The Public Intellectual

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 2  12 May - 9 June 2008 ]

By Christina Buckridge

Anti-racist policy should not be about making people feel dependent on others for their well-being; it should be about preserving their self-sovereignty.

Ghassan Hage wasn’t born in Australia, though he could have been. His Lebanese grandparents settled in Bathurst NSW in the 1930s; his mother grew up here. But she returned to Lebanon in the 1950s, fell in love, married, and stayed.

Ghassan somewhat wryly recalls that his first experience of the Australian outback and culture as a child was through a French comic book Spirou which featured Sandy and his friend Hoppy the kangaroo.

His first-hand experience of Australia came 33 years ago as a student when he landed in Sydney to escape the civil war in Lebanon and join his Australian family. And apart from visits to his grandparents in Bathurst and accepting frequent and pressing invitations to visiting professorships across the northern hemisphere, he has called Sydney his home ever since.

But now he has been drawn south to take up an inaugural Future Generation Professorship at the University of Melbourne. After 15 years at the University of Sydney, he was feeling the need for a change. Mid-negotiation on a move to a professorship in the UK, an offer came from Melbourne.

“It was an offer that was hard to refuse,” he admits. “It is a very enviable position. It allows me to be creative, to write, to organise visiting lecturers and conferences, and to foster research and, most importantly, radical interdisciplinarity.”

With a CV listing pages and pages of his published works and guest lectures, it is not surprising that Ghassan Hage is regularly identified as one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals. Just last year, the Sydney Morning Herald listed the softly-spoken anthropologist in its top 25 public intellectuals in Australia. It’s a term he finds prescriptive. “There are many ways of being a public intellectual,” he says.

His way has been to work on writing in an accessible way that does not compromise intellectual integrity, does not dumb down the academic message. He concedes it is hard work, but believes his teaching experience makes it easier. He practises presenting a lecture to students again, and again, and again, working on it to make it more accessible.

So now Ghassan Hage is again a migrant, moving cultures, from Sydney to Melbourne.And he is ready to spread radical interdisciplinarity at Melbourne. He proposes to do so through an interdisciplinary group called CIRCuS – the Collective for Innovative Research in Culture and Society – which would be drawn from all parts of the University.

CIRCuS has four key features – extreme professionalism, collaboration, extending oneself beyond the limits and, he adds with a gentle laugh, fun. “It is designed to foster creative research opportunities, grants, initiatives in an innovative spirit.”

“It’s relevant to many social issues such as Indigenous, immigration, housing and health, all of which need to be seen from as total as possible perspective.”

Ghassan will also be giving guest lectures in the Faculty of Arts, and is keen to introduce the ‘open seminar’, an interactive model common in French universities, where academics present their developing work to colleagues who can just ‘hop in’ to discuss the work. “I am hoping it will work well here.”

And he will be putting it to the test. After his formal inaugural professorial lecture next semester which will outline his research work and what he hopes to achieve, his developing research will be subject to ongoing interactive discussion by colleagues in an ‘open seminar’ lecture series.

Ghassan feels it is time that Australia had a rethink about the way it approaches the interaction of cultures. In a recent newspaper article he explored the sense of ‘rootedness’ he felt seeing the fig, olive, pomegranate trees – “very Lebanese trees” – planted by his grandfather at Bathurst. Rootedness, he explains, is about the roots that stay with you when you move. It’s not an either-or proposition, either my roots or yours, either this land is mine or yours, either you are sovereign or I am.

This leads to a key area of his current research – the culture of negotiation. Until now, he explains, all theorising of intercultural relations and policy about multiculturalism has been designed around the concept of ‘recognition’.

“In the paradigm of recognition, there is always a ‘subject’, someone to do the recognising, and an ‘object’, someone to be recognised. “We see this with young Muslims, second and third generation Australians, where social problems emanate from the ‘recognition paradigm’. They are not satisfied with recognition, they find it patronising.

“It’s time to move into a paradigm of negotiation where, even if the two sides are not equal, the unequal side will not be treated as an ‘object’. It’s a much richer way of thinking about policy, taking into account many more complex issues.”

He concedes negotiation can be risky. “The person you are negotiating with may decide to do something which is not good for them but, importantly, it helps encourage the development of a healthy sense of decision-making, the ability to be autonomous, to be self-sovereign.”

Anti-racist policy should not be about making people feel dependent on others for their well-being; it should be about preserving their self-sovereignty. Ghassan is concerned that governments are no longer thinking about multiculturalism. “It has become ‘absent’ - even from the 2020 Summit - but it must be dealt with.”

Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne