Anthropologist and social critic Ghassan Hage explores one of the most complex and troubling of modern phenomena: the desire for a white nation.

In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations-biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment. Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert

Anthropologist and social critic Ghassan Hage explores one of the most complex and troubling of modern phenomena: the desire for a white nation. In this prickly, strongly argued book, he asks whether that desire is indeed limited to "racists." Drawing upon the Australian experience, Hage draws conclusions that might also be applicable in France, the United States, of Great Britian, each being examples of multicultural environment under the control of white culture. Hage argues that governments have promise white citizens they would lose nothing under multiculturalism. But on the ground - where people live - migrant settlement has changed neighborhoods, challenged white control, created new demands from non-whites, and led to white backlash. This provocative book suggessts that white racists and white multiculturalists may share more assumptions than either group suspects.

In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations-biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment. Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert

Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory. In The Diasporic Condition, Ghassan Hage engages with the diasporic Lebanese community as a shared lifeworld, defining a common cultural milieu that transcends spatial and temporal distance-a collective mode of being here termed the "diasporic condition." Encompassing a complicated transnational terrain, Hage's long-term ethnography takes us from Mehj and Jalleh in Lebanon to Europe, Australia, South America, and North America, analyzing how Lebanese migrants and their families have established themselves in their new homes while remaining socially, economically, and politically related to Lebanon and to each other. At the heart of The Diasporic Condition lies a critical anthropological question: How does the study of a particular sociocultural phenomenon expand our knowledge of modes of existing in the world? As Hage establishes what he terms the "lenticular condition," he breaks down the boundaries between "us" and "them," "here" and "there," showing that this convergent mode of existence increasingly defines everyone's everyday life.

This book is a contribution to a long history of critical writing against an increasingly destructive global order marked by an excessive instrumentalisation, exploitation and degradation of the human and non-human environment, and ridden with unacceptable, but also, importantly, avoidable, forms of inequality, injustice and marginalisation. Alter-Politics is concerned with the way anthropological critical writing in particular aims to weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics): alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness. If Alter-Politics privileges alter-politics over oppositional politics, it is not because, as is made clear, the 'alter' moment is more important than the 'anti'. It is because a concern for alter-politics has been less prevalent. The question of 'political passion' is crucial in this conception of the alter-political. For the book argues that it is because radical political passion has been mostly directed towards anti-politics that it has come to dominate over alter-politics. This does not simply mean that political passion needs to be equally directed towards alter-politics. It also means that this passion itself needs to be a radically different kind of political passion once so directed. It is this 'alter-political passion' that Hage strives to create a space for throughout Alter-Politics.

Arab people first came to Australia in the late nineteenth century. Today more than half a million Australians claim some form of Arab ancestry. They are a diverse group, both socially and economically. New South Wales, for example, appointed Australia's first Lebanese Governor, while at the same time it was labelling groups of economically deprived young people as 'Lebanese gangs'. Victoria's Premier, Steve Bracks, comes from a Lebanese background. Melbourne has an important Arab business community, while newly arrived Arab immigrants have one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country. Arab-Australians Today raises important questions about immigration, settlement, marginalisation and participation in Western societies. It discusses the way early Arab immigrants were received in Australia and talks about contemporary issues of participation in the Australian political process. It examines the lives of diverse groups of people, ranging from entrepreneurs to Arab women activists to unemployed youth. It analyses issues ranging from the ways Arab-Australians grow to call Australia home, to the moral panic created around Arab youth and criminality. The book offers non-Arab-Australians a way to better understand the Arab presence in Australia. It is also an invitation for Arab-Australians to reflect on the history of their settlement in Australia, as well as on the current experience of more recent immigrants.

Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory. In The Diasporic Condition, Ghassan Hage engages with the diasporic Lebanese community as a shared lifeworld, defining a common cultural milieu that transcends spatial and temporal distance-a collective mode of being here termed the "diasporic condition." Encompassing a complicated transnational terrain, Hage's long-term ethnography takes us from Mehj and Jalleh in Lebanon to Europe, Australia, South America, and North America, analyzing how Lebanese migrants and their families have established themselves in their new homes while remaining socially, economically, and politically related to Lebanon and to each other. At the heart of The Diasporic Condition lies a critical anthropological question: How does the study of a particular sociocultural phenomenon expand our knowledge of modes of existing in the world? As Hage establishes what he terms the "lenticular condition," he breaks down the boundaries between "us" and "them," "here" and "there," showing that this convergent mode of existence increasingly defines everyone's everyday life.

In this rich and insightful collection of essays, leading anthropologist Ghassan Hage brings together academics across political science, philosophy, anthropology and sociology for an examination into the experience of waiting. What is it to wait? What do we wait for? And how is waiting connected to the social worlds in which we live? From Beckett's darkly comic play Waiting for Godot, to the perpetual waiting of refugees to return home, or to moments of intense anticipation such as falling in love or the birth of a baby, there are many ways in which we wait. This compelling collection of essays suggests that this experience is among the essential conditions that make us human and connect us to others.