Decay / edited by Ghassan Hage.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hage, Ghassan, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Degeneration--Social aspects.

Degeneration.

Degeneration--Political aspects.

Anthropological ethics.

Political culture.

Social change.

Social aspects.

Physical Description:

viii, 181 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2021.

Summary:

"In thirteen sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations-biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social-and in its numerous contexts-colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations between individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide a nuanced and rigorous way to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Toward an Analytics of Social Decay / Ghassan Hage

Forever "Falling Apart": Semiotics and Rhetorics of Decay / Violeta Schubert

Trash and Treasure: Pathologies of Permanence on the Margins of Our Plastic Age / Debra McDougall

The Dialectic of Construction and Ruination in the Study of Infrastructure / Akhil Gupta

The Waterfall at the End of the World: Earthquakes, Entropy, and Explanation / Monica Minnegal, Michael Main, and Peter D. Dwyer

"Vile Corpse": Urban Decay as Human Beauty and Social Pollution / Michael Herzfeld

Decay or Fresh Contact? Exposure, Mixture, and Moral Panic after War's End / Bart Klem

Seeds of Decay / Fabio Mattioli

Accelerated Decay in Settler Colonial Australia / Elise Klein

Decay as Decline in Social Viability among Ex-Militiamen in Lebanon / Ghassan Hage

Relational Decay: White Helpers on Australia's Colonial Frontier / Cameo Dalley

Decay, Rot, Mold, and Resistance in the US Prison System / Tamara Kohn.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-169) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Decay

ISBN:

9781478013808

147801380X

9781478014737

1478014733

OCLC:

1243263681