Research seminar with Ghassan Hage: "Book talk: Bourdieu as an anthropologist of viability"

Research seminar with Ghassan Hage: "Book talk: Bourdieu as an anthropologist of viability"

Seminar

Date:

Monday 1 December 2025

Time:

13.00 – 14.30

Location:

B600

Abstrakt:

In this talk I want to introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being. In this book I have no desire to claim that I am offering an account of what Bourdieu’s work is ‘really about’ or even an ‘interpretation’ of Bourdieu. Rather, I put together in an as rigorous as possible manner those dimensions of Bourdieu’s work that I have found useful to think with and that make of him an important participant in what I call an anthropology of viability: an anthropology concerned with the analysis of the way people struggle to imagine, define, and pursue competing conceptions of viable lives.

Bio:

Ghassan Hage is a professor of anthropology working between Australia, Lebanon, and Europe. His work covers many areas of inquiry which include an engagement with multiculturalism, racism, and white supremacy in Australia, the relation between White colonial domination and the human domination of the environment,  ethnographic explorations among the Lebanese diaspora in the world and critical anthropological theory.