattress in the corner of the living room, ‘That’s for you’. Whilst I sat on the floor blowing up my mattress, Maarten entered the kitchen and started making tea.

I had just moved to Amsterdam from England to begin my postgraduate studies at the University of Amsterdam and it would be a couple of days before my student room was available for me to move into. I had contacted Maarten the previous week through

Couchsurfing.com, an online networking site that allows members to send ‘couch requests’ to other users around the world to ask for a place to stay for free. A popular site amongst

travellers, ‘with Couchsurfing, you can stay with locals in every country on earth. Travel like a local, stay in someone's home and experience the world in a way money can't buy.’1 I stayed with Maarten for two nights and during that time I got to experience a side of Amsterdam that was missing in the Lonely Planet book I had religiously studied before my move. A bike tour around the canal rings was followed by an all-night party at the house of one of Maarten’s friends with the theme ‘cereal killers’ (everyone dressed as their favourite cereal mascot – I was Tony, the Kellogg’s Frosties mascot), an interpretive dance retelling of the fall of Rome that his sister was performing in, and a night time picnic at Strand West, one of Amsterdam’s urban beaches. My two night stay was not my first experience with

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Couchsurfing. I had been a member since the previous summer, but had only used it a couple of times during a trip to Canada. Faced with a tight budget I decided to utilise the website once more to orientate myself in Amsterdam and to meet some people before my course began. Out of ten couch requests I had sent to hosts in Amsterdam, Maarten was the only one who had replied saying that he would be willing to host me, and those two days and nights I spent with him not only planted the seed for this thesis but also gained me a good friend.

Sharing Your Life: An Introduction to Couchsurfing

The thought of sleeping in the home of a total stranger in a foreign city is enough to make mothers all over the world shudder. Yet this is precisely what the millions of travellers who use the hospitality network Couchsurfing.com do. Couchsurfing greets potential members with the grand statement ‘We envision a world made better by travel and travel made richer by connection. Couchsurfers share their lives with the people they encounter, fostering cultural exchange and mutual respect.’2

Couchsurfing originally launched in 2004 after an American student sent an email asking a number of students in Iceland for a place to stay during his trip. He received more than fifty offers and this planted the seed of an idea, which eventually was to morph into Couchsurfing. With approximately 9 million people in more than 120,000 cities having created profiles on the site as of early 2015, and frequent mentions in travel publications such as Lonely Planet, Couchsurfing as a hospitality network has created a truly global community that allows people from all over the world to experience an alternative form of travel. It is a non-profit organisation although members have the option of paying a small fee in order to get ‘verified’ – a marker that simply proves you live at your stated address.

Joining the site is a relatively simple process. Members sign up to the website entering basic information – name, age, gender, location - and create a profile detailing a bit about themselves through a number of headings such as ‘About Me’, ‘One Amazing Thing I’ve Done’, ‘Countries I’ve Visited’, and ‘Philosophy’. The more detailed a profile is the more likely it is that an individual will be successful in finding someone who will want to host them or stay with them. Adding photographs and having friends who also use the site

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can help to improve a profile and allow a new member to begin their usage of the site3. Once they have created a profile they can search for hosts or travellers around the world and send ‘couch requests’. As well as allowing members to find hospitality, Couchsurfing allows them to create events and organise meetings creating a network that reaches far beyond a dyadic host/guest relationship.

Couchsurfing also functions as a social media site, allowing members to exchange messages and join sub-groups such as Queer Couchsurfers or Christian Musicians. Members can add friends and participate in discussions, which whilst not as streamlined as other social media sites, still provides the opportunity for continued communication with members even if an individual is not participating in a host-guest interaction.

Throughout the course of this thesis I will make continual reference to Couchsurfing using a number of terms that it will be beneficial to define here. During a stay couchsurfers typically take on one of two roles – the host or the guest. Whilst the host is always called as such, I also use the term ‘surfer’ to denote the guest. The guest can be viewed as the active member – moving into the static realm of the host – and therefore I use ‘surfer’ as a noun to distinguish them from the host. ‘Couchsurfer’ I use as a catch-all term to encompass any member of the site. On the other hand I use ‘couchsurfing’ as a verb to describe the act of being involved in the Couchsurfing community and therefore both host and guest can be described as couchsurfing. I only use the capitalised form of Couchsurfing as a noun to refer to the network and site itself so as to distinguish from the verb.

Understanding the Phenomenon: Research

Questions and Couchsurfing in the Literature

This thesis is driven by a desire to explore Couchsurfing practices as they occur within the city of Amsterdam. In particular I use the theme of hospitality as a broad cover to discover how Couchsurfing members use the network. My primary research question that I seek to answer within this thesis is ‘How is Couchsurfing practiced by members in Amsterdam?’ This is quite an open-ended topic and my research brought up numerous aspects of

Couchsurfing that all serve to help build towards the notion of a hospitality network. From these topics I selected a number of them to create the secondary research questions that I

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explore more thoroughly throughout the course of this thesis, namely ‘How does the

reference system affect members usage of Couchsurfing?’, ‘What role do the events play in creating community?’, ‘What role does food play as a carrier of hospitality?’ and ‘How are negative experiences during the reciprocal hospitality relationship dealt with?’ These research questions arose as a result of my own fieldwork as well as from my reading of the literature surrounding Couchsurfing. As a form of tourism there is a large body of literature that can be drawn upon to begin to understand the phenomenon of Couchsurfing.

Tourism has been of interest to anthropologists since at least the 1960’s with Theron Nuñez’s Tourism, Tradition, and Acculturation: Weekendismo in a Mexican Village (1963) often being credited as one of the earliest example of anthropological enquiry into the world of tourism. Since then tourism has become an important part of the anthropological literature with Nelson Graburn (1977; 2001) in particular leading the charge. Anthropologists have focused on a myriad of different forms of tourism from sex tourism (Brennan, 2004; Bunzl, 2000; Williams, 2013) to volunteer tourism (McGehee and Santos, 2005; Conran, 2011; Mustonen, 2006) and Ecotourism (Stronza, 2005; Russell, 2007; West and Carrier, 2004). Pilgrimage as a form of tourism has been often discussed within the discourse (Eade, 1992; Eade and Coleman, 2004; Badone and Roseman, 2004) and recently several scholars have turned their attention to backpacking (Muzaini, 2006; Binder, Richards and Wilson, 2004) to provide but a few examples. The wide body of literature that has built up surrounding tourism serves as an anchoring point for any discussion of Couchsurfing as an aspect of tourism.

