A New industry in an Ancient Land (NIAL) considers the vocabularies of tourism to think about the ways in which Palestine was both produced and consumed by both Arabs, Jews and Europeans. Archaeology, archaeologists and photography are central: they informed the tourism industry through the production of travel guides and tour manuals, photo books and postcards, and the framing of holy sites and biblical cartographies.
NIAL also considers the relationship between tourism and cultural diplomacy, and thus archaeology, which was central to such endeavours given the formation of the joint British, French and American Archaeological Advisory Board and the ways in which such cultural diplomacy shaped the presentation of archaeological materials. The Palestine Archaeological Museum, now the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, stands testament to such processes.
NIAL will address how local cultural production may have formed as a response to Western scholarly interests in the region. Archaeology became increasingly entwined with Western diplomatic aspirations in the Levant, but also as part of the circuits of popular tourism. In this respect, the biblical overtones of ‘Holy Land’ tourism is both a product of modernity (especially the technological infrastructures that enabled it), but also a projection into an ancient past that undermines such modernity.
Part 1: Archaeology and Tourism
Panel with Jasmin Daam (U. Kassel), Felicity Cobbing (Palestine Exploration Fund), Sary Zananiri (Leiden University)
Sarah Irving and Sary Zananiri: ‘Iliffe’
John Henry Iliffe was the first Keeper of the Palestine Archaeological Museum. His partial diary leaves us an account of his movements and the negotiation of the 1948 war. Alongside this sits a significant collection of photographs of antiquities, conservation processes and archaeological digs as well as postcards and other collateral produced by the museum that he had preserved. This visual material tells the story of how an institution and individual navigated archaeological and heritage projects from an academic perspective, while also positioning its activities and collection for popular public consumption.
Part 2: Dutch and the Middle East
Photographic exhibition (RMO) Frank Scholten: Archaeology and Tourism in the ‘Holy Land’ (reprised viewing of RMO exhibition, April-October 2020)
Willy Jansen (Radboud University), Jan de Hond (Rijksmuseum) & Karène Sanchez Summerer, ‘Holland in the Holy Land - The Holy Land in Holland: The Dutch initiative of the Holy Land Foundation 1903-1933’
Willy Jansen (Radboud University), ‘Constructing an imagined Holy Land in the Netherlands. How Piet Gerrits showed the cultures of the East to the Dutch’
In the early twentieth century the plan was taken up to recreate part of the Holy Land in the Netherlands, to enable the less fortunate Dutch Catholics to experience the pilgrimage to Palestine by visiting the Biblical Museum of the Holy Land Foundation in Nijmegen. In 1915 this museum opened its doors to the public. The multiple representations of the Holy Land that could be admired by the local tourists were designed by Piet Gerrits, an all-round artist and craftsman, who had gained his knowledge of Palestine when working for the Latin missions in the Middle East from 1906 to 1911. In this museum he reproduced, materialized, transmitted and transformed his personal experiences in Trans-Jordan and Palestine.
Willy Jansen will analyse Gerrits’s visualizations of the East in paintings, statues and architecture. she will illustrate three ways in which his experience-based knowledge informed his work: embodied knowledge, material heritage and religious coexistence. Next, she will show that these visualisations were not easily assimilated or copied in Europe, as his representations based on intimate knowledge of everyday life in the Levant clashed with dominant Catholic iconographic norms and the assumptions, dominant representations, and religious aims of other authorities involved. But while his visual narrative was hardly effective in changing Dutch perceptions of the Middle East, his artwork was re-appropriated by Jordanians to restore their damaged local cultural heritage and Christian identity.
A New Industry
Book presentation: The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub (Or How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerika), Jacob Norris, Univ. Sussex; discussant: Cyrus Schayegh
