Gerhard: We're here with Prof. Ghassan Hage
at Melbourne University.
You're professor of Anthropology and Social
Theory, and I think that's something we'll
be picking up throughout this talk, this combination
of anthropology and social theory. First,
let's talk about the theme or one of the themes
of this section, which is multiculturalism.
What is multiculturalism, and how have you
critiqued it? I think you've been a public
intellectual here and worldwide really, reimagining
and rewriting what multiculturalism has become
and perhaps what it should become.
Ghassan: Well, I think it has been one of
the distinctive elements of the way I started
thinking about multiculturalism from the start,
as an anthropologist. The fact that in Australia,
but also very much around the world, when
I started thinking about multiculturalism,
the dominant approach was based in political
economy, in the political economy of migration,
how working class—or to be working class,
to become working class, people migrate from
the Third World to Europe, to Australia, and
become integrated into the society they migrate
to.
One of the things that always struck me is
that there was not much an analysis of the
experience of multiculturalism. There was
a kind of like what you call an objectivist
gaze, in the sense of the analysts think of
themselves as sitting from way above the foray
and looking at multiculturalism as if it was
existing.
Anthropology, on the whole, had a lot of work
on migrant experiences, taking a specific
migrant culture and looking at that experience,
but multiculturalism as such very rarely was
done from the perspective of: how do people
actually experience multiculturalism?
My first work on multiculturalism started
through this emphasis on the fact that a migrant
might think that multiculturalism is a wonderful
thing, that it's given them an opportunity
to feel better about their culture. At the
same time, an Anglo person might be experiencing
that same reality very differently and experiencing
multiculturalism as a buzz that they get from
having someone from another culture present
in their space and they're enjoying it.
My approach to multiculturalism started with this idea: how do people experience multiculturalism?
I never really, despite people sometimes interpret
me this way, I never spoke about multiculturalism
in the abstract like this. In my first work,
in "White Nation," it was about the white
experience of multiculturalism. When I say
in the book that multiculturalism is about
management of space, I'm saying this is how
it is experienced by someone from the dominant
culture.
Gerhard: I think that's been a shift to—anthropology
traditionally has been studying from the bottom
up, if you like, and has rarely studied the
elite or has rarely studied the ones in power.
There's often been an emphasis on studying
the powerless. In a way, a lot of the work
that you referred to was focused on the migrants
and how they were experiencing a policy framework—maybe
not even a reality but policies that were
acting upon them.
I think that's another issue when we talk
about multiculturalism: the difference between
the social reality of lived experience that
you described, both from—in “White Nation”
from the point of view of the Anglo, or what
you termed white because you don't like that
term, and also from the point of migrants,
as opposed to the policy framework that governments
create and update and states create.
Ghassan: Yes, it's—I mean, if you look at
the literature on multiculturalism in Australia,
in US, in UK—not that much elsewhere—but
in my experience, there's a kind of policy
fetishism in the sense if you think the government
comes up with policy, and suddenly social
reality becomes the policy as if the policy
of government is so powerful that it molds
reality completely.
Of course, it contributes to those, but, again,
the experience of a bureaucrat—the bureaucratic
culture of multiculturalism is itself a cultural
milieu that anthropologists have to insert
themselves in to study. Likewise, white multiculturalism,
the multiculturalism of certain specific ethnicities,
because, again, it's a big difference if you
experience multiculturalism from the position
of a minority culture, which is found as useful
and enjoyable by the dominant culture and
therefore is welcomed into the multicultural
fold; and a minority which does not cope very
nice and therefore nobody wants to be multicultural
about them. Again, their experience of multiculturalism
is very different.