Since the site went live in 2004 there has been interest in Couchsurfing amongst academic circles which has naturally started to grow as the network gains more attention in the public sphere. As a research topic, Couchsurfing has been approached from a number of different disciplines, including anthropology, and scholars have drawn attention to a number of issues including authenticity, trust, belonging and reciprocity. There is still only a

relatively small body of scholarly literature devoted to Couchsurfing but an ever growing number of doctoral and master’s theses are serving to bring attention to the world of

computer mediated hospitality exchange. This literature review will discuss a number of the most important academic studies on Couchsurfing as well as those that have provided inspiration for specific themes that I discuss within this thesis.

One of the earliest and to date most comprehensive articles on Couchsurfing is

Cosmopolitans on the Couch: Mobile Hospitality and the Internet (2007) by Jennie Germann

Molz. Whilst she does not draw on any ethnographic research in her article, instead focusing on the theoretical argument, Germann Molz turns her attention to the question of how the

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internet is used to sustain the relationship between the host and guest through the lens of hospitality. She focuses on three key areas – hospitality as a reciprocal arrangement; the role of reputation systems in maintaining the hospitality relationship; and the paradox of a

‘global’ community that delimits the boundaries of a community that focuses on like-minded but diverse individuals (Germann Molz, 2007). Using Jacques Derrida’s notion of radical hospitality, Germann Molz notes that the roles of guest and host are closely linked to those of parasite and enemy and therefore the reputation system, exhibited through references, serves to minimise risk. She also suggests that couchsurfers try and play into a ‘cosmopolitan fantasy’ through the desire to appear open-minded and accepting of the world outside of their own cultural surroundings, ultimately proving this to be a fabrication through the

construction of boundaries that serve to exclude non-couchsurfers. In Couchsurfing and

Network Hospitality (2011), Germann Molz introduces the term ‘network hospitality’ in an

attempt to link the online world of the Couchsurfing website to the offline interactions that occur when members meet face-to-face. She notes that the core of Couchsurfing is the meaningful interpersonal relationships than about the offer of accommodation and therefore the intersection between the offline and online world is an interesting site of study for anthropologists. Germann Molz’s work has been central in grounding my research in the current literature. I particularly draw upon her ideas surrounding the reciprocal hospitality relationship and the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan fantasy’.

Recently an edited volume by David Picard and Sonja Buchberger Couchsurfing

Cosmopolitanisms: Can Tourism Make a Better World? (2014) brings together chapters from

a number of researchers that look critically at the computer-mediated hospitality that is facilitated by Couchsurfing. Based on ethnographic research amongst couchsurfers in places as diverse as Tunisia, Vietnam, and Siberia, the chapters within this volume make an

excellent starting point for further research into how sites such as Couchsurfing are changing hospitality and tourism. Of particular interest is Jun-E Tan’s chapter (2014) focussing on subcultural capital and the role it plays in creating a network of trust. She conducted three years of fieldwork amongst couchsurfers in Taiwan, hosting and surfing numerous times herself. Tan suggests that cosmopolitanism is seen as a form of subcultural capital amongst the Couchsurfing community - the more Couchsurfing experiences one has and the more countries one has visited therefore presenting oneself as a ‘world traveller’ serve to bolster a members perceived status amongst the rest of the community. Tan’s work on references particularly informs my work on negative references in the third chapter of this thesis.

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Vicky Steylaerts and Sean O’Dubhghaill (2012) focus on the emergence of Couchsurfing as a trend and challenge the true nature of the authenticity that it seeks to harness, as well as the role the host/guest dichotomy plays in creating individualised experiences for members. Their research is based on their own ethnographic fieldwork amongst couchsurfers in Flanders and acts as part of a larger research project on tourism in the area. This focus on the applied effect of Couchsurfing on the regions tourism serves as an important study for the implication of internet based hospitality networks in the wider field of tourism studies. This work especially becomes relevant in my first and second chapters when I look at authenticity and the ‘real’. Although I do not use Steylaerts and O’Dubhghaill to inform my theoretical argument in these sections, they provided me with a direction on which to focus.

Dave Rosen, Pascale Roy Lafontaine and Blake Hendrickson (2011) conducted research on the engagement of Couchsurfing members by focusing on aspects such as trust, connectedness, and belonging. In conjunction with Couchsurfing they used a survey method that asked every tenth member who logged into their profile over the course of a week to complete a survey, gathering information from 1094 participants. Their article suggests that belonging in the Couchsurfing community is linked to the amount of face-to-face contact members have, with those who attend meet-ups or host and surf regularly feeling more involved with the community than those who do not. This article is of particular relevance during my discussion of the Amsterdam meet-up in the first chapter

In her Senior Honors Thesis, Clare Toeniskoetter (2013) examines the roles of gender in the creation of feelings of safety and trust amongst couchsurfers. She does not confine her research to one specific geographical area, instead focusing on her experiences couchsurfing in a number of countries as well as one case study involving the negative experience of a female Canadian couchsurfer. Toeniskoetter notes that trust is at the core of Couchsurfing and that even though members are aware of negative experiences they believe in the

‘community’ of Couchsurfing, which makes them continue using the site. This provided me with the basis of my sections on the referencing system, particularly those dealing with negative experiences.

Alexander Chaplin (2012) tackles the authenticity of Couchsurfing encounters, and how members experience constructed notions of authenticity as ‘real’. Although Chaplin conducted research amongst couchsurfers in Serbia, his ethnographic accounts do not feature within his thesis, yet he provides a clear theoretical stance on how couchsurfers construct a

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reality based on contact with an ‘other’. Chaplin’s work is of particular interest in my first chapter when I look at the idea of authentic experiences.

