Ghassan Hage

A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community:

This article reflects on key analytical concepts used in the anthropology of migration in the light of the author’s own ethnographic work on Lebanese migrants in a number of international locations. It first examines the notion of multi-sited ethnography and argues that in the study of migrants sharing a unifying culture across a number of global locations, multi-sitedness is less helpful than a notion of a single geographically discontinuous site. The article also examines the excessive usage of the notion of ‘imagined community’ in diasporic research. It argues that there is often very little empirical evidence of ‘community’ presented in the literature that uses the concept. Finally, the article examines the uncritical assumption often made that the study of migration is the study of ‘mobility’. It argues that migrants do not really spend that much time ‘moving’ in the sense assumed by the notion of ‘mobility’.

Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia

In the days that followed the Israeli army’s reinvasion of the West Bank in March 2002 and the resultant destruction of the embryonic elements of a sovereign Palestinian society, I, like many, sat in my office fuming, e-mailing with depressed friends and colleagues to express our helplessness and despair at the unbelievable injustice of it all. Besides the death and devastation, most depressing perhaps was the mediatic normalization of the very idea of a nation’s military rampaging virtually unopposed—like Genghis Khan in tanks—in another nation’s cities and towns, leveling entire streets, destroying homes. It was for all of us an absurdly anachronistic form of violence: a medieval mode of warfare outfitted in modern technology. I took it upon me to send Arab, Jewish, and other concerned friends an e-mail that attempted to think through the nature and ramifications of this violence. While addressing the Israeli government’s use of Palestinian suicide bombers (PSBs) as an excuse for transforming cities into rubble, I pointed out that to a large degree the Israeli government shared with the suicide bombers a lack of concern with the humanity of the people murdered in the course of the conflict. In a communal Us versus Them logic, the dehumanizing gaze that saw Them

Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today

This article begins by defining the specificity of critical anthropological thought and the way it can articulate with radical politics. It shows how the anthropology of Eduardo Vivieros de Castro offers a paradigmatic example of an anthropology that is both critical and radical, highlighting both the critical and political nature of Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism and his concept of multinaturalism. It shows how this concept can offer a political and critical perspective that forms a basis for the unification of the concerns of both ‘primitivist’ and ‘modernist’ anthropology.

The Spatial Imaginary of National Practices: Dwelling—Domesticating /Being—Exterminating

The prevalence of a culture of ‘tolerance’ towards ethnic minorities in the West in the face of the practices of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe and of other more general practices of intolerance and extermination in parts of the Third World has led to a popular as well as a sometimes academic conception of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms essentialised into two radically different kinds of nationalism. In this paper I offer a critique of such a differentiation based on an examination of various practices of dealing with otherness in the process of nation building, particularly in Lebanon and Australia. I argue that practices of nation building, ranging from the promotion of ethnic cultures to mass ethnic killings, are guided by national imaginaries which, despite their empirical variety, are basically structured in the same way. This means, first, that such differences are better understood as the historical or contextual privileging of specific nationalist problematics grounded in this common national imaginary. Second, it means that within the nationalist imaginary that guides them there is a space in which, in given circumstances, the practitioners of valorisation and tolerance can turn into practitioners of mass killings and vice versa without them turning into a radically different kind of nationalists. Far from being specific to an ‘Eastern’ nationalism, the logic of extermination is inherent to any form of nation building today.

The Affective Politics of Racial Mis-interpellation

This article is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon’s writing. In their latest book, Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take Fanon’s attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a ‘new universality’ as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity. In the article, I show that the affective dimension of Fanon’s search for a new universality is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way. I analyse how this difference between an affective ‘anti’ and an intellectual ‘alter’ arises in Fanon’s analysis and experience of racism. I refer to this particular experience as mis-interpellation and analyse the equally particular affect it generates. More generally, I show that if one is to make use of Fanon’s work today one cannot separate the intellectual and the affective that are so intertwined in his analytical work as Hardt and Negri do. To do so is to abstract from the serious political ramifications that the presence of this affective dimension entails.

Antipodean fields: Working with Bourdieu

The papers collected in this special issue of the Journal of Sociology seek both to develop a sense of the cumulative impact of Bourdieu’s work on Australasian (‘antipodean’) debates, and to get a sense of how these debates might raise questions regarding the portability of Bourdieu’s categories. We discuss the distinctive disciplinary orientations of the uptake of Bourdieu’s work both here and internationally, and propose some explanations of the ways in which the antipodean uptake has modified its focus and conceptual force. These have to do, first, with the salience of different and more fluid models of the structural variables of class, gender and ethnicity; second, with a questioning of the nation-state as the ‘natural’ border of cultural fields; and third, with the way Indigeneity, in both Australia and New Zealand, is seen to transform the ‘mainstream’ culture and thereby to challenge many of the conventional ways of thinking about such things as cultural artefacts, cultural markets, and the ‘rules of art’.

Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s philosophers:

While working on an auto-ethnographic account of my deafness and concurrently offering a seminar on the philosophical dimensions of Pierre Bourdieu’s work, I was struck by how permeated my ethnographic language was with the very Bourdieu-ian concepts I was examining. Initially, some of the moments captured in the ethnography played docilely a function of exemplification of Bourdieu’s theories and the philosophies behind them. At times, however, I found that my description of certain states of being/hearing invited a more complex three-way conversation, pointing to some productive tensions between the anthropological, sociological and philosophical dimensions of critical thought.

The Ethics of Apology: A Set of Commentaries

■ On 13 February 2008, the Australian government apologized to the ‘stolen generations’: those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed from their parents (usually their Aboriginal mothers) to be raised in white foster-homes and institutions administered by government and Christian churches — a practice that lasted from before the First World War to the early 1970s. This apology was significant, in the words of Rudd, for the ‘healing’ of the Australian nation. Apologizing for past injustices has become a significant speech act in current times. Why does saying sorry seem to be ubiquitous at the moment? What are the instances of not saying sorry? What are the ethical implications of this era of remembrance and apology? This set of commentaries seeks to explore some of the ethical, philosophical, social and political dimensions of this Age of Apology. The authors discuss whether apology is a responsibility which cannot — and should not — be avoided; the ethical pitfalls of seeking an apology, or not uttering it; the global and local understandings of apology and forgiveness; and the processes of ownership and appropriation in saying sorry.

Recalling anti-racism

ABSTRACT Despite its many achievements and some remarkable victories against the forces of racism in their variety of forms, it cannot be said that anti-racism has been particularly successful as a social, cultural, and political force. This essay uses Bruno Latours figure of the ‘recall’ to rethink certain elements of the anti-racist tradition. Latour sees the figure as combining both ‘recalling’ in the sense of remembering, but also ‘recalling’ in the way a company recalls a product when it realises it has some defect. In much the same way, the essay uses the idea of ‘recalling anti-racism’, firstly, in order to stay in touch with anti-racisms ‘founding principles’, to develop a sense of the cumulative gain that has been made throughout its history, and, secondly, in order to critically re-examine how it can be modified and made more efficient.

Questions Concerning a Future-Politics

Needless to say, I am more than pleased that my work has helped propel an area of investigation of such importance as the exploration of configurations of hope in our social world. Hope has activated the analytical imagination and proved to be fruitful in both allowing people to think up new research objects as well as seeking new answers to old questions. It has even become in Japan a quasi-academic field: hope studies. Clearly, as one would expect, I have noted that in the process, certain aspects of what I wrote about hope were taken up and found more useful than others. For example, less has been made of the analytical ramifications of the ambivalence and uncertainty that are at the core of hope than of the more general conception of hope as a relation to the future. Again, less has been made of the production of hope, and more has been developed in relation to what I called, inspired by Bourdieu, the distribution of hope in a particular society. I am not saying this as a kind of “lament” but more to foreground what I think are particularly important areas of analysis that I was inspired to think about when reflecting onmy work in relation to this collection. Sometimes this will take the form of self-critique. It is common to say that hope is a relation to the future. But what kind of relation are we talking about and what is this entity “the future” one is supposed to relate to? What kind of existence/reality does it have? For Bloch, for instance, hope was a relation to the future but only in so far as the future is what is already existing in the present in the form of active potentiality, the famous “not yet”. For Saint Paul, and for Christian thought in general, hope was a relation to the possibility of salvation after death. The two propose not only different hopes but also different futures. So, it seems to me that while we can say descriptively that “hope is a relation to the future”, in saying so we presume that the future is something objective that pre-exist the relation to it. But is that really the case and does not hope itself conjure the future into existence? That is, is not hope part of a technology of constructing the future in the very process of relating to it? This makes hope a category similar to spirit. And hope has indeed its shamans, and its priests in Weber’s sense: virtuosos of hope who are good at conjuring it and distributing it among those who participate in its rituals. This is different to an economic distribution in that it plays on hope as a form of attachment and desire towards “the future” and as such distribution is not only a distribution of “amounts” of hope but a “distribution” of intensities. The above links up with the other question we raised: what does it mean to “relate” to the future? When we are faced with questions of ambivalence, uncertainty, intensities saying that hope is a relation to the future is an invitation to ask more questions rather than think of “relation” as a positive answer. It is an invitation to think of how these ambivalences, uncertainties and intensities combine to make up something called a “relation”? Why do we, for instance, speak sometimes of hope in terms of “daring to hope”? What does this daring speak to in terms of fear of, and attachment to, an outcome, etc.? Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimismmight certainly offer food for thought in this regard.