Ghassan Hage

Hage grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, in a Maronite Catholic family. He moved to Sydney in 1976, aged 19. Hage's maternal grandparents are of Lebanese background, but had migrated to Australia from Santo Domingo in the 1930s. His mother, born in Santo Domingo, was an Australian citizen and thirty years old when she moved to Lebanon and married Hage's father, Lt Colonel Hamid Hage. After their marriage they lived in Baabda, near Beirut, where Hage was born.^[1]

Hage completed his schooling in Lebanon. He obtained his Baccalaureat 2eme Partie as a student of the International College (section française). Hage had enrolled at the American University of Beirut as a pre-med student when the Lebanese civil war (1975–90) erupted. He left Lebanon in 1976 and joined the maternal side of the family in Australia. He completed a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) at Macquarie University in 1982, a Diplome de 3eme Cycle (University of Nice, 1983) and a PhD in anthropology ("a study of communal identification among Christian Lebanese during the Lebanese civil war" - Macquarie University, 1989).^{[citation needed]}

From 1987 he was a part-time lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, then until 1994 a lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney. He was at the University of Sydney from 1994 to 2008 before moving to the University of Melbourne. He has also held a post-doctoral research position and a visiting professorship at Pierre Bourdieu's research centre in Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales which has been of particular importance in his intellectual formation.^{[citation needed]}

In 2023-2024 Hage was a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany.^[2] On 7 February 2024, Hage was laid off by the Max Planck Society due to his comments on the Gaza war.^[3][4] On 7 October 2023, the day of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, Hage published a poem entitled "Israel-Palestine: The Endless Dead-End That Will Not End."^[5]

Hage divides his time between Sydney, Beirut and Europe.^{[citation needed]}

Hage is deaf. His hearing declined considerably in the 1980s and 1990s. He has had one cochlear implant fitted in 2004 and another in 2012.^[6]

Hage works on the comparative anthropology of racism, nationalism and multiculturalism, particularly in Australia and the Middle East. He has written and conducted fieldwork on the Lebanese transnational diaspora in Australia, the US, Europe, Canada and Venezuela. He also researches and writes in social theory, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu.^{[citation needed]}

He has been a contributor to debates on multiculturalism in Australia and has published on the topic. His book, White Nation, draws on theory from Whiteness studies, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu to interpret ethnographic work undertaken in Australia. The book has been widely debated in Australia, with many of its themes picked up by anti-racism activists in other countries.^[7] The follow-up Against Paranoid Nationalism is an analysis of certain themes in Australian politics that Hage believed were prominent under the government of John Howard.^{[citation needed]}

He has also written on the political dimensions of critical anthropology (which appears in the volume Alter-Politics: Critical Thought and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne University Press 2015)). His writings include: Is Racism an Environmental Threat? which views racism and the domination of nature as originating from the same ideology, which Hage refers to as 'domestication': "a mode of feeling at home in the world by dominating it". Hage's most recent book, The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World, is concerned with affirming the importance of a continuity between classical anthropological questions and the study of diasporic culture.^{[citation needed]}

Hage was terminated by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology on 7 February 2024 over his comments on the Gaza war and the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.^{[8][9][3][10]} On 7 October 2023, Hage published a text on his blog stating "the Palestinians, like all colonised people, are still proving that their capacity to resist is endless. They don't only dig tunnels. They can fly above walls."^[11]

The Max Planck Society published a press release, stating that many of the views he had shared via social media after the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel are incompatible with their core values and that "racism, anti-Semitism, islamophobia, discrimination, hatred and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society".^[12] Hage rejected any accusation in a statement.^[13]

Following the dismissal, global academic communities, including Israeli scholars,^[14] the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology,^[15] the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies,^[16] the European Association of Social Anthropologists,^[17] the American Anthropological Association,^[18] the Council for Humanities, Arts and Sciences and the Australian Anthropological Society^[19] rallied in support of Hage, urging the society to reverse its decision.

Hage had previously expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.^[20]

• Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences
• Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
• Fellow of the British Academy of the Social Sciences
• Past President of the Australian Anthropological Society
• 2004 winner, Community Relations Commission Award, New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, for Against Paranoid nationalism.^[21]