Decay

Published by Duke University Press 2021

Decay

Edited by: Ghassan Hage

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478022039

Overview
Contents

About this book

In thirteen sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material forms of decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe.

Author / Editor information

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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. STATES OF DECAY Ghassan Hage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Forever “Falling Apart”: Semiotics and Rhetorics of Decay Violeta Schubert Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2. Trash and Treasure: Pathologies of Permanence on the Margins of Our Plastic Age Debra McDougall Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
3. Infrastructure as Decay and the Decay of Infrastructure Akhil Gupta Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
4. The Waterfall at the End of the World: Earthquakes, Entropy, and Explanation Monica Minnegal, Michael Main and Peter D. Dwyer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
5. “Vile Corpse”: Urban Decay as Human Beauty and Social Pollution Michael Herzfeld Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
6. Decay or Fresh Contact? The Morality of Mixture after War’s End Bart Klem Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
7. Seeds of Decay Fabio Mattioli Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
8. Discourses of Decay in Settler Colonial Australia Elise Klein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
9. Decay as Decline in Social Viability among Ex-Militiamen in Lebanon Ghassan Hage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
10. Relational Decay: White Helpers in Australia’s Indigenous Communities Cameo Dalley Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	128
11. Decay, Rot, Mold, and Resistance in the US Prison System Tamara Kohn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 192

eBook

Published: August 23, 2021
ISBN: 9781478022039