Throughout this thesis I refer to the members who participate in Couchsurfing as a community. Couchsurfers often use the term ‘community’ to denote the network of members who have joined the site and who participate in the activities that make Couchsurfing what it is thus creating an emic informed usage of the term. It is nevertheless important to understand what is meant by community within an academic setting. Anthony Cohen (1985) defines a community as ‘members of a group of people that (a) have something in common with each other, which (b) distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other putative groups’ (Cohen, 1985 :12). Cohen’s definition creates a dyadic group founded both on inclusion and exclusion. Couchsurfing does in a way also create its sense of community around this. From my interactions with Couchsurfers, as well as my perusal of various profiles on the site, and my own position as a Couchsurfer, there seems to be a definite sense of a unified ‘we’ versus the ‘them’ of mainstream tourists and travellers, with quotes such as ‘we see the world differently’ or ‘support your fellow Couchsurfers’ appearing on profiles or coming up in conversation. Couchsurfing seems to create a sense of community simply through the act of Couchsurfing as by either surfing or hosting you are granted access to this network, and further participation helps to solidify ones standing within the network and therefore increase status within the community.

Bellah et al (1985) proposes a definition of community that includes a group of people who are socially interdependent and involved in decision making and discussion. The Couchsurfing network relies on interaction between members for its continued usage.

Without socially interdependent members there would simply not be a site for Couchsurfers to use. Members create the network which allows surfers to find hosts. Members are also able to create events, ranging from picnics in a park to language exchanges to parties. These serve to help build a community that is not simply reliant upon the host-guest dyadic but also utilises the social aspect of the site to create interrelationships between members. The website acts as a platform for these interactions but there is a reliance on other members to ensure that the site remains active. This is shown through the providing references to act as a form of subcultural capital - as pointed out by Jun-E Tan (2014) - as well as through events and groups which help to solidify the sense of community. Rosen et al also pick up on this, tying it into the time a member has spent as a part of the Couchsurfing network, ‘As length of membership in the community increases, there is a parallel increase in the amount of contact with other members. This positive relationship leads to the accumulation of references,

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friendships, and social capital that helps members build a positive reputation’ (Rosen et al., 2011: 994). This discussion of community helps to show how couchsurfers see themselves as a group and serves as a platform from which we can understand why aspects of Couchsurfing that are discussed within this thesis such as reciprocity and the reputation system are so important

Researching Amsterdam: Methodology, Setting,

Population

My fieldwork took place over three months solely within the Couchsurfing community of Amsterdam. Throughout my fieldwork period I met many members of Couchsurfing – both Dutch and international travellers - who participated in a number of ways. Some only hosted, others only surfed and many did both.

As an international hub for millions of travellers every year, Amsterdam is an interesting city from which to base an anthropological enquiry of Couchsurfing. As of April 2015 the Couchsurfing website page for Amsterdam reveals 83,951 members that are listed as living in the area, although only 2,874 of these have logged in within the last month, suggesting that the rest are either inactive profiles or belong to members who only

sporadically use the site. There were also approximately 1400 travellers who were looking to stay with hosts in Amsterdam within the near future, and this number is likely higher during the peak season of the summer. There are also 325 events scheduled between the end of April and the beginning of November, although this number will continue to grow as members add new events. Couchsurfing is not just limited to younger travellers. A search for a host in Amsterdam filtered by age reveals 13,763 hosts aged between 18 and 30, 7,670 hosts between the ages of 31 and 60, and only 261 older than 60. This wide span of ages shows how Couchsurfing can appeal to a wide range of people.

All of my informants were contacted through the website, Couchsurfing.com. I started by putting a message on the public forum explaining my research and what I hoped to achieve. This attracted a number of research participants who were interested in talking to me. I also sent private messages to a number of members, both hosts in the city and travellers who had advertised that they were looking for hosts in Amsterdam. Whilst some people were hesitant to participate, the response I received from my messages was almost overwhelmingly

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positive. The Couchsurfing community seems to be from the outset a very friendly and welcoming place, although of course like any group of people there are exceptions. I wanted to talk to a varied group of people who represented the diversity of the Couchsurfing

demographic, so my initial messages were focused on a group of people who varied in age, gender, status on the site, participation, family, and sexuality. I was aware however that I did not want these to become stereotypes or markers for a whole category, and so I quickly abandoned this approach and instead took up offers to help wherever they came from, an approach that I believe led to a more interesting group of participants. I also attended a number of the weekly meet-ups that are organised by members every Saturday in a local bar in the centre of Amsterdam. I found a number of participants during these meetings, and the meet-ups themselves provided an interesting research setting for me to gain a better

understanding of the Couchsurfing world and the importance of the community to those who actively participate within it.

The research conducted for this thesis was based on a three month period of participant observation within the city of Amsterdam. I also engaged with Couchsurfing members through online forums such as the website itself and social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Although couchsurfing is of course an important act to undertake when trying to understand the phenomenon as a whole, I found that it was not a truly

necessary action for me to undertake in order to gather the information I required to begin to answer my research questions. Instead I focused more on informal interviews and ‘deep hanging out’ in both private and public spaces as they were sufficient for me to get the information I needed.

Many of my interviews and conversations with members took place in public spaces such as café’s or restaurants. I also engaged in activities such as biking or visiting museum exhibits with a number of couchsurfers, although these tended to be those who were

travelling to Amsterdam and therefore had limited time and wanted to see some more of the city. I found that joining them for these sorts of activities created a closer bond between myself as the researcher and my participants than I was able to conjure up through a simple talk over coffee.

In my position as a researcher I felt that it would not be appropriate for me to leave references for the Couchsurfing members I met with, no matter how positive or negative the interactions were. I removed myself from the expected reciprocal arrangement of reference provision (a topic I discuss in greater depth within this thesis) by ensuring that my informants

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were all aware of what I was doing and that I was there primarily as a researcher and not as a couchsurfer.

As with any ethnographic account, my informants are central components of this thesis. Many of them I met through the Couchsurfing website as I sent them messages asking if they would be willing to help me with my research. Others I met at the events I attended or through snowballing from other members who introduced us. Whilst all of them were

interesting to talk to and provided me with different insights on the world of Couchsurfing and what it meant to be a member, some were naturally more relevant than others in the writing of this thesis. Whilst I mention a number of them throughout the course of this thesis I would like to take this opportunity to introduce a number of my key informants.

Hanneke is a 33 year old Dutch language teacher who lives in the west of Amsterdam. She had been active in the Couchsurfing community for around a year when I met her,

hosting travellers in the apartment she shares with her boyfriend although she has yet to use the site as a surfer. I spent a night surfing with Hanneke in late February and much of the following day ‘deep’ hanging out with her in De Pijp. As a vegan she also provided some interesting viewpoints on food and cooking with couchsurfers.

