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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Muzzling Scholars of Arabic Ancestry
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition by Yael Zerubavel discusses the construction of memory and the invention of traditions in Mandatory Palestine and in the State of Israel. The book describes some unusual Israeli or Zionist practices associated with Masada and Bar Kochba archeological excavations.
Rather like Nadia Abu el Haj in Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israel, Zerubavel describes the use of archeology and other scholarship to construct Zionist national identity.
Other scholars have investigated the political use of archeology in various contexts. Not only Max Weinreich and Eric Hobsbawm provide similar analysis in their published works, but Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories by Hyung Il Pai addresses precisely that same issues with regard to the development of Korean national consciousness.
Even though Abu el Haj focuses more narrowly on professional archeologists whereas Zerubavel looks at Israeli society as a whole, both authors make similar points in their books, and Zerubavel provides support for some of the claims for which Nadia Abu el Haj has been most criticized.
Zerubavel received the 1996 Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research for her work while Nadia Abu el Haj is the target of an international campaign to drive her out of Columbia/Barnard. The difference in the responses evoked by the two authors merits a scholarly study in itself.
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Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition by Yael Zerubavel discusses the construction of memory and the invention of traditions in Mandatory Palestine and in the State of Israel. The book describes some unusual Israeli or Zionist practices associated with Masada and Bar Kochba archeological excavations.
Rather like Nadia Abu el Haj in Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israel, Zerubavel describes the use of archeology and other scholarship to construct Zionist national identity.
Other scholars have investigated the political use of archeology in various contexts. Not only Max Weinreich and Eric Hobsbawm provide similar analysis in their published works, but Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories by Hyung Il Pai addresses precisely that same issues with regard to the development of Korean national consciousness.
Even though Abu el Haj focuses more narrowly on professional archeologists whereas Zerubavel looks at Israeli society as a whole, both authors make similar points in their books, and Zerubavel provides support for some of the claims for which Nadia Abu el Haj has been most criticized.
Zerubavel received the 1996 Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research for her work while Nadia Abu el Haj is the target of an international campaign to drive her out of Columbia/Barnard. The difference in the responses evoked by the two authors merits a scholarly study in itself.
2 comments:
Good post.
I hope you can follow it up with a closer comparison of the two scholars' methodology. One need not buy into a post-modern, post-colonial scholarly discourse in order to recognize how archaeology is used in the service of nationalism and collective myth-creating. One wonders whether those scholars who do (e.g., Ilan Pappe, El-Haj) don't damage their case, since their points can be made more effectively without resorting to the jargon of culture studies. After all, more traditional scholars (e.g. Yael Zerubavel, Norman Finkelstein) manage to avoid it.
But that is off the top of my head.
Jerry Haber
The Magnes Zionist blog
Right now I am working on a book: The Israel Lobby, what it really is and how it hurts America.
I discuss the controversy of Nadia Abu el Haj's application for tenure and use Yael Zerubavel as a counterpoint. I am expecting to complete the first draft around the middle of September.
The books of the two sociologists do not really address the same issue. Zerubavel is trying to understand Israeli society, in which Israeli archeology plays a constitutive role while Abu el Haj is trying to understand the sociological construction of the Israeli discipline of archeology.
You might wish to take a look at the following web articles:
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?p=227
http://archaeology.stanford.edu/journal/newdraft/steen/paper.html
Mark Lehner's work in Egyptian archeology is worth comparing with Israeli archeology.
The controversy over Nadia Abu el Haj arises because Zionists view her work as a threat to the ideology of the connection between the "Jewish people" and its "historic homeland."
She is not addressing claims about such a connection at all even if in the minds of her critics she probably serves as a surrogate for Israel Finkelstein.
Someone that really wanted to undermine the connection of the "Jewish people" and "its historic homeland" or the very concept of a "Jewish people" would do archeology work in Eastern Europe and Southern Russia to demonstrate the autochthonous origins of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim.
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