Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
May 06 2009
Seminar Room A

Spaces of Negotiation: Culture at the Margin of the Law
Ghassan Hage, Anthropology, University of Melbourne

I have a memory of my mother taking me in the early 1960s to a Beirut shop called Fontana that sold household appliances. My mother bought a food processor and paid for it. I also remember vividly noticing something strange. She did not bargain for the price. She was known to love bargaining. And she did so enthusiastically in the old Lebanese Souks that were later wiped out by the Lebanese civil war and where one bought things like clothes and jewelry. I asked my mother why she did not bargain and she said: 'This is a modern store, the prices are fixed, you do not bargain here'. In this paper I want to examine modernity's association with the 'fixed': whether in the economic sphere in terms of prices or in terms of social rules that are fixed by the law. I want to argue that with the efficiency that accompanies this fixing comes a loss that is increasing marking our culture. It is the loss of what I will call 'spaces of negotiation'. This has ramifications in the way we conceive our relationship with all forms of 'otherness' as well as how we imagine state policy and the laws aimed at regulating our relation with such otherness.