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- Convenors:
-
Emilie Le Febvre
(Interactive Ethnography and Arts Institute)
Aref Rabia (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Senate Room
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 26 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the histories, practices, and roles of museums for making and teaching desert heritage in the Middle East and North Africa throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Long Abstract:
Museums play a central role in making and teaching Middle Eastern and North African heritages. For residents today, these ‘cultural centres’ are the most publicly accessible places of anthropological learning outside of universities, and authorities have invested millions in their creation and the nationalisms they support. Through the collection and display of folk art, objects, archives, and photographs, many museums authenticate regional ethnicities by engaging desert heritages - a past way of life based on romanticised notions of tribalism and nomadism. In places like Jordan, exhibitions of Bedouin culture service ideas of collective national identity. In other places, like Israel, desert heritage reinforces dichotomies of Jewish modernism and Arab primitivism. In both occasions, these heritages are rarely about the people themselves or their pasts. Rather, they are ethnological productions carefully assembled from East-West imaginaries - a confluence of local, state, and colonial representations cultivated over the centuries by anthropologists, governments, and local leaders in the region.
While the entanglements of anthropology, curation, and representation are well-explored, the vernacular work of these practices for teaching cultural knowledge in the Middle East and North Africa remain largely unexamined. Redressing this imbalance, this panel invites papers that consider the histories, practices, and politics of making and teaching desert heritage in museums. Potential topics include the: ethics of display; uneven power, educational access, and narratives; enduring taxonomies; conflict and cultural capital; museums as public places; politics of heritages; influence of anthropologists; impact of digitization and online networks; and reappropriation of material culture and archives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 26 June, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The Bedouin identity in the Negev is directly or indirectly affected by the political and national dispute about the land. Much of what has been written about the Bedouins of the Negev has focused on the significant impact of the state of Israel and its attempts to settle them.
Paper long abstract:
The Bedouin identity in the Negev is directly or indirectly affected by the political and national dispute about the land. Much of what has been written about the Bedouins of the Negev has focused on the significant impact of the state of Israel and its attempts to settle them. Many social scientists however have rarely addressed the ethnic identity of these Bedouin in Israeli.
The Bedouin themselves have been unable to express their connection to the land in a way that is understandable to sedentary Westernized people. They are still prohibited from using their traditional lands and they believe that in this respect they are being targeted and discriminated against because of their ethnicity. The processes of dispossession and erasure of land and identity materialize in Indigenous people’s lives on a daily basis. Connections to land, place, community, and kinship are enduring.
The formation of a multi-faith coalition of Muslims, Jews, and Christians to protect the sanctity of the mosque and cemeteries in the Negev, has been formed around the principles of peaceful coexistence and interfaith. The consequences of this coalition, cooperated together in order to protect the sanctuaries and places of worship in Israel
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how museum practices of curation inform historical revisionisms in the Palestinian-Israeli context and further enable educational inequalities between Jewish and Bedouin residents living in the Naqab Desert.
Paper long abstract:
Through permanent and changing displays of historical Naqab Bedouin photographs and artefacts, the Joe Alon Museum of Bedouin Culture is one of the main repositories of Bedouin material culture in southern Israel today. The institutional history of the venue is controversial with their exhibitions of Bedouin heritage aiming to provide ‘a record’ of the ‘almost-extinct way of life’ among ‘the Bedouin tribes scattered throughout the Negev and Sinai deserts’. By way of examining the situation, this paper first questions: How is Bedouin heritage presented in Israeli museums? Who controls these presentations and what do they say about their creators? Where do contemporary Bedouin members fit into these projects? By way of response, I argue that practices of revisionist curation are commonplace in Israel which not only minimise the Bedouins’ continuing history in the Naqab but also frame Bedouin heritage as unchanging thus affirming state constructions of Palestinians.
While serving Orientalisms through their exhibitions, access to Naqab museums is also primarily reserved to tourists and Jewish residents – a situation whereby the Naqab Bedouins' connections to their own material culture is institutionally controlled. Therewith, this paper also questions the results of revisionist curations, that is: How do museums contribute to the educational discrimination of host communities, when people like the Naqab Bedouin have restricted access to these ‘places of learning’ and the artefacts housed within them. I argue that by exploring these issues, we can further understand how national conflicts over historical and cultural capital influence presentations of Bedouin heritage today.
Paper short abstract:
This paper retraces the constitution of an Algerian-Jewish collection of ‘objects of affection’, exploring the agency of these exile-materialities in producing Magrehebian Jewish heritages; it aims to rethink: How does the curatorship of these objects' biographies evolve into new forms of knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Seeking to fill the gaps in its collections with Jewish-Argelian heritage, in 2011, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (MahJ), Paris, disseminated a calling for the participation of Jewish families exiled in France to donate ‘sensitive testimonies’ (Héricher 2012) of their life trajectories. This curatorship was envisioned to counteract the process of institutional forgetfulness that Judeo-Algerian heritage faced after the mass departure of the Jewish population from Algeria in 1962 (Stora 2006). The constitution of this fund of administrative and family archives and heirlooms, curated in the exhibition “Juifs d’Algérie” (2012), came to complement MahJ’s permanent collection exhibited in the gallery entitled “The Jews in the Levant and the Maghreb.”
Drawing on my ongoing research on the trajectories of Algerian Jewish ‘exile materialities’ reassembled in the MahJ’s collections in articulation with ethnobiographies of their donors, this paper proposes a reflection on the knowledge recuperation and actualisation entailed in the process of musealisation of Algerian-Jewish heritage. In particular, it seeks to establish correspondences between the representations of a lost vernacular world exhibited in MahJ’s galleries and the subjective and affective dimensions interwoven in the materiality of these dons. How can museums act as proxies to re-animate Judeo-Arab ‘desert heritages’ for second-generation descendants of Algerian exiled Jews? In what ways does the constitution of a collection of ‘displaced things’ (Dudley 2021) enable the mapping and transmission of Arab-Berber-Jewish traditional knowledge?
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers an evaluative analysis of governmental and non-governmental efforts to curate and preserve desert cultures in Morocco and Mauritania. Its ultimate goal is to assess the role the curation of local desert cultures has played in making and teaching heritage in both countries.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the question of curating desert cultures both in Morocco and Mauritania through museums and cultural centers. Over the past two decades, and as desert places cover a good deal of Moroccan and Mauritanian geographies, both governmental and civil society actors in Morocco and Mauritania have adopted various cultural policies to preserve desert heritage. Mention can be made of the 2015 Royal Model of Southern Provinces Development in Morocco and the Mauritanian Law NO 024-2019 for the preservation and promotion of Hassani cultural heritage. Coupled with these two governmental projects, a number of civil society initiatives have been launched in the region to contribute to the revival and survival of the cultural collective memory of the desert local communities. Examples of these projects and initiatives involve the creation of local cultural museums and cultural centers where Arabo-Afro-Amazigh desert cultures have been showcased, through curated exhibitions and displays of objects like traditional clothing, tools, and artifacts that reflect the daily lives of desert communities in these regions. Hence, this paper offers an evaluative analysis of these efforts to assess the role the curation of local desert cultures has played in making and teaching heritage in Morocco and Mauritania.
Keywords: Hassani Desert culture, Morocco, Mauritania, Heritage, Museums