An Amsterdam native, Diego (38) was one of my key informants due to his role in organising the weekly Amsterdam Couchsurfing meet-up I attended. Both he and his wife have been active couchsurfers since 2010, using the network to both host and surf, as well as to meet people through events. I met Diego several times over the course of my fieldwork, always at the meet-up.

Claartje (28) is a PhD student from Nijmegen now living in Amsterdam and studying molecular biology. She has been using Couchsurfing for a couple of years, particularly in her travels around Europe. She also enjoys hosting but cannot do it as often as she would like due to her studies. I spent two nights staying in her apartment and met her several times

throughout the rest of my fieldwork period. Her comments and views on ‘Dutchness’ and the character of the Dutch were important in helping to understand how Couchsurfing plays into the sensibilities of the Dutch.

Tia and Cassie are both English and working for a magazine in London. Both in their mid-twenties they have some interesting stories from their six years of involvement with Couchsurfing. Several of these involve the dark side of Couchsurfing and acted as inspiration for my final chapter.

Many of the other informants I mention in this thesis are Dutch and often take on the role of the host whilst in the city. I also mention a number of surfers from various other

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countries. It is the combined experiences of both host and surfer and the interaction between members that make Couchsurfing such a rich source of anthropological study, and I hope that this thesis illuminates this at least in part.

Thesis Structure

The first chapter deals with how hospitality is approached by couchsurfers in Amsterdam. I start by looking at Amsterdam as a Couchsurfing location and I pay particular attention to the weekly meet-up that is organised in Amsterdam by a number of couchsurfing members. I also deconstruct some of the stereotypes surrounding Dutch hospitality. I will analyse the themes of authenticity and home in relation to hospitality and how Couchsurfing builds upon these, as well as ideas of friendship. I also look at the role of the reference system and reputation in how members enact hospitality and how it helps to minimise risk.

In my second chapter I focus on how food acts as a carrier of the reciprocal hospitality relationship that is created between a host and their guest. I use two main themes to highlight the role food plays in the creation of this relationship. I highlight how food is used as an embodiment of culture and personal experiences, and how the sharing of this with others creates an intimate bond built upon a desire to reciprocate in part the hospitality offered by the guest. I then show how cooking as an action is seen as a form of sharing part of oneself and how this is used by couchsurfers to create and maintain relationships.

The third and final chapter tackles the dark side of Couchsurfing. During my fieldwork my participants brought a number of examples of times when the Couchsurfing network had created less than favourable experiences showing an aspect that is often overlooked by the Couchsurfing ideology. I spend some time looking at some of the ‘extreme’ negative experiences of Couchsurfing members before moving to how Couchsurfing can cause conflict around food and the kitchen to tie this section with my previous chapter. I end by analysing the role of the negative reference and how it is perceived amongst members of the community, as well as the situations in which members feel the need to leave them. Finally in my conclusion I will reflect upon my previous chapters to answer the question ‘How is Couchsurfing practiced by members in Amsterdam?’ and make suggestions for potential follow up research.

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“I wouldn’t travel any other way”:

Couchsurfing, Dutchness, and

Reputation

Jos’ living room was intriguing. It was so full of all sorts of paraphernalia that I didn’t really know where to focus my attention. There was a stuffed fox sitting on a rock in one corner and what appears to be half a surfboard propped up against one wall. The walls were covered in photographs, all of which are Jos’ own work. He works as a freelance photographer and much of his work is focusing on decay and abandonment. One photograph in particular caught my eye, of a small child sitting outside the ruins of a house which looks like it has been severely damaged by a fire. ‘I took that one in New Orleans a couple of years ago. I like the contrast. The innocence of the child against the destruction of the house’. I agreed. A number of Jos’ other photos are inspired by his trips using Couchsurfing. He has a set of portraits of all of his hosts – twenty nine in total – all of which have been signed by the person they depict. Jos has been a member of Couchsurfing since 2010 and has used it all over the world. He had just returned a couple of weeks earlier from an assignment in Mongolia and even managed to find a host in Ulan Bator. Jos is Dutch and in his late twenties. His boyfriend, Andy, is also a member of Couchsurfing. They met in Budapest whilst they were both staying with separate hosts when they attended a free walking tour organised by a local member. I was spending the afternoon with Jos, first meeting him for coffee at his house before going to a Lebanese restaurant that he had recommended for dinner. We had met the previous evening at the Amsterdam weekly Couchsurfing meet-up. He was there with Andy and another of their friends and was interested enough in my research to invite me over without me having to ask. He goes to the meet-ups occasionally because he ‘likes

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meeting different people and it’s an easy way to do that. And I know I will probably get on with them because they are couchsurfers as well’. Jos handed me a mug of tea and a piece of boterkoek before settling down next to me and telling me his Couchsurfing stories. He really seemed to embody the spirit of Couchsurfing. As he told me about his encounters he was constantly smiling and laughing. Frequently he would point to a photograph on the wall that is associated with whatever he was telling me – about the time he went fishing at night in Australia and saw a crocodile, or ate a fried tarantula in Phnom Penh. The photographs of his hosts serve to put a face on these stories and made me feel like I am living them with him – even though they took place far away and with people I have never met. This is what Couchsurfing is. Sharing your life with other people, even just through stories. He told me that he still talks to most of the people he has surfed with or hosted, he will drop them an email from time to time and if he ever is in the area he makes sure to look them up. I felt at ease in Jos’ apartment almost straight away, he was friendly and inquisitive, constantly asking questions and making sure I was comfortable. I asked him what his favourite thing about Couchsurfing is and he replied without hesitation ‘the people’.

Jos appeared to me to be a perfect example of a couchsurfer. Someone who is truly

passionate about meeting new people and experiencing new things and who shared his life with those he met. The way in which couchsurfers use the network is of course varied. Some members only use it as a way to find a place to stay, but others – like Jos - are much more involved and it is because of these that there is a sense of a Couchsurfing community rather than just a fleeting host-guest interaction.

Within this chapter I will turn my attention to a number of aspects of Couchsurfing, in particular Couchsurfing in Amsterdam. I first focus on one particular example of

Couchsurfing in Amsterdam – that of a weekly meet-up that is organised by a couple of users. I want to show that Couchsurfing is not just about finding a place to stay, but is about meeting people and creating new experiences. I then use my ethnographic account of one of these meet-ups to move onto focussing on three themes that are central to Couchsurfing – the search for authentic experiences, the creation of a feeling of ‘home’, and friendship. These

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themes are important ones to consider as they are constantly found in the rhetoric surrounding Couchsurfing.

