The idea of co-existing realities, and multi or pluri-realism has become a key theme in the critical anthropological current thought known as ‘the ontological turn’. This anthropology offers a critical comparative standpoint to western modernity’s obsession with mono-existence, from monogamy to monotheism to mono-ethno-nationalism. The western idea of one reality and many perspectives on it is relativised by examining Amazonian multi-perspectivist ontology which sees the multiplicity of perspectives as a multiplicity of realities, as an entanglement of a multiplicity of realities or ecologies.

This has proven helpful to me in thinking the nature of diasporic existence that I have theorised as taking a lenticular form. A lenticular is an image that appears differently depending on how you look at it. Think of the granulated postcards that change images depending on the angle from which they are seen: smiling clown/frowning clown, Jesus/Mary. In contrast to the single image/reality captured in the common photograph the lenticular surface contains a multiplicity of images/realities that reveal themselves perspectively and are continuously flickering and speaking to each other. I will use this to reflect on what it means to think of diasporic dwelling as a lenticular process involving oscillation between a multiplicity of realities.

We are delighted to be hosting Ghassan Hage for this Existential Territories: The Lenticular Condition talk. This is the third in our series of Existential Territories event at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art.

SCHEDULE

Welcome by Dr Godofredo Pereira
Architect and researcher Dr Godofredo Pereira is a Senior Tutor and Course Leader on MA Environmental Architecture and ADS7 Ecologies of Existence in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.

Ghassan Hage
Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Ghassan has published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism and migration. Ghassan is the author of, amongst others, White Nation (1998), Against Para­noid Nation­al­ism (2003), Alter-Politics: Critical anthropology and the Radical Imagination (2015), and Is Racism and Environmental Threat? (2018).

Questions & Answers