In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.

Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert

Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne and author of The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, and other books.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: States of Decay / Ghassan Hage  1
1. Forever "Falling Apart": Semiotics and Rhetorics of Decay / Violeta Schubert  17
2. Trash and Treasure: Pathologies of Permanence on the Margins of Our Plastic Age / Debra McDougall  28
3. Infrastructure as Decay and the Decay of Infrastructure / Akhil Gupta  37
4. The Waterfall at the End of the World: Earthquakes, Entropy, and Explanation / Monica Minnegal, Michael Main, and Peter D. Dwyer  47
5. "Vile Corpse": Urban Decay as Human Beauty and Social Pollution / Michael Herzfeld  58
6. Decay or Fresh Contact? The Morality of Mixture after War's End / Bart Klem  73
7. Seeds of Decay / Fabio Mattioli  86
8. Discourses of Decay in Settler Colonial Australia / Elise Klein  99
9. Decay as Decline in Social Viability among Ex-Militiamen in Lebanon / Ghassan Hage  110
10. Relational Decay: White Helpers in Australia's Indigenous Communities / Cameo Dalley  128
11. Decay, Rot, Mold, and Resistance in the US Prison System / Tamara Kohn  140
References  153
Contributors  171
Index  175