Diasporic Anisogamy Annual Lecture

Professor Ghassan Hage - University of Melbourne

The Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Anthropology and Sociology are pleased to invite you to the CMDS Annual Lecture by:
Prof Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne

9 am (UK time) 8 pm (Melbourne time)

Registration is required and it is now open on Eventbrite

The event will take place on zoom. The link will be available upon registration

About this event

'Anisogamy’ is the concept used by Levi-Strauss to refer to marriages and reciprocal relations between people of unequal status. In its Levi-Straussian usage the inequality of status is an accepted fact. As lived by most people today, however, inequality of status, is itself a domain of anisogamic struggle: a party claiming superiority does not necessarily mean an acknowledgment of this superiority by the other party. Ghassan Hage, nonetheless uses ‘anisogamic relations’ to describe any relation requiring a form of reciprocal exchange where the inequality of status of the two parties and the inequality of what is being given and what is being received is an issue negotiated in the relation. Ghassan Hage also uses the notion of ‘anisogamic strategies’ to speak of the symbolic labour that is involved in the maintenance this type of relations. In his paper, drawing on his ethnographic exploration of the Lebanese diaspora around the world, he explores what it means to see immigrant-host relations from within such an anisogamic lenses.

Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social theory at the University of Melbourne. He has worked for many years on racism and white nationalism from a comparative perspective. His publications include his early work White Nation (1998) that deals with white supremacist fantasies in Australia, and his later work Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017) that deals with the commonalities between the colonial practices of racialisation and exploitation of people and the speciesist practices of exploitation of nature. He also has a long term interest in critical anthropological theory. His main publication in that field is the book Alter-politics: Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press, 2015). His forthcoming works include Decay (Duke University Press, 2021) and The Diasporic Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2021.