On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism and the Ethnic Field

This book examines diverse aspects of the social experiences and cultural practices of Lebanese migrants and their descendants in Australia. Except for a relatively small number of studies (see Batrouney and Batrouney, 1985; Humphrey, 1998; Hage, 2002), writing on Lebanese migrants in Australia has generally placed relatively little emphasis on these immigrants' cultural practice and its articulation with dominant social and power relations. This book, drawing on joint research which spanned over a decade and included surveys, open-ended interviews and participant observation, contributes to the understanding of their dynamic experience of settlement and habitation in Australia by examining their cultural practice while critiquing the essentialist and celebratory notion of culture implied by some versions of Australian multiculturalism. But we also want to reshape the theoretical debates by drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to develop an argument about ethnicity as a form of symbolic capital in the wider field of social belonging.