The Diasporic Condition

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In his new book, Ghassan Hage bridges the gap between research on migration and anthropological tradition, illustrating that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory. Though his research subject is anything but classical on its face, Hage engages with the diasporic Lebanese community as a shared lifeworld, defining a common cultural milieu that transcends spatial and temporal distance-a collective mode of being here termed the "diasporic condition." Seeking to encompass an unusually complicated transnational terrain, Hage's longterm ethnographic engagement takes us from Mehj and Jalleh in Lebanon to Europe, Australia, South America, and North America, analyzing how Lebanese migrants and their families have succeeded (or not) in establishing themselves in their new homes, even as they remain socially, economically, politically, and affectively related to Lebanon and to each other. At the heart of this research lies a critical anthropological question: in what way does the study of a particular socio-cultural phenomenon expand our knowledge of modes of existing in the world? As Hage establishes what he terms the "lenticular condition" to describe how the diasporic Lebanese community inhabits a multiplicity of intersecting realities, he breaks down the boundaries between "us" and "them, " "here" and "there, " showing that this lenticular mode of existence increasingly defines everyone's everyday life"--