Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination

Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination is a contribution to the long history of critical writing against an increasingly destructive global order marked by excessive exploitation and degradation of the environment, and ridden with unacceptable, but also, importantly, avoidable, forms of inequality and injustice. It is concerned with the way anthropological critical writing aims to weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics): alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness. If the book privileges alter-politics over oppositional politics, it is not because the ‘alter’ moment is more important than the ‘anti’, it is because a concern for alter-politics has been less explored in public debate. The question of ‘political passion’ is crucial in this conception of the alterpolitical. The book argues that because radical political passion has been mostly directed towards anti-politics, it has come to dominate over alterpolitics. This does not simply mean that political passion needs to be equally directed towards alter-politics: it also means that this energy needs to be a radically different kind of political expression. In Alter-Politics, Ghassan Hage strives to create a space for this ‘alter-political passion’.