Tamar Katriel

Sites of memory: Discourses of the past in Israeli pioneering settlement museums

Heritage museums as sites of cultural production are explored in terms of the distinction drawn by historians between “memory” and “history,” which denotes fundamentally opposed orientations towards the past. The discursive practices employed by museum guides in orally mediating the material displays in Israeli settlement museums are examined in relation to this distinction, suggesting the need to develop a more nuanced view of the relationship between “history” and “memory” as dialectically defined orientations to the past, which combine ritual enactment and critical reflection in contexts of collective remembering. Strategies identified in museum interpretation include the use of a rhetoric of factuality, the narrative appropriation of objects, and the establishment of an indexical relationship between the museums “master‐narrative” and its localized “object stories.” Some implications are discussed for exploring culturally focal “sites of memory” as part of a critically oriented, auto‐ethnography.

Scrapbooks as cultural texts: An American art of memory

The largely invisible but pervasive American cultural practice of scrapbook keeping is examined in this essay. Through a synthesis of ethnographic and rhetorical methods, the cultural genre of scrapbook is defined and explored. Interview data from 55 informants are explored to disclose the meaning of scrapbooks as an artifact of life narration for many youthful middle‐class Americans. Phases of selection, organizing, and sharing indicate that the scrapbook is a text that needs to be captioned and performed for both the self and ‘other’ as audiences. In an era often characterized by loss of belonging and cultural fragmentation, this is an American art of memory.

Tower and Stockade: Dialogic Narration in Israeli Settlement Ethos.

This study explores the narrative construction of Israeli symbolism via a consideration of the tellings and re‐tellings of the heroic saga of Israels pre‐state era. This operation, natively known as “Tower and Stockade,” spanned the years 1936–39 and has since become mythologized as part of Israels modern cultural heritage. Contemporary contexts of narration or narrative allusion involve such public texts as pedagogical and commemorative materials on the one hand, and political debates concerning the present day West Bank settlement movement on the other. The study highlights the essentially dialogical process in which such high profile, multivocal national narratives participate and considers the rhetorical role they play in the larger cultural conversation.

Rhetoric in flames: Fire inscriptions in Israeli youth movement ceremonials

Fire inscriptions have become an institutionalized form of ephemeral art in Israeli youth movement ceremonials. The symbolic meanings and rhetorical effects associated with the use of fire as a medium in this context are rooted in secular, European youth movement culture on the one hand, and in traditional Judaism on the other. The fire inscriptions symbolically mediate these two cultural strands in contemporary Israel, and serve as attention‐commanding indexical signs enacting cultural form through the social and visual experience they provide.

Between Moral Activism and Archival Memory: the Testimonial Project of ‘Breaking the Silence’

Viewing public memory as a cultural field of struggle over meanings and values, we address the question of how oppositional voices can insert themselves into an institutionally controlled conversation about a nation’s past and thereby reshape its memory-scapes. In particular, we are interested in two themes: (1) the interplay of ‘archival memory’ as a depository of knowledge about the past and its enactment as lived or usable memory in the immediate or distant future; (2) the role played by personal memories in renegotiating public memory.

Pioneering women revisited: Representations of gender in some Israeli settlement museums

Abstract This study examines the representation of women in museums that are devoted to the preservation and celebration of the Zionist nation-building ethos of the 1920s and 1930s (i.e., Israels pre-state era). These representations are encoded in the rhetoric of the museum guides. In the official discourse and the interpretive stances to which they give voice, the museums that provided ethnographic sites for this inquiry uphold the prevalent myth of gender equality in pioneering groups as if relates to womens participation in the male-dominated pubic sphere of “productivity” in agricultural and road construction work. At the same time, they reproduce representations of women as ambivalent participants in the pioneering enterprise. Their positioning within the redefined domestic sphere of communal living, women all too often remain marginalized participants; at times they are even “storified” as essentially objects of the male gaze.

Accounts and rebuttals in an Israeli discourse of dissent

ABSTRACT This study explores the notion of dissent, seen as a form of ‘limited nonconformity’, via a study of some of the discourses produced by the Israeli veterans’ organization Breaking the Silence (BTS), which elicits and circulates soldiers’ testimonies about their experiences of military service in the occupied Palestinian territories. BTS has been criticized widely for its undisguised oppositional stance against the Israeli occupation, regime responding by directing some of its efforts to airing videotaped soldier-witnesses’ personal accounts and formulating organizational rebuttals with an eye to gaining public legitimization for its testimonial project. In these accounts and rebuttals, BTS activists explain their motivations for their oppositional move and respond to accusations that have been leveled against them by politicians and mainstream media. This study addresses BTS members’ personal accounts as well as their organizationally anchored rebuttals. Both are considered locally situated discursive practices of self-legitimation, whose analysis brings out a tension inherent in the notion of dissent between nonconformity and its limits. In so doing, it addresses ways in which these soldier-witnesses discuss their sense of self, their moral dilemmas, their social commitments, and the speech ideology that informs their testimonial activities.

