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Gerhard: We're here with Professor Ghassan Hage at Melbourne University, a new professor
of anthropology and social theory. I think that's something we'll be picking up throughout
this talk, this combination of anthropology and social theory.
I think the first thing I'd want to ask you is: how did you come to anthropology? What's
your journey to anthropology?
Ghassan: Well, actually, I didn't—I did not formally have an anthropology degree.
When I started, I started with a political science degree. Then I studied in France in
an institute which was called the Transdisciplinary Institute, which is where I did—because
I feel what was lacking in people's background for one year. If you've done sociology and
political science, they do psychology and anthropology, et cetera, for one year, then
you have to write a thesis from a multidisciplinary perspective. That was my first formal introduction
into anthropology. My thesis was quite sort of like fieldwork based at the Institute.
Then when I came back to Australia, I did my PhD in political science. Both my examiners—because
it was a very fieldwork-based thesis on the civil war in Lebanon— both my examiners
were anthropologists.
The first job I applied for, because my examiners were my references, was to teach Other Cultures,
which was the same as anthropology course at the University of Western Sydney. Basically,
I've been teaching anthropology since, and so I became an anthropologist partly through
teaching myself as I was teaching.
Gerhard: Which is often the best way to learn about a topic. Could one describe you as a
political anthropologist, or you don't like that kind of label?
Ghassan: Well, I mean, I think my work has always been political in the sense that I
have—that I am always aware of the relation of power in which I'm writing and in which
I'm doing anthropology. It's not political anthropology in the sense—in the traditional
conception of political anthropology, but, yes, it's very political, definitely.
Gerhard: I think we'll come back to that topic, but first let's talk about the theme or one
of the themes of this section, which is multiculturalism. What is multiculturalism, and how have you
critiqued it? I think you've been a public intellectual here and worldwide really, reimagining
and rewriting what multiculturalism has become and perhaps what it should become.
Ghassan: Yes. Well, I think it has been one of the distinctive elements of the way I started
thinking about multiculturalism from the start as an anthropologist. The fact that in Australia
but also very much around the world, when I started thinking about multiculturalism,
the dominant approach was based in political economy, in the political economy of migration,
how working class—or to be working class, to-become working class people migrate from
the third world to here, to Australia and become integrated into the society they migrate
to, and the problem of their cultures, et cetera.
One of the things that always struck me is that there was not much an analysis of the
experience of multiculturalism. There was a kind of like what you call an objectivist
gaze in the sense of the analysts think of themselves as sitting from way above the foray
and looking at multiculturalism as if it was existing.
Anthropology, on the whole, had a lot of work on migrant experiences, taking a specific
migrant culture and looking at that experience. But multiculturalism as such very rarely was
done from a perspective of: how do people actually experience multiculturalism? So my
first work on multiculturalism started through this emphasis on the fact that a migrant might
think that multiculturalism is a wonderful thing, that it's giving them an opportunity
to feel better about their culture. At the same time, an Anglo person might be experiencing
that same reality very differently, and experiencing multiculturalism as a buzz that they get from
having someone from another culture present in their space and they are enjoying it.
My approach to multiculturalism started with this idea: how do people experience multiculturalism?
I never really, despite people sometimes interpreting me this way, I never spoke about multiculturalism
in the abstract like this. In my first work in "White Nation," it was about the white
experience of multiculturalism. When I say in the book that multiculturalism is about
management of space, I'm saying, "This is how it is experienced by someone from the
dominant culture."
Gerhard: I think that's been a shift to—anthropology traditionally has been studying from the bottom
up, if you like, and has rarely studied the elite or has rarely studied the ones in power.
There's often been an emphasis on studying the powerless, and in a way it's—a lot of
the work that you refer to was focused on the migrants and how they were experiencing
a policy framework, maybe not even a reality but policies that were acting upon them. I
think that's another issue when we talk about multiculturalism: the difference between the
social reality of lived experience that you describe in "White Nation" both from the point
of view of the Anglo or what you term "white," because you don't like that term, and also
from the point of view of migrants, as opposed to the policy framework that governments create
and update and states create.
Ghassan: Yes, it's the—I mean, if you look at the literature on multiculturalism, in
Australia, in US, in UK, not that much elsewhere, but in my experience there's a kind of policy
fetishism in the sense of you think the government comes up with a policy, and suddenly social
reality becomes the policy, as if the policy of the government is so powerful that it molds
reality completely.
Of course, it contributes to the—but, again, the experience of a bureaucrat, so the bureaucratic
culture of multiculturalism is itself a cultural milieu that anthropologists have to insert
themselves in to study. Likewise white multiculturalism, the multiculturalism of certain specific ethnicities
because—again, it's a big difference if you experience multiculturalism from the position
of a minority culture which is found as useful and enjoyable by the dominant culture and
therefore is welcomed into the multicultural fold. The minority, which does not cope very
nicely, and therefore nobody wants to be multicultural about them. Again, the experience of multiculturalism
is very different.
Gerhard: I think that's an interesting point, these different processes of othering. In
your work, in a way there's a shift from talking about the Asian other to the Muslim other,
that has sort of become the dominant trope in Australia but in lots of other countries
in the West, and how people—how these processes play out in everyday interactions in, again,
not just the policy frameworks and the discourse level or where people are talking about this,
but in how people actually interact and those relationships between people.
I was going to ask you this. In "White Nation," which we have to put into a bit of context
because it describes the Howard era in Australian politics where there was a shift to right-wing
politics around multiculturalism and almost—well, certainly here, an active response against
multiculturalism by a lot of people. In the book, you make the assertion that both people
have the fantasy of white power, who believe in this white nation, and the white multiculturalists.
Both have it wrong, and both have to be assimilated to—or perhaps should be assimilated to the
mainstream multiculturalism. Can you explain that a little bit?
Ghassan: Yes. Well, I mean, let me give a more specific thing about "White Nation."
"White Nation," when I started writing it, it wasn't the Howard era. It was actually—it
was the whole Keating era. It was an era of a government supportive of multiculturalism.
I think it's important to say this because, at that time, critiquing multiculturalism—multiculturalism
and multicultural policy was not in danger. You critique it in order to push it further,
hoping that it will become even more egalitarian, even more involved in securing social justice
for people. As I write it—and that's important. With the Howard era, we start with the era
of the attack on multiculturalism, and suddenly you become in this very difficult position
where people might think that you are supportive of the right-wing push to undermine multiculturalism,
and the critique takes a life of its own in a sense.
Definitely, at the core of what I was saying in "White Nation" was that regardless of multicultural
policy that, from an anthropological perspective of moving on the ground—just me taking my
kid, at the time 6, 7 years old, to play a soccer match. I sit with the parents. They're
from all over the world. We interact. Nobody mentioned multiculturalism, but it is an amazingly
bustling intercultural reality. Really, in those realities, if you want to be a white
racist, you'll be the one sitting somewhere in the corner. That in a sense is the image
that dominated my mind, that if we need an assimilation policy today, we needed an assimilation
for this space, sitting in the corner, to make sure they can assimilate to this intercultural
reality that is on the ground.
I think parts of what we call the restoration program of white power that has come with
right-wing governments is in a sense to shield themselves from this reality and try and reposition
white European values as core values and de-centering the intercultural core that was forming in
Australia.
Gerhard: That in a way relates to another big concept that you've worked on for a long
time, which is nationalism and how there's been, in a way, resurgence of nationalism
and the nation. When I was going into undergrad, I was reading a lot of works that were arguing
"The nation is dead, and it's all about the supranational, and we're going to all live
in this bigger and smaller—bigger yet smaller entities, and the nation won't have a big
impact on how we identify ourselves and others,” whereas now we live in an era where the nation
has really reasserted itself in lots of different ways and, as you say, often there's a disconnect
between the reality, how people interact, and what governments might say or what certain
papers might say, the media, or other actors in that space.
Ghassan: I think that resurgence of white nationalism, which is also resurgence of all
forms of nationalism around the world, not just white nationalism, is interesting because,
on one hand, it is a resurgence, but, on the other, it has a distinctive sense of embattlement
and failure to it. If you look at the rise of nationalism, originally nationalists were
people full of hope. They wanted—the nation meant, “Well, I'm going to own the world
because I'm a national." That's part of the history of being a national, if not necessarily
a nationalist. But the mere fact of being a national meant, "So I can be French," "I
can be Polish," “I can be Russian," et cetera, so it meant something wonderful to me. But
what we're calling the resurgence of nationalism is, sure, it's a reassertion of the nation,
but the hope that was part of the nation has in a sense died, and what you have is a resurgence
of people who feel besieged, who feel, by the mere fact of being a nationalist, you
immediately—your immediate instinct is, "Who's going to get me," rather than, "The
world belongs to me."
It always reminds me of what Nietzsche calls sense of power. Nietzsche has this very beautiful
thing about what you call—about sense of power, in the sense that he says that you
can have two people who have exactly the same amount of power, but one feels that their
power is increasing and one feels that their power is decreasing. The person whose power—who
has a sense of power that their power is increasing, you will find that they will deploy power
benevolently. They will be nice in the way they deploy power. While another person with
exactly the same amount of power but with the sense that their power is decreasing,
I find them cruel, vicious, petty.
I think this is true of the resurgence of nationalism today. The rise of nationalism
initially was a rise of an optimism and involved benevolence, tolerance, et cetera, with all
the negative parts on the side of the nation, but the resurgence of nationalism is the resurgence
of this sense of power, a sense of decline, and therefore we find more and more cruelty,
viciousness, whether towards migrants or towards refugees or towards working class or towards—all
kinds of categories.
