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Waiting
In this rich and insightful collection of essays, leading anthropologist Ghassan Hage brings together academics across political science, philosophy, anthropology and sociology for an examination into the experience of waiting. What is it to wait? What do we wait for? And how is waiting connected to the social worlds in which we live? From Beckett's darkly comic play Waiting for Godot , to the perpetual waiting of refugees to return home or to moments of intense anticipation such as falling in love or the birth of a baby, there are many ways in which we wait. This compelling collection of essays suggests that this experience is among the essential conditions that make us human and connect us to others.
256 pages, Paperback
Published July 15, 2009
About the author
Ghassan Hage
23 books43 followersGhassan J. Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 1, 2018
I really enjoyed this book so much. This is an edited collection (a book written by a group of academics on a single topic) and the editor here wrote White Nation, a stunningly good book, and has a new one out I want to get hold of, but haven’t had a chance to read about racism (particularly anti-Muslim racism) and comparing this to environmental destruction that is exactly the sort of smashing together of idea I love.
Waiting doesn’t exactly sound like the ideal theme for a book. Waiting sounds like the sort of thing that is little more than an annoying feature of living in society. But waiting is presented here as virtually the key aspect of being human. If ‘hope’ is a key human emotion, then hope is something that depends on a future, and the future is something we need to wait for. There are lots of good things that come from waiting – but they are generally not called ‘waiting’ but ‘anticipating’ or ‘expecting’. There are chapters where religious waiting is discussed – the example is from Islam, but it could just as easily be from Christianity and the long wait for the second coming, or the waiting for national identity and nationhood.
One of my favourite chapters was on waiting to be married in Macedonia and the trouble economic shifts have caused to the marriage market for young men and therefore also the process of becoming a man (and in becoming a grandmother, more to the point).
The last chapter on waiting on death row was also stunningly interesting – the barbarity of the death sentence always surprises me, and I found this chapter quite moving.
One of the things I kept thinking about while reading this was the idea of queuing – which isn’t really mentioned, but what struck me was that some nations are almost defined by their relationship to queuing. I’m thinking of both England and the Soviet Union mostly. But they aren’t really defined by it in nearly the same ways. In relation to England, queuing is seen as a national trait basically as a display of good manners. It is an expression of orderliness and courteousness. This certainly isn’t how queuing was ever thought of in relation to the Soviet Union. Queuing there was always presented as proof of lack, of crushing scarcity.
A friend of mine I’ve known virtually forever is from the Ukraine and he once told me of a member of his family in the Soviet Union needing to queue for days and days. I assume it must have been for something they were trying to get from the black market, but the point was that they didn’t actually queue for all of that time, rather, they needed to mark their place in the queue at very specific times, or they would have to go back to the end of the queue. So, it might mean travelling across town at 2am – giving your details to someone in an apartment and then going home again.
While we all hate waiting, it isn’t at all clear that life is or would be better without it. Of course, ‘waiting’ is too broad a concept to say anything specific about, but a life without waiting is basically death – and I’m more than happy to wait a while longer for that.
Waiting doesn’t exactly sound like the ideal theme for a book. Waiting sounds like the sort of thing that is little more than an annoying feature of living in society. But waiting is presented here as virtually the key aspect of being human. If ‘hope’ is a key human emotion, then hope is something that depends on a future, and the future is something we need to wait for. There are lots of good things that come from waiting – but they are generally not called ‘waiting’ but ‘anticipating’ or ‘expecting’. There are chapters where religious waiting is discussed – the example is from Islam, but it could just as easily be from Christianity and the long wait for the second coming, or the waiting for national identity and nationhood.
One of my favourite chapters was on waiting to be married in Macedonia and the trouble economic shifts have caused to the marriage market for young men and therefore also the process of becoming a man (and in becoming a grandmother, more to the point).
The last chapter on waiting on death row was also stunningly interesting – the barbarity of the death sentence always surprises me, and I found this chapter quite moving.
One of the things I kept thinking about while reading this was the idea of queuing – which isn’t really mentioned, but what struck me was that some nations are almost defined by their relationship to queuing. I’m thinking of both England and the Soviet Union mostly. But they aren’t really defined by it in nearly the same ways. In relation to England, queuing is seen as a national trait basically as a display of good manners. It is an expression of orderliness and courteousness. This certainly isn’t how queuing was ever thought of in relation to the Soviet Union. Queuing there was always presented as proof of lack, of crushing scarcity.
A friend of mine I’ve known virtually forever is from the Ukraine and he once told me of a member of his family in the Soviet Union needing to queue for days and days. I assume it must have been for something they were trying to get from the black market, but the point was that they didn’t actually queue for all of that time, rather, they needed to mark their place in the queue at very specific times, or they would have to go back to the end of the queue. So, it might mean travelling across town at 2am – giving your details to someone in an apartment and then going home again.
While we all hate waiting, it isn’t at all clear that life is or would be better without it. Of course, ‘waiting’ is too broad a concept to say anything specific about, but a life without waiting is basically death – and I’m more than happy to wait a while longer for that.
Displaying 1 of 1 review