‘Lebanese Muslim’: A Bourdieuian ‘Capital’ Offense in an Australian Coastal Town

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on encounters between differently habituated bodies at ‘Bayside’, a popular Anglo-majority Australian coastal town. Based on in-depth interviews with locals, I show how banal speech acts, interpretations of encounters, corporeal attitudes and practices of exclusion construct the embodied behaviour and haptic space of Lebanese Muslims visitors as threatening and inferior, producing a racialised habitus of Lebanese Muslims. I enrol Ghassan Hage’s theoretical framework on habitus and the field of Whiteness in multicultural Australia to argue that the fields of gender, class, ethnicity, religion and race – evoked in various settings such as the beach, cafes, parks – ‘fold’ [Noble, G, 2013. ‘It is home but it is not home’: habitus, field and the migrant. Journal of sociology, 49 (2–3), 341–356] into the field of Whiteness such that Lebanese Muslims are situated in a hierarchy of valuation that privileges the different forms of capital possessed by Bayside residents. The result, among the participants, is a perception of Lebanese Muslim body techniques and modes of using public space as inferior, threatening and out of place.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• racism
• Muslim
• Islam
• habitus
• embodiment’
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to my supervisors, Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayuthum for their comments and suggestions. All errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Randa Abdel-Fattah is a final year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University. Her thesis, entitled ‘Islamophobia and everyday multiculturalism from the point of view of the perpetrators’, explores the visceral, atavistic nature of people’s fears, emotions and responses to the Muslim ‘Other’ in various everyday contexts and micro-publics. Randa is interested in an ethnographically oriented approach that draws on the sociology of everyday life to understand Islamophobia via geographies of encounter. Randa practiced as a lawyer until 2012 and is also an award-winning author of 10 novels.

Notes

1. Actual name of town has been changed.

2. According to the 2011 Australian Census, the common ancestry in Bayside is English (29.6 per cent), Australian (27.5 per cent), Scottish (6.4 per cent) and Irish (9.5 per cent). Seventy-four per cent of the population is Australian born.

3. This forms part of a larger current research project examining Islamophobia from the point of view of the ‘actors’. The research is funded by a Macquarie Research Excellence Scholarship at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. It was approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee in 2014.

4. A colloquial reference to the loud and showy Australian King Parrot.