A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine discusses prospects and methods for a comprehensive, evidence-based history of Palestine with a critical use of recent historical, archaeological and anthropological methods. This history is not an exclusive history but one that is ethnically and culturally inclusive, a history of and for all peoples who have lived in Palestine.
After an introductory essay offering a strategy for creating coherence and continuity from the earliest beginnings to the present, the volume presents twenty articles from twenty-two contributors, fifteen of whom are of Middle Eastern origin or relation.
Split thematically into four parts, the volume discusses ideology, national identity and chronology in various historiographies of Palestine, and the legacy of memory and oral history; the transient character of ethnicity in Palestine and questions regarding the ethical responsibilities of archaeologists and historians to protect the multi-ethnic cultural heritage of Palestine; landscape and memory, and the values of community archaeology and bio-archaeology; and an exploration of the “ideology of the land” and its influence on Palestine’s history and heritage.
The first in a series of books under the auspices of the Palestine History and Heritage Project (PaHH), the volume offers a challenging new departure for writing the history of Palestine and Israel throughout the ages. A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine explores the diverse history of the region against the backdrop of twentieth-century scholarly construction of the history of Palestine as a history of a Jewish homeland with roots in an ancient, biblical Israel and examines the implications of this ancient and recent history for archaeology and cultural heritage. The book offers a fascinating new perspective for students and academics in the fields of anthropological, political, cultural and biblical history.
Author(s): Ingrid Hjelm, Hamdan Taha, Ilan Pappe, Thomas L. Thompson
Series: openhagen International Seminar: Palestine History and Heritage Project Subseries
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 380
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: creating coherence and continuity: suggestions and illustrations of methods and themes
Part 1 Historiography
1.1. Emic and etic historiography and tradition within various disciplines
1 Palestinian historical narrative
2 Palestinian identity: the question of historiography
3 History of Palestine versus history of Israel? The minimalist- maximalist debate
4 De-theologising medieval Palestine: corpus, tradition and double critique
5 History, curriculum and textbooks: reframing Palestine in the post-Oslo period
1.2. The roles of memory and oral history in history writing
6 Oral history’s credibility, role and functionality: from the Arab Islamic tradition to modern historiography
7 The cultural and linguistic background of the naming of objects and agricultural installations in Palestine
8 The production of alternative knowledge: political participation of Palestinian women since the 1930s – a case study
Part 2 Ethnicity, geography and politics
9 Cultural heritage of Palestine: ethnicity and ethics
10 Narratives, nucleotides, nationhood: the conundrum of demographic continuity and discontinuity, and the quest for historic legitimacy
11 Patronage and the political anthropology of ancient Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages
12 “To be an Israelite and a Judean as I want you to be”: material culture and ethnicity during the Iron Age
Part 3 Landscape, archaeology and memory in the interface between history and tradition
13 Landscape and memory: theoretical perspectives and the case of Lubya as lieu de memoire
14 Community archaeology: protection, preservation and promotion of archaeological heritage sites in Palestine
15 Al-Nuweima mosque: an archaeological perspective on modern history
16 Archaeology as anthropology (bio-archaeology)
Part 4 Ideologies of the land
17 Mapping Palestine: biblical and rabbinical perspectives
18 Land, people and empire: the Bible through Palestinian Christian eyes
19 The invention of the homeland
20 The history of Israel… but what is this Israel?: drawing the conclusions from recent research into the history of ancient Palestine
Index
