In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations-biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.

Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert

About the Author
Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne and author of The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, and other books.

Reviews
"This innovative and ethnographically tantalizing book presents the notion of decay as a keyword for our times-times that are depressive and apocalyptic-and connects it to a broad array of terms that circulate in today's pop culture and critical scholarship. Decay's punchy and insightful essays introduce readers to an exciting new terrain in social theory, one that is good to think with and pregnant with possibility." -- Charles Piot, author of * The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles *
"Striking out at the lack of decay in our conceptual approaches, Decay encourages anthropologists to examine entropy and the tendency toward disorder as a new way of thinking about social change, persistence, and relationality." -- Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of * Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism *
"These essays in Decay provide an attractive opening invitation for further thought. Taking up the difficult task of uniting a disparate number of biological, physical, organisational, moral, political, personal and social concerns, they are provocative, imaginative and stimulating in their reach." -- Helen Mackreath * LSE Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478014737
Author Ghassan Hage
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 272g