Next I move on to deconstructing some of the stereotypes surrounding the Dutch and hospitality, using the work of Nepalese sociologist Rajendra Pradhan (1990) on hospitality in Schoonrewoerd in particular. The Dutch are stereotypically a quite insular people, almost to the point of rudeness, and I discuss how these stereotypes stand up to my own experiences with Dutch couchsurfers. Finally I turn my attention to the Couchsurfing reputation system which is created through references. References play a large part in how members conduct themselves and participate in the reciprocal hospitality relationship and therefore I feel it is important to understand exactly what they are and how members use them. They serve to build trust between members and act as a form of subcultural capital and I explore how this affects members and their actions.

Meeting and Greeting: Couchsurfing in Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a popular tourist location, drawing in millions of international travellers every year. It is no surprise then that it also home to a thriving community of couchsurfers. As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, there are around 3000 active hosts and a constant stream of surfers looking for somewhere to stay and people to get to know. As a hospitality network, Couchsurfing provides travellers with the opportunity to get to know a city through the eyes of a local and to make travel a social experience by creating meaningful connections between people4. The world of Couchsurfing in Amsterdam is no exception, and the

popularity of Couchsurfing in such a culturally diverse city serves as an example of the global appeal of the network.

Whilst many Couchsurfing interactions take place within the dyadic relationship of a host and guest, another aspect that is important to acknowledge in a discussion of

Couchsurfing practices are the events. When a member searches for a city they have the option to look for events that are happening during their stay. These events are created by members and in Amsterdam they range from helping to fix a houseboat to language

exchanges and baking lessons. They provide couchsurfers the chance to engage in activities that are not on the agendas of a typical tourist, providing them with travelling experiences

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that they will not find in the pages of their guide book. They also provide the opportunity to get to know other people, both locals and travellers and therefore really amplify the idea of Couchsurfing as a community of people rather than just the individuals involved in a host-guest interaction.

One of the most common forms of activity that take place in many cities is a weekly meet-up. These usually involve members congregating at a public place such as a bar or café and just spending time with fellow couchsurfers in a social setting. This section focuses on one such event – a weekly meet up that occurs every Saturday evening at a bar a short walk from Amsterdam’s Dam square5. Organised by a couple of hosts from the city, the meet-up’s main aim is to allow members to:

Hang out with the coolest locals & visitors in a homely artistic atmosphere → Exchange experiences → Hear what's going on in town → Make plans to reconnect → Make plans for the rest of the night and weekend6

An analysis of this rather simple looking advertisement reveals a lot about the Couchsurfing ideology. To start with it is written in English. Couchsurfing is a global phenomenon and English is used as a default lingua franca acting as a common language that is understood to varying degrees by people all over the world. As the meet-up is intended to allow

international travellers as well as hosts to get together, it makes sense that the message would be written in a language that is more widely understood than Dutch.

The language of the advertisement is informal suggesting that the meeting itself takes the form of an informal get together, as indeed many of the Couchsurfing events are. It suggests that it is a meeting between friends and equals, a feeling that is reinforced through the use of ‘Hang out’ and ‘coolest’. Even so, these terms are often associated with the vernacular of youth culture. Whilst a large proportion of Couchsurfing members fall within the 18-30 age bracket, there are also a significant number of older members. The use of these terms rather than ‘spend time with’ or ‘interesting locals’ seemingly taps into the image of Couchsurfing as a ‘young person’s game’. This however does not stop older members from attending the meet-ups – during my fieldwork the oldest attendee I spoke with was 67 years old.

5_{A screenshot of the event page for this weekly meet-up can be found in the appendices.}

6_{https://www.couchsurfing.com/events/am-dam-cs-weekly-saturday-meetup-amsterdam-2015-06-13}

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‘Homely’ is an interesting choice of word on the part of the author, as despite the public location of the event it is suggesting that there is a more intimate ‘family’ feel to the meet-up. Home as a space is associated with comfort and privacy and the use of this particular adjective extends this sphere to the group in the back of this bar in the centre of Amsterdam. Another interesting point is the use of ‘make plans’ suggesting that the meet-up extends beyond just the one evening and that people continue the relationships they form. As Couchsurfing superficially seems to focus on fleeting temporal interactions, it is perhaps important to note that there is more to it than just the accommodation aspect and that it also facilitates the creation of friendships. There is however a paradox at play here as the

permanency conveyed through the choice of language evoking images of home and

friendship is mediated through the brief time period in which these meet-ups occur. For all the talks of making lifelong friends in a ‘homely’ atmosphere, when the bar closes the members disperse, often never seeing each other again. The themes of friendship and home are discussed more thoroughly later on in this chapter.

One final aspect of the advertisement that it is interesting to note is the use of arrows to separate the sentences where other forms of punctuation would perhaps have made more sense. Arrows tend to be symbolic of movement, from moving from one place to another, going forward or back (or indeed up or down or any other direction). In the description for the weekly meet-up these arrows could suggest a movement from hanging out to exchanging stories and getting to know events in the city to making plans for the future. There is a sense of movement from the state of stranger – having drinks with new people – to acquaintance – getting to know the people you are with – and finally to friend – creating opportunities for further interactions and activities. This could be seen as a microcosm of Couchsurfing as whole. Members move from strangers (by simply being active on the site), to acquaintances (by sending messages and couch requests), to friends (through staying with a host or offering space to a surfer).

