Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

Introduction

1. Islamophobia and the becoming-wolf of the Muslim other

2. Islamophobia and the dynamics of ecological and colonial over-exploitaion

3. The elementary structures of generalized domestication

Conclusion: Negotiating the wolf

"In his usual grippingly lucid prose, Ghassan Hage gives us here an insightful critique of the intrinsic connection between racism and speciesism in their most 'ungovernable' contemporary expressions, namely, Islamophobia and the planetary ecological catastrophe. He thereby exposes the politico-metaphysical foundations of Western colonialism alongside with the colonialist - in the broadest and deepest sense - foundations of Western metaphysics, particularly in its capitalist expression with its relentless need of so-called primitive accumulation. By showing, with the help of anthropological classics such as Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl, that our own anthropotechnics of 'generalized domestication' (one of the most innovative concepts of this book) is by no means the only human way of ecologizing - of making ourselves at home in the world - Hage offers us a nuanced, subtle analysis of the metonymic and metaphorical wolves that haunt the obsessive 'mono-realist' project of capitalism, whose glaring failure is now forcing us to pay increased attention to the counter-hegemonic modes of existence (re)emerging through the widening cracks in the ecocidal and racist-colonial nomos of Modernity."
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The National Museum of Brazil

Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne