[Anthropgrad] Anthrop Seminar_Prof Hage_6 May

[Fay castles]

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Prof Ghassan Hage, 6 May, 9.30 am; Sem room A, Coombs

Spaces of negotiation: culture at the margin of the law

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.

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Fay Castles
Departmental Administrator
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
+61-2-612 52162  Fax: +61-2-612 53023
Fay.Castles at anu.edu.au
http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
ANU CRICOS Provider Number: 00120C
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