Decay

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.

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

"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)