Haim Hazan

Against Hybridity (eBook, ePUB)

Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

One of the major characteristics of our contemporary culture is a positive, almost banal, view of the transgression and disruption of cultural boundaries. Strangers, migrants and nomads are celebrated in our postmodern world of hybrids and cyborgs. But we pay a price for this celebration of hybridity: the non-hybrid figures in our societies are ignored, rejected, silenced or exterminated. This book tells the story of these non-hybrid figures D the anti-heroes of our pop culture. The main example of non-hybrids in an otherwise hybridized world is that of deep old age. Hazan shows how we fervently distance ourselves from old age by grading and sequencing it into stages such as 'the third age', 'the fourth age' and so on. Aging bodies are manipulated through anti-aging techniques until it is no longer possible to do it anymore, at which point they become un-transformable and non-marketable objects and hence commercially and socially invisible or masked. Other examples are used to elucidate the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid: pain, the Holocaust, autism, fundamentalism and corporeal death. On the face of it, these examples may seem to have nothing in common, but they all exemplify the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid and provoke similar reactions of criticism, terror, abhorrence and moral indignation. This highly original and iconoclastic book offers a fresh critique of contemporary Western culture by focusing on that which is perceived as its other D the non-hybrid in our midst, often rejected, ignored or silenced and deemed to be in need of globally manageable correction.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: John Wiley & Sons
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. April 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780745690735
• Artikelnr.: 42675944

Autorenporträt

Haim Hazan is professor sociology and social anthropology at Tel-Aviv University, and Co-Director of the Minerva Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the End of Life.

Inhaltsangabe

PART I Introduction: Zones and Discourses of Cultural Sturdiness The Book's
Composition (Non-)hybridization and (Anti-)globalization The Genealogy of
Hybridity The Biopolitics of Hybridization, Medicalization, and Cultural
Brokering Medicalization as Cultural Brokering and Staging Traditional,
modern and postmodern anthropology in search of its other PART II From
Ageless Self to Selfless age: The Very Old as Deadly Others Before Taking
the Plunge Social Theory and Extreme Old age The Academic Disciplines of
Anthropology and Gerontology in the Context of Extreme Old Age The
Old-as-Other in Anthropology and Gerontology Third World and Third Age: A
Tale of two Hybrids Research Methodology and Extreme Old Age From the Third
to the Fourth Age: A Hybrid turned Non-hybrid PART III The Fluid and the
Immutable: Extending the Argument Beyond Debate? The Cultural Site of the
Holocaust Translating the Holocaust: The 'Rebel' vs. the 'Lamb to
Slaughter' The Case of Autism, or: Those on the Spectrum Pain, the Old
Barbarian Surviving Pain Old Age and the Mark of Pain In Conclusion:
Bringing the Extra-Cultural Back In References Index

Rezensionen

Opening new vistas, blazing new trails, drawing out from invisibility the forcibly fixed - that other, murky side of the glittering world of self-defining and self-asserting, as well as self-congratulating, hybrids: the collateral victims of the universal duty of market-inspired, market-promoted and market-mediated self-creation.
Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds

An intellectual tour de force. Hazan describes how postmodernity esteems hybridization, networking and assimilation, but at the expense of irreducible, irreconcilable and pure forms of life. He brings an ethnographer's eye to our contemporary aversion towards, and discounting of, essential objects such as the savage, the old and autistic, pain and the Holocaust.
Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews