The Diasporic Condition

Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World

Ghassan Hage

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226547060, 9780226546902
• eBook ISBN: 9780226547237
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

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. 

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by an f refer to figures.

Adel (United States): diasporic trajectory, 145–47; internalized masculinity of, 152–62; marriage of, 147–52; powerlessness of, 147–52, 159–62; sexual dysfunction of, 141–45, 151–52, 159–62

Adèle (Neefa family) (Jalleh), 119, 132–39

aesthetics, interfamily differentiation, 127–31

Afifeh, 156–57

ajnabi (Western foreigner), 199n2

Algeria, 28

alienation (Marxian concept), 70, 113

Alissar, 40

alterity, 3, 9, 166

alternative modernities, 27

Amal (Australia), 111–12

ambivalence: attractiveness of concept, 60, 63; inhabitance/being relationship and, 98; injury and loss related to, 54–58; limits of concept, 60–63, 65; modernity/tradition dichotomy and, 64–65

Ameen (Neefa family) (Venezuela), 118, 131

America. See United States

Ana Maria (United States), 66

Anderson, Benedict, 17, 108, 109

anisogamic relation(s), 184–85; in aestheticization, 128, 129; applications of concept, 186–87; in colonialism, 186–87; defined, 52, 57; disempowerment within, 147–52, 159–62; imagined reciprocity in, 55–56; lenticularity and, 99–105; in literature, 56–57; loss and injury as part of, 54–58, 99; in marriage, 52–53, 147–51, 186; returning immigrants and, 168–73; strategies of intensification and, 102–16; valorization and status in, 52–55, 56, 57, 100–101, 147, 160. See also nostalgia (diasporic)

anisogamic strategy, defined, 52

anisogamy, defined, 52

anthropology: of Beirut, 166; problem of space in, 78–79; site in, 16

anthropology, diasporic: critical approach to, 9–14; multisited ethnography and, 14–16; prevalent cultural analyses in, 13; sociological approach to, 2–4; universal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• One / Lebanese Capitalism and the Emergence of a Transnational Mode of Existence
• Two / On Being Propelled into the World: Existential Mobility and the Migratory Illusio
• Three / Diasporic Anisogamy
• Four / From Ambivalent to Fragmented Subjects
• Five / On Diasporic Lenticularity
• Six / Lenticular Realities and Anisogamic Intensifications
• Seven / The Lebanese Transnational Diasporic Family
• Eight / Diaspora and Sexuality: A Case Study
• Nine / Diasporic Jouissance and Perverse Anisogamy: Negotiated Being in the Streets of Beirut
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index