My first attendance at the weekly Amsterdam meet-up occurred in the middle of January. The weather was terrible and the bike ride from my apartment to the bar had left me cold and miserable. Fighting through the press of umbrellas in one of

Amsterdam’s busiest tourist areas, I found the bar were the meet-up was organised and made my way inside. The group of Couchsurfers was seated around a couple of tables in the back, all wearing coats and jumpers and nursing biertjes. There were ten

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introducing myself to them, the rest of the evening passed by in a mix of conversation, playing pool and eating and drinking. One of the attendees was Diego, one of the members who were responsible for organising the event and for writing the description on the website. Diego is 38 years old and he and his wife have been members of

Couchsurfing for nearly five years. They originally joined as a way to cut costs during a backpacking trip through South America but quickly fell in love with the alternative form of travel that Couchsurfing can offer. He explains:

It’s all about the people really. You can go to a city like Paris that is beautiful and the architecture is stunning but having people who live there that can show you or tell you about the place makes everything much more real. The people bring travelling to life. (Diego, 13th January 2015)

This comment essentially gets to the very root of what Couchsurfing is about – meeting people and creating experiences rather than simply finding a place to stay. Of course the accommodation finding aspect is a major factor, but without the people there simply would not be a Couchsurfing for travellers to use. I asked Diego what made him want to create the event:

Pretty early on after I had started using Couchsurfing I was in New York and saw that they had a meet-up. I went and there were around 40 people there, from all over the world. It was a really good time and I enjoyed getting to meet people that I wouldn’t just by staying with my host. I came back to Amsterdam and thought we should try and have our own. Amsterdam is just as popular as New York! There already was a meet-up event on the page but it was very… not filled out. And hardly anyone seemed to be going. So I made my own. I invited some friends from Couchsurfing who bought their surfers and it just built from there. I get to make new friends whenever I attend these meet-ups and the people are just incredible. (Diego, 13th January 2015)

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The creation of an event is fairly simple. A couple of clicks on the website brings you to a form where you fill in details such as event name, location, date, maximum number of attendees, and a description.7 Further links can be made to other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and members who join the event can leave comments, providing the opportunity to get to know other attendees before the event begins.

The varying demographic make-up of Couchsurfing members is visible in the group of people at the bar. The group is a mix of local hosts and surfers who are

visiting from other countries – including Australia and Vietnam. The youngest attendee is eighteen and the oldest is sixty-three. Amongst them is Floris (27, Dutch), one of the regular attendees of the event. He has been a member of Couchsurfing for six years and in that time has become one of Amsterdam’s most active members, with an impressive 450 positive references – and no negative ones - on his profile.

I think that for me the appeal is that I have the opportunity to meet and help people from all over the world. When I went backpacking around Europe a few years ago – before I joined Couchsurfing or even knew it existed – and I met some great people in the hostels but I felt like I was missing out on that whole travel experience. It was just bars and tourist sites you know? That was not what I wanted. But with Couchsurfing you can stay with a local, you can become a local. You feel at home wherever you are. (Floris, 13th January 2015)

It is this opportunity to temporarily inhabit the role of a local that appeals to many of those who use Couchsurfing as a way to aid their travelling. That appears to be a part of the appeal of these meet-ups as well. It gives travellers the opportunity to spend time with local hosts in a comfortable social atmosphere. The tourist bars that Floris seems to revile are still present however, as evidenced by the fact that I am sitting in one that is also hosting a stag party of English men with bright orange t-shirts bearing obscene nicknames. According to Diego this location was picked because of its location and the owners willingness to host large groups, however the charm is not in the location – it is in the small group of members who have chosen to meet through a shared interest in Couchsurfing.

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I attended this meet-up eight times throughout the course of my fieldwork. The amount of participants fluctuated from a low of nine in late January to around 45 one weekend in March and with a constant rotation of travellers attending it provides a good opportunity for meeting new people and making friends. This is especially welcome for those in the city who do not have the facilities to act as hosts themselves as it allows them to still be included and feel like a part of the community despite not occupying the role of either a host or surfer.

Participation in these member organised events can help to make members feel more included within the Couchsurfing community and give them the opportunity to meet new people, try new things, explore more of the city, and ‘just generally have fun’ (Tak, 20, Croatian). Dave Rosen et al found that attendance at community gatherings had the ‘strongest impact on an individual’s sense of belonging to the Couchsurfing community’ (Rosen et al, 2011: 993) as they provide the opportunity to meet more members outside of the host-guest dyad. Through participation in these user-created events members are able to create a larger presence on the network as it provides them with the opportunity to add more friends and therefore expand their subcultural capital – a topic I will discuss further later on in this chapter.

My experience at that first meet-up I attended in January brought three key themes to my attention that I would like to take this opportunity to discuss briefly. These are

authenticity, home, and friendship. They are themes that are commonly cited by

Couchsurfing members and indeed the organisation itself with variations of phrases such as ‘it was a real experience’, ‘I made a friend for life’ and ‘I felt at home’ cropping up in many stories by members. Whilst they are not explicitly central themes for this thesis, an

understanding of what they mean and how they are enacted by Couchsurfers serves to help us to understand how Couchsurfing moves beyond a simple exchange of hospitality.

“Stay with a local; become a local”: Authentic

Experiences and Couchsurfing

One of the main appeals of Couchsurfing is its promise to deliver authentic experiences to its members. Couchsurfing is an alternative form of tourism (Germann Molz, 2011), taking travellers out of the world of large resorts and all-inclusive stays, and instead placing them into the private domain. Couchsurfing ‘positions itself outside the field of tourism’ (Chaplin,

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2012: 17. Emphasis in original) through a desire to detach members from the staging and exoticisation that often comes hand in hand with more traditional forms of tourism. It does this by giving members the opportunity to enter the home of a local and therefore experience a place from the ‘insider’ knowledge that such an encounter provides.

As a form of alternative tourism, Couchsurfing ‘speaks to a growing desire among tourists to have more authentic, individualized, and intimate embodied experiences with the people and places they visit’ (Germann Molz, 2011: 213) through providing a means for members to experience a place through connections made with people. In Amsterdam, tourism focuses mainly on the area surrounding the Dam square, with a high concentration of coffeeshops, the red light district, and numerous shops selling miniature clog keychains and wooden tulips. Couchsurfers often seek to avoid this by finding ‘off-the-grid’ areas using the local knowledge provided by their hosts to get to know a city beyond the tour books.

Authenticity is the perception that something is real – whether that be ‘real’ flamenco dancing in Seville or ‘real’ pizza in Italy. Of course what makes something real is debateable but most couchsurfers would agree that it is found in a world that is removed from the pageantry of mass tourist spectacles and instead is rooted in the idea that ‘this is what the locals do’ (Seger, 26, Swedish). For couchsurfers the search for authenticity is often found manifested in a desire to experience the local everydayness. Mundane acts such as buying groceries and cooking dinner serve to bring them further away from the tourist arena through doing just what the local people do.

