Alter-Politics

This book is a contribution to a long history of critical writing against an increasingly destructive global order marked by an excessive instrumentalisation, exploitation and degradation of the human and non-human environment, and ridden with unacceptable, but also, importantly, avoidable, forms of inequality, injustice and marginalization. It is concerned with the way anthropological critical writing in particular aims to weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics): alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness. If the book privileges alter-politics over oppositional politics, it is not because, as is made clear, the 'alter' moment is more important than the 'anti'. It is because a concern for alter-politics has been less prevalent.

The question of 'political passion' is crucial in this conception of the alter-political. For the book argues that it is because radical political passion has been mostly directed towards anti-politics that it has come to dominate over alter-politics. This does not simply mean that political passion needs to be equally directed towards alter-politics. It also means that this passion itself needs to be a radically different kind of political passion once so directed. It is this 'alter-political passion' that the author strives to create a space for throughout the work.


Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne. He has held many international visiting professorships including at Harvard, at The Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, The University of Copenhagen and The American University of Beirut. He works in the areas of comparative nationalism, racism and multiculturalism. He is the author of many publication in this domain most known among them is White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Routledge 2000). He also works in social theory with a particular interest in the work of Pierre Bourdieu.