The Metapragmatics of Direct Utterances

This chapter revisits the analysis of the dimension of “directness” in language use as theorized within a socio-pragmatic perspective and as empirically explored within the ethnography of speaking. It draws on Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s seminal study of politeness strategies, which integrates Paul Grice’s approach to the logic of conversation and Goffman’s study of “facework” in social interaction, and on ethnographies of indirectness (Arabic musayra) and directness (Israeli dugri speech) as culturally inflected ways of speaking whose study brings out the social regulation and cultural codification of indirect and direct talk. Further exploring the cultural warrants that legitimate the use of directness in the case of asymmetrical power relations, the analysis incorporates Foucault’s discussion of the ancient Greek metapragmatic notion of parrhesia (fearless speech). In so doing, it highlights the performative, defiant role of direct utterances in the rhetoric of sociopolitical protest.

Memory to action

The recent emergence of the fields of memory studies, heritage studies, and museum studies as distinctive academic enterprises attests to the scholarly concern with societal projects that turn to the past as a cultural resource. In his classic book, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985), and in its updated version published in (2015), Lowenthal argues that the past is a potent force in human affairs as each generation reshapes its past legacy in line with its current needs. Eyal (2004) similarly refers to the contemporary cultural preoccupation with the past as a historically situated “will to memory.” In his comparative study of postcommunist memory discourses in Central-Eastern Europe, he identifies two functionally differentiated versions of this will—one relating to memory as a guarantor of a continuous collective identity, and the other to memory as a healer of trauma. Indeed, the rich and varied research on collective memory conducted in many parts of the world in the past several decades reinforces the claim about the ongoing relevance of the past, offering in-depth explorations of identity and traumarelated sites of memory that form part of the politics of remembrance in the public arena (e.g., Dekel, 2013; Dickinson, Blair, & Ott, 2010; Erll & Nunning, 2008; Nora, 1989; Violi, 2012; Young, 1994). Increasingly, too, contemporary memory projects form part of the transnational movement associated with a globalized tourism industry, further spatializing our sense of the past by turning it into platforms for intercultural contact and the dissemination of cultural knowledge. In recent years, a growing number of memory-oriented grassroots initiatives have sprung around the world that take the memory enterprise a step further, going beyond the politics of identity, the promise of healing, or the potential of cultural exchange. These latter memory projects draw on universally oriented human rights discourses in actively seeking to reshape local, national, and global memory-scapes. They give voice to marginalized, counterhegemonic, often suppressed social groups that have emerged as part of civil society initiatives in conflict and postconflict zones. These memory projects buttress their visions of what Margalit (1998) calls a more “decent society” by challenging official versions of the past, by providing platforms for stories of untold or downplayed pasts. They thus consciously and openly mobilize alternative narratives of the past toward struggles for social change in the present. Such grassroots interventions, which are located at the nexus of memory-work and activism, have recently attracted research attention under the heading of memory activism (Gutman, 2016; Katriel & Shavit, 2011), i.e., memory initiatives by ethnic or political

Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent

The collection and dissemination of testimonies that document routine acts of violence, harassment and intimidation against civilian populations under occupation are part of the agenda of anti-occupation groups in Israel and elsewhere. Indeed, as Givoni (2008) has argued in her study of the French organization “Physicians Without Borders,” witnessing has become an intrinsic technique and a shared code of contemporary humanitarian action. As a transnational yet locally embedded cultural configuration, witnessing has become a way of responding to states of emergency, crises and ongoing conditions of human suffering around the globe. It is conceptualized as involving three basic components, which are differently and delicately balanced in every given case: (1) presence in a socially distant scene of suffering, while siding with victimized “others”; (2) documentation and reporting grounded in an empirical epistemology associated with the seeking of evidence; (3) the use of fearless speech, that is, speech that involves risk-taking as it challenges hegemonic positions and power relations by voicing critique, condemnation, or demands for intervention (Foucault, 2001).