Presented in person and online - details below.

Pierre Bourdieu and The Socio-Existential Physics of Viability

I was leaving Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport bound for Paris with one of my informants, Wafa, and her mother. Her mother was carrying such a great deal of luggage—well beyond the allowed weight allocation—that it caused a scene at the airport. Wafa looked very embarrassed by the whole situation. She said to me that it was always like this traveling with her mother, and adding, “It’s like traveling with someone who comes from the village.”

Wafa had a clear sense of the class connotations of how much weight one carries when traveling: cosmopolitan people travel lightly, country people take too much luggage. But what interested me was the way her mother’s luggage “weighed” on Wafa. Her mother was carrying the heavy physical luggage but was unaffected by it, symbolically or existentially. Wafa, on the other hand, because she saw herself through others’ eyes (perhaps mine, on this occasion), was the one affected by it symbolically and existentially. What is interesting, from a Bourdieusian perspective, is that the notion of “existential weight” was not merely an etic category but straddled both the etic and emic. After saying that her mother looked like she was a “villager,” Wafa exclaimed, “Shee ma byenhamal,” which literally means “something that cannot be carried”—“unbearable.” The incident made me start to register far more methodically the way my informants deployed a Newtonian physics-like imaginary to speak of their state of being.

In this presentation I will discuss the way Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field helped me think the way the physical, the social and the existential intermingle, coalesce, and fuse to forge the socioexistential physics of people’s life struggles.

Speaker: 
Ghassan Hage is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Professor Hage has published broad-ranging and highly acclaimed works on racism, nationalism, multiculturalism, migration, and the relationship between critical anthropology and radical politics. His books include White Nation, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Alter-Politics, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, and The Diasporic Condition. His newest book, Pierre Bourdieu′s Political Economy of Being, will be published later this year with Duke University Press. 

Location: Haydon-Allen building 22, Rm G53

Zoom: https://anu.zoom.us/j/87802807372?pwd=fbu3BD3PcmaIXpt3VU4srkznBENqkG.1
Meeting ID: 878 0280 7372
Password: 277792