Gerhard: Which is what you talk about in “Paranoid Nationalism,” and one of the readings is
actually the chapter on the national cuddle. One of the interesting things—I think it’s
in there—is when you talk about—and you often bring psychology in, when you talk about
longing and in the sense of belonging somewhere, which is linked to a longing of being someone
with a place to call home but also belonging to a nation and also seeing the nation belonging
to me, and becoming very possessive over what that should mean. Rather than having a space
where we can discuss or talk about the many varied ways of belonging, it becomes almost
a zero-sum game. If I belong, you can't belong. If you belong, I can't belong. That's where
I think a lot of the tension comes from in this non-euphoric way of imagining this.
Ghassan: Yes. I mean, when belonging is territorial—I mean, that's where—I think that's where
multicultural reality but also the reality of colonial settler societies, so not just
the cultures of migrants who come after colonization to places like Australia or the United States
or Canada, but the indigenous people and their cultures which should never be just part of
multiculturalism as if they are one culture among others. Obviously the relation of power
behind those cultures and their decimation was very important to take in their specificity.
When you have this situation of a multiplicity of cultures, a multiplicity of forms of existence
in the nation, then the question of territorial belonging becomes increasingly problematized.
That's why it traces actually the imagination of the possibility of non-territorial nationalism
and non-territorial belonging or the capacity of existing of two or three or four cultures
belonging to the same space without this exclusionary mode of thinking.
Gerhard: There's a story you've told many times, and I wonder if you could tell it again,
that I think is a nice way of explaining some of those processes of othering and some of
the way white multiculturalism has played out, which is a story about the refugee who
comes and lives in the community in the hut by the sea, which I think is a fictional account
from someone.
Ghassan: Yes. Yes, it is a semi-fictional account by Loubna Haikal, a Lebanese-Australian
author. Yes, it's a lovely story. It's about this very progressive green community up the
north coast of New South Wales. They are committed to be nice, like all these communities. They're
nice to everybody, and they want to be very nice to refugees, so much so that they decided
they want to be nicer than the normal nice to refugees. They said all these people support
refugees or support asylum seekers when they are detained, but when these asylum seekers
get out of detainment, they forget about them. So they decided they were supporting this
Iraqi asylum seeker and they got him out of detention. They asked him to come and live
with them. The Iraqi came to live with them and they said, "Go and choose yourself a very
nice plot of land here." The Iraqi looked around and found this beautiful view of the
sea but also found a palm tree and said, "This is where I want to be because the palm tree
reminds of me of my home, and I can remember home, and enjoy the sea, and be part of the…"
Everybody was happy. He started living.
Until one day, at the castle, because they are a deep green community, somebody said,
"Actually this palm tree is not native. You know, we are committed to native vegetation
here, and I think we need to remove this palm tree." They go to the Iraqi and say to him,
"We have to remove the palm tree." He says, "No way, this palm tree means everything to
me, and that's why I'm here."
The story starts suddenly showing how the people start turning on him in a racist way
and say, "Who do you think you are? We have invited you here. We are the ones who gave
you this land," et cetera. Yes, the story shows how conditional the integration of a
person can be when it is done in this mode. Even when it is super nice, when you leave
that little bit of power left to the dominant culture whereby when the crunch comes and
if it annoys them, they will use it. In a sense, the aim of any progressive multiculturalism
is the removal of this residual power. It's the capacity of just living among each other
without power over…
Gerhard: To go beyond tolerance…
Ghassan: Go beyond tolerance.
Gerhard: …to I think what you call a politics of negotiation, be amongst equals rather than…
Ghassan: Well, what I call the politics of negotiation which is here—because negotiation
has many meanings. It's very important to differentiate. Negotiation is not like negotiating
over the table in a diplomatic way, but negotiating like when you negotiate a river and you are
in a canoe. It's about being attuned to others and being continuously sensitive, inter-sensitivity
to the other in every possible way.
Gerhard: In fact, throughout the episodes, one thing we're looking at is relationships
between things, relationships between people and things, and relationships between people.
I think that's where anthropology has a lot to offer in describing this inter-subjectivity,
that space in between, I guess.
Ghassan: I think anthropology is definitely moving to gather strength from something which
it had, throughout its tradition, of not thinking of otherness simply in terms of human otherness.
The fact that we have such a rich history of studying people who do not make sharp distinctions
between humans, culture and nature, and the fact that there are such varieties of ways
that we experience, we can bring all of these together and make them relevant to our lives.
I think that's always what attracts me, the political element of anthropology that always
attracts me, that it is always capable of giving us forms of otherness, forms of different
ways of living that we can use to haunt our own culture into to making it better.
Gerhard: Do you think that's a role of anthropology, the mission of anthropology?
Ghassan: I feel that, yes, critical anthropology in the fields of critique—I think that today
critical anthropology has so much to offer. It is very exciting, actually. It is one of
the disciplines which makes us think so much about possibilities, something that we need
a lot.
Gerhard: Possibilities of living differently, I guess.