Alexander Chaplin (2012) discusses the illusion of authentic experiences within Couchsurfing and how members accept constructed notions of authenticity as real. He argues that the ‘real’ is intimately associated with spontaneity – a quality that is often mentioned in the profiles of couchsurfers – as it suggests the lack of control over events, a far cry from the organised tour groups or suggested day plans that are provided in guide books. Couchsurfing however has ‘institutionalised spontaneity’ (Chaplin, 2012: 25. Emphasis in original) as it almost seeks to facilitate spontaneous occurrences. Simply by entering into a Couchsurfing interaction and therefore entering the home of a stranger or letting one into your home, couchsurfers are opening themselves up to the unexpected. Stays are often only loosely organised – “I will arrive on this day and leave on this day” – and everything that happens in between is often filled with whichever opportunity arises. This creation of spontaneity leads to the illusion that members are having authentic experiences, although the actual spontaneity is somewhat minimised through the expectation of spontaneity. Couchsurfers often actively seek out the spontaneous rather than letting it happen. Hosts also play into this creation of the

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spontaneous as authentic by taking their surfers to events or places that may appear to be ‘real’ yet have been carefully chosen specifically for that reason, as exemplified by Claartje (28, Dutch) who told me that:

If I have a surfer on a weekend I will see if they want to come with me to this bar I know where they have these informal gigs held by old Dutch men and they will sing traditional Dutch songs. (Claartje, 3rd March 2015)

The conscious choice of venue somewhat dissipates the spontaneity of the event, however the authenticity lies instead in its perceived ‘Dutchness’ which is created through the presence of ‘real’ Dutch men singing ‘real’ Dutch songs. Another of the ways in which couchsurfers seek authenticity in their experiences is through food, a topic which is the main focus of the next chapter of this thesis. Couchsurfers often seek ‘real’ food as opposed to the food that is commonly available in tourist areas and therefore seen as being explicitly linked to the world of mass tourism from which they try to escape. Diego is passionate about getting

couchsurfers away from the tourist traps and finding other places to try Dutch food:

Around the tourist sites you always find places offering cheese and stroopwafels in fancy packaging. It’s the same stuff you get in the Albert Heijn [a Dutch supermarket chain] for half the price and double the quantity. And pancakes for example. There are places selling the traditional Dutch pancakes or something. Sure they are pancakes but if you want a real Dutch pancake you need to go into the home of Dutch person! (Diego, 13th January 2015)

Whether couchsurfers use food or events or the mundanity of everyday events to seek authentic encounters, they often seek to get to know a place through finding the ‘really real’ (Chaplin, 2012: 37). This is also brought about through perceptions of home and the feeling that one can be ‘at home anywhere in the world’ (Diego, 13th January 2015).

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“You feel at home wherever you are”: Creating the

Feeling of Home

The rather throwaway comment made by Floris – ‘You feel at home wherever you are’ - brings up the question of what is ‘home’. The anthropology of the home is somewhat

underrepresented in the literature surrounding the ‘West’ with most of the attention focusing instead on the ‘exotic’ home (Cieraad, 2006:2) however most scholars agree that it is closely tied to ideas of domesticity and domestic space. As a private setting it is somewhat difficult to research the home thoroughly as a boundary between private and public is created at the front door. The distinction between private and public in relation to the home has been attributed by some to the mercantile homes of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic with the home being a focal point for gezelligheid [comfort] in contrast to the chaos of the outside world (de Mare, 2006: 13). This idealised version was often depicted in art and was

transported to other ‘western’ countries such as the United States in the nineteenth century where it became the popular image of the home. The association of home with qualities such as comfort and cosiness contrast the perceived discomfort that can arise from allowing a relative stranger into your home vis-à-vis Couchsurfing. Couchsurfing by its very nature suggest that the ‘world’ is brought into the home of individuals through surfers. This intersection between the intimacy of the home environment and the public sphere is blurred somewhat through allowing a stranger in, however Couchsurfing actively seeks to create these encounters making the home a place for openness and friendship or conflict.

There are a number of popular idioms surrounding the notion of home including ‘home is where the heart is’ and ‘home is wherever you hang your hat’. These idioms suggest that home is not a fixed spatial location. It takes on a transient quality that is powered through feeling – wherever you feel your home to be, that is where it is. Couchsurfers often take this sentiment with them, allowing them to ‘feel at home anywhere in the world’ (Darryl, 24, American. 5th February 2015) and it serves to help fortify the sense of community as members are able to find their ‘home’ wherever they want. It may not be a temporally

extensive location of home, maybe lasting only one night, yet by accepting an invitation from a host to enter their private domestic space temporarily makes that space the home of the surfer as well.

The use of the adjective ‘homely’ in the advertisement for the Amsterdam meet-up serves as an indicator of how Couchsurfing and its members create the feeling of home even

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outside of a domestic sphere. It evokes a sense of comfort and familiarity, something that many hosts endeavour to create for their guests within their own home. This is echoed in the frequently used phrase ‘make yourself at home’ suggesting that a guest should treat the home of their host like their own home, although this is not without its problems as I discuss in the third chapter of this thesis

.

“I get to make new friends”: Building Friendships

through Couchsurfing

One sentiment that is often found in the rhetoric surrounding Couchsurfing is that you can make friends all over the world. On the website, an ‘About’ page has a description of the Couchsurfing story saying ‘An email to a group of students in Iceland gave birth to the idea that people anywhere would want to share their homes with strangers (or, as we like to call them, friends you haven't met yet).’ 8 Friendship is also mentioned in several other places on the page including offering members to rediscover their city through ‘making new friends’ and promoting the idea of becoming a host in order to ‘make the world a little smaller; a little friendlier.’ This idea of making friends through travelling is at the very heart of Couchsurfing and is a feature that sets it apart from other forms of tourism. What, though, is meant by ‘friend’? Friendship is a culturally relative thing and cannot easily be defined (c.f. Desai and Killick, 2013) nevertheless according to Bettina Beer – a German ethnologist - ‘Friendship is an informal social relationship. Contrary to kinship it is based on choice and voluntariness’ (Beer, 2001: 5805).

In the ‘West’ one of the most prominent attributes to the creation of friendship is that of sentiment – or the idea that ‘feeling is the relationship’ (Papataxiarch, 1991: 178). This feeling is often reinforced through shared interests. Couchsurfers often pick their host or guests based on the information provided in the members profile and therefore can select members who have similar interests or ideologies. This creates a common ground from which to build a relationship, although many couchsurfers have the opinion that ‘simply by being a part of Couchsurfing it’s like we have something in common. Providing they are using it for the right reasons’ (Gabriel, 34, English, 16th March 2015) – the right reasons being using the network through the concept of ‘sharing your life’ rather than just free accommodation.

