Ghassan Hage @ MPI - 'Anthropology & Strategic Exoticisation' (May 9th, 2023)

From a talk by Prof. Ghassan Hage given at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany, May 9th, 2023. This talk was originally posted in June 2023, but was taken off the Max Planck Institute Youtube page after Prof. Hage was dismissed from the Institute following a scandal in German right-wing tabloid media, in which he was subjected to an unscrupulous campaign of bullying, replete with unsubstantiated accusations of antisemitism and racism, due to comments made on his social media merely expressing solidarity with those suffering and dying in Gaza under murderous, genocidal assault from the Israeli military. Ghassan Hage remains one of the top scholars in the world on racism and antiracism, a fact which should underline for all how cowardly and pathetic the Max Planck Institute have behaved in dismissing Ghassan, kowtowing as they have to the German governmental policy of silencing voices critical of Israel. Abstract: ANTHROPOLOGY AND STRATEGIC EXOTICISATION There was a time when Anthropology dealt with people perceived to be, from a Western point of view as, exotic. But this idea of ‘exotic people’ has been subjected to an on-going post-colonial critique. Nonetheless, while happy to ditch the idea that anthropology only dealt with the non-western, non-modern, people, some anthropologists at least, did not want to let go of the idea of the exotic all together. For these anthropologists, it is one of the specificities of anthropology to deal with what defined and characterised the exotic: namely its challenging strangeness, uncommonness and weirdness. It demanded from us to expand our horizon of what is acceptable and possible. Some anthropologists have argued that one does not have to go to a remote part of the earth to discover weirdness. If one looks around carefully, weirdness can be found and highlighted anywhere. Even the most familiar parts of our own culture can be shown to be weirder than they might appear to us to be in the first instance. This desire to look for, encounter and analyse the weirder dimensions of the familiar is not some fascination with the weird for its own sake. Rather, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has shown there is an analytic gain to be made via this ‘strategic exoticisation’. It emanates from a belief that one of the most critical and distinguishing aspects of anthropological research is always to ask the following question: in what way does the study of the particular sociocultural phenomena that we are studying expand our knowledge of the plurality of modes of existing in the world? In this lecture I give a few examples of what it means to do ethnography while asking such a question.