Haim Hazan 
Against Hybridity 
Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

One of the major characteristics of our contemporary culture is
a positive, almost banal, view of the transgression and disruption
of cultural boundaries. Strangers, migrants and nomads are
celebrated in our postmodern world of hybrids and cyborgs. But we
pay a price for this celebration of hybridity: the non-hybrid
figures in our societies are ignored, rejected, silenced or
exterminated. This book tells the story of these non-hybrid figures
D the anti-heroes of our pop culture.

The main example of non-hybrids in an otherwise hybridized world
is that of deep old age. Hazan shows how we fervently distance
ourselves from old age by grading and sequencing it into stages
such as ‘the third age’, ‘the fourth age’
and so on. Aging bodies are manipulated through anti-aging
techniques until it is no longer possible to do it anymore, at
which point they become un-transformable and non-marketable objects
and hence commercially and socially invisible or masked. Other
examples are used to elucidate the same cultural logic of the
non-hybrid: pain, the Holocaust, autism, fundamentalism and
corporeal death. On the face of it, these examples may seem to have
nothing in common, but they all exemplify the same cultural logic
of the non-hybrid and provoke similar reactions of criticism,
terror, abhorrence and moral indignation.

This highly original and iconoclastic book offers a fresh
critique of contemporary Western culture by focusing on that which
is perceived as its other D the non-hybrid in our midst, often
rejected, ignored or silenced and deemed to be in need of globally
manageable correction.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction: Zones and Discourses of Cultural Sturdiness 1

1 Terms of Hybridity: (Non-)Hybridization and (Anti-)Globalization 10

2 Becoming a Non-hybrid: The Very Old as Deadly Others 46

3 Impasses of Hybridity: From Liquidity to Quiddity 91

Conclusion: Bringing the Extra-Cultural Back In 131

References 144

Index 165

About the author

Haim Hazan is professor sociology and social anthropology at Tel-Aviv University, and Co-Director of the Minerva Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the End of Life.