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Stays through Couchsurfing tend to only last a couple of days and once they have finished the people involved may never see each other again. The fact that these interactions are located in a small temporal window means that often relationships are formed much more quickly then they might otherwise be in a different social environment. The intimacy

involved in the sharing of a private space with a stranger often causes people to feel more comfortable with each other and therefore less guarded than they would in a public space. Leah (23, Australia) told me that she often goes from ‘talking about my trip into the city to my deepest hopes and dreams in the space of about half an hour’ (13th February 2015).

Couchsurfing provides members the chance to add friends on the website, in much the same way as other forms of social media. Many also expand their friendship onto these other platforms, adding each other on Facebook or exchanging email addresses to keep in contact. This continuation of the connection, albeit through a virtual presence, serves to reinforce the idea that Couchsurfing is about creating lasting relationships with other people rather than just a platform for the finding of accommodation. These continuing friendships that are made between Couchsurfing members are nicely summed up by this comment by Jess (22,

English): ‘I now have friends all over the world and that’s pretty awesome’(23rd January 2015).

(On)gastvrijheid: Deconstructing the Stereotype of

Dutch Inhospitality

As this thesis is concerned with Couchsurfing in Amsterdam and my fieldwork took place solely within the city it will be beneficial to understand something of the national character of the Dutch and their approaches to hospitality. Like every culture, the Dutch have been subject to a number of stereotypes ranging from the ‘traditional’ image of a milkmaid with clogs and a roll of cheese to liberal hippies constantly using drugs and prostitutes. Whilst these images may certainly be evocative of the general image of the Netherlands and the Dutch in much the same way as tulips and windmills, they are over exaggerated caricatures of a diverse country. Joep Leerssen writes about the rhetoric of national characterisation, noting that the ‘strongest effect lies in the familiarity and recognition value rather than in their empirical truth value’ (Leerssen, 2000: 280). This creates overly caricatured perceptions of people and places that are often based on minor characteristics.

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When it comes to hospitality, cultural stereotyping often paints the Dutch as a rather miserly and antisocial people. Visitors to the Netherlands are apparently taken aback by the ‘general bluntness of the Dutch, their lack of consideration of others in public places, their wild children and their unrefined manners’ (Boissevain and Boissevain, 1999: 26). The expression ‘Going Dutch’ is often used when people choose to pay just for themselves in a social situation such as a group dinner, where in other countries it may be considered normal to split the bill equally. Similarly, one of the first things I was told as a new international student at the University of Amsterdam is that the Dutch are very hard to become good friends with and that being included in a social circle should be regarded as an exceptional feat worthy of praise. Leerssen writes that the ‘The Dutch are either staunch individualists defending personal liberty or moralistic pettifoggers maintaining strict social control over each other’s conventionality’ (Leerssen, 2000: 279). It would be presumptuous of me to make comment on the national characteristics of an entire country, yet my encounters with a small percentage of Dutch couchsurfers show that the stereotype of an ungenerous people does not apply to everyone.

Rajendra Pradhan’s (1990) article on social exchange in the Netherlands is primarily based on his ethnographic research during the 1980s in a small, traditional town in the South Holland region. Although there is a disparity, both socially and temporally, between

Pradhan’s research and modern Amsterdam, the social values and cultural categories that Pradhan discusses are still valid amongst the urban Dutch today though admittedly to a lesser degree. Pradhan distils Dutch attitudes to hospitality down into four categories – hospitality (gastvrijheid), generosity (vrijgevigheid), sociability (gezelligheid) and intimacy (intimiteit) (Pradhan, 1990: 48). Pradhan uses the term gastvrijheid in the ‘sense of welcoming and entertaining guests in both the domestic as well as the public domains’ (Pradhan, 1990: 52) and it is in this sense that I also use the term hospitality. Couchsurfers fulfil both of these requisites as members are invited into both the home and the public spaces that are

exemplified through the meet-ups and events. The Dutch may have a more conservative view of hospitality than other cultures, in the sense that they like to be prepared for guests, as Pradhan notes ‘When the Dutch say that they are inhospitable (niet gastvrij) they mean that they do not so readily receive or welcome guests (strangers and acquaintances) into their homes’ (Pradhan, 1990: 53). Claartje reinforces this view, saying:

We are maybe a bit more private than other people because we don’t like people turning up unannounced or really getting too comfortable

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in our houses. But I think that the younger people are more friendly than the older generations, and of course Couchsurfing is completely different to that (Claartje, 3rd March 2015)

Pradhan’s focus on a small, rural town means that his research cannot be translated ad

verbatim to the modern, urban landscape of Amsterdam in 2015. There are still remnants of

the more insular social norms that he mentions, but in a city such as Amsterdam that is a fusion of differing cultures and values, the traditional principles are increasingly being replaced with more open ones. Jeremy and Inga Boissevain’s reflection on life in the Netherlands notes that ‘there are two very different Netherlands: Amsterdam… and the rest of the country. Much more goes on and is accepted in Amsterdam, an intriguing combination of international metropolis and small town’ (Boissevain and Boissevain, 1999: 33). As my research was only centred on Amsterdam I cannot comment on the conservativeness of the rest of the country, however Amsterdam is often viewed as a haven of liberality and it is therefore understandable that there is a contrast between the multi-cultural atmosphere in the capital city and the more rural areas that can be found in other parts of the Netherlands.

Throughout my fieldwork I noticed that the Dutch hosts I spoke to almost always suggested we first meet at a neutral public space such as a café or bar rather than in their homes. During my previous experience with Couchsurfing in Canada my hosts always gave me direct directions to their homes and our first introductions occurred on their doorsteps. In Amsterdam however introductions occurred at a location where there were other people to see us. These public locations serve as a boundary which allows the participating members to make a final decision to go through with the stay before admittance into the private space of the home.

I met Claartje at a bar in Amsterdam Oost on a Wednesday evening in early March. Her reasoning behind her choice of location was that she:

…really needed a drink after work. And I also like to meet my Couchsurfers somewhere like this, outside of my home. It makes me feel more comfortable around them because I don’t want to let a stranger into my house… I know a bit about them from their profiles, but it is good to talk to them face to face first I think. (Claartje, 3rd March 2015)

Couches and canals : an ethnographic analysis of couchsurfing in Amsterdam