Saturday, October 27, 2007

A Controversy of Biblical Proportions

I have been following this battle since I first read of it a couple of months ago. In academic circles, it has been a BIG story. At stake: a tenured position for a female of Palestinian ancestry who teaches at Barnard University. The field: biblical archaeology. I’ll bet you thought that biblical archaeology was a yawner subject! Ha! From The Jewish Week News online (New York) October 25, 2007 Flinging Dirt In Archaeology Dispute Some charges against Barnard professor’s tenure inaccurate; scholars divided. by Larry Cohler-Esses Editor-At-Large The key organizer of a campaign to deny tenure to a Barnard College professor seen by some as virulently anti-Israel acknowledged this week that her petition against the professor may not have quoted the book accurately. Barnard alumna Paula Stern, who now lives in an Israeli settlement community on the West Bank, acknowledged Tuesday that her petition —signed now by more than 2,500 people — incorrectly quotes from Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book in charging she is grossly ignorant of Jerusalem geography. Stern also conceded attributing to Abu El-Haj a viewpoint that Abu El-Haj does not voice as her own in her book. The petition does so by taking a quote fragment from a section in which Abu El-Haj describes others as having the opposite viewpoint. In addition, despite Abu El-Haj’s frequent citation of Hebrew language sources and an acknowledgment on her book’s first page thanking her Hebrew tutor, Stern’s petition asserts, “Abu El Haj does not speak or read Hebrew ... We fail to understand how a scholar can pretend to study the attitudes of a people whose language she does not know.” The charge may stem from criticism from some scholarly quarters that Abu El-Haj’s book contains mistakes in Hebrew, indicating her skills in the language are inadequate for such complex scholarship. Other experts have defended her Hebrew skills. “It was written very quickly,” Stern said of her petition, whose signatories include many Barnard and Columbia University alumni. “But there is a clear pattern in her book of attempting to undermine the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land.” Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian American, has been condemned by many supporters of Israel who say her controversial book, Facts On The Ground, reflects a deep-seated hostility to the very notion of a Jewish state. But her politics, whatever they may be, are — in principle at least — irrelevant to the tenure process. More relevant to that process, many of these critics also charge that the book is intellectually dishonest — a fraudulent attempt to throw into question some of the basic historical assumptions about Jewish presence in the land of Israel through the centuries. Some scholars have argued that she uses evidence selectively, misunderstands key aspects of how archaeology works and/or misrepresents the conduct and motives of archeologists. Others, no less expert, have praised and defended Abu El-Haj’s book — based on her dissertation —which has won several prestigious awards. At times it sounds like the experts have read entirely different books. William Dever, a well-known retired professor of Near East archaeology at the University of Arizona, dismissed it as “a piece of shoddy work as historical research. She doesn’t quote a single Israeli archaeologist. She doesn’t show she’s read their work.” Eric Meyers, a biblical archaeology professor at Duke University and member of her dissertation committee, pointed out that, in fact, Abu El-Haj went deep into the archaeological archives to quote directly from dusty reports and field notes of Israeli archaeologists from the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Prof. Rafael Greenberg, senior lecturer in archaeology at Tel Aviv University, called the work an “eye-opener,” adding, “I recommend it.” His colleague, Aren Maeir, an archaeologist based at Bar Ilan, denounced it as “replete with inaccuracies [and] faulty research.” But the scholars are, by and large, at least arguing over things that are actually in the book, presumably, in context. In her petition, Stern says that Abu El-Haj “asserts that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a ‘pure political fabrication.’" Last August, bloggers Richard Silverstein and Jesse Walker publicly challenged the accuracy of this quote, among others, noting it was taken out of context. After a close reading of the 319-page book, this reporter found that the only place in which that phrase appears is in a section devoted to comparing the understandings Israeli Jewish and Palestinian archaeologists have of their respective origins on the land. Abu El-Haj notes that some Palestinian archaeologists argue Palestinians are heirs to the Cannanites who preceded the Israelites on the land. Israeli archaeologists, she notes, dismiss this as complete nonsense while for them the “modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as pure political fabrication.” Stern denied she had taken out of context Abu El-Haj’s quote about political fabrication. “She denies the ancient history of the Jewish kingdoms in many ways,” Stern said in an email about Abu El-Haj, “as when she says that Jerusalem in the times of Herod was not Jewish.” The statement in question, in Abu El-Haj’s own voice, reads, “For most of its history, including the Herodian period, Jerusalem was not a Jewish city, but rather one integrated into larger empires and inhabited, primarily, by ‘other’ communities.” On the other hand, contrary to many claims by both scholars and lay critics, Abu El-Haj elsewhere repeatedly writes about the First and Second Temple periods and Jewish presence during these periods as a matter of fact. Like many archaeologists, she raises many more questions about the historicity of Israelite presence during the late Bronze and early Iron ages, when biblical tradition holds that identifiably Israelite tribes came into the land. Stern's petition also lambastes Abu El-Haj for "demonstrations of her ignorance of history and archaeology." It cites her quoting of an unnamed Israeli archaeologist criticizing a dig "in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City" as "one of the worst" in terms of method and preservation. "Somewhere in there are the complexes of the Palaces of Solomon," the archaeologist frets. Stern notes that Solomon's palaces, if they exist, would be nowhere near the Jewish Quarter. But the archaeologist quoted was not referring to a dig there but to one on the south and southwestern slopes of the Temple Mount - near the City of David. It is a site that, in fact, later turned up artifacts from what appear to be part of the palace grounds, said Greenberg, the Tel Aviv University archaeologist. “I’ve spoken to many newspapers, no one has done what you’ve done,” said Stern, presumably displeased with questions asking her to square her charges against the book with its text. She says the overall “trend” of the book is to deny a Jewish connection to the land and that “no matter whether it’s accurate or not, my petition is not on trial here. If you don’t like my petition, go to my Web site and read the experts’ opinions.” The current status of Abu El-Haj’s tenure process is a well-kept secret. She is widely believed to have gotten tenure approval from Barnard but not yet from Columbia, the parent institution of the women’s college. The campaign to deny her tenure has received public support from figures such as Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, who stated, incorrectly, last month that Abu El-Haj “believes that archeology proves there were never any Hebrews in the Holy Land.” Last November, The New York Sun, one of the first newspapers to report on the controversy, stated wrongly that Abu El-Haj “suggests Jerusalem was destroyed not by the Romans, but by the Jews themselves due to rising class tensions among them.” Sun managing editor Ira Stoll did not respond to a request for comment on the report by press time.Campus Watch, a web site devoted to exposing what it views as leftist bias in the academy, and FrontPage, a site with similar aims, have posted numerous articles critical of Abu El-Haj. The Democracy Project, another conservative website, has denounced her as “an academic impostor who passes off a political agenda demonizing the State of Israel and its legitimate historic roots.” In her book, Abu El-Haj repeatedly uses terms such as “colonial nation-state,” “(colonial) national political project,” and “settler state,” when describing Israel. The book implicitly rejects widespread Jewish self-perception of the Zionist enterprise as one in which Jews have returned to a land to which they have always been inherently connected. That connection, Abu El-Haj argues, had to be created in multiple ways—from establishing settlements and making that the sine qua non of early Zionism, through renaming and Hebraizing thousands of Arab villages, towns and place names and—not least of all—through developing a national “myth” of indigenous origin—a narrative—in which the findings of archaeology, with its scientific authority to “fix facts,” played a key role. The book discusses these issues using the loaded jargon of academic post-structuralism, referring frequently to “national origin myth,” “making place,” “self-fashioning” and “privileging” certain concepts, methodologies or paradigms. It strongly rejects a positivist world view in which knowledge is something objectively out there that is simply discovered, through empirical investigation, rather than interpreted. “The part that’s most revealing is her critical view of the automatic assumptions made by Israelis when they present Jerusalem,” said Greenberg, the Tel Aviv University senior archaeologist. “Anyone looking at it from a non-Jewish, non-Israeli point of view sees things we don’t see; for example, our use of terms like ‘First Temple period,’ ‘Second Temple Period. Once you think about it, you see it’s a very loaded term. There were many people living in the land at the time—many different religions, ethnicities, identities who did not relate to the Temple at all. “The thing I don’t agree with, emphatically, is that there’s something unusual in the Israeli position,” Greenberg said. “Every archaeologist in the world has an agenda.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here's a review form an anthropologist, who understands words and concepts that cohler-esses does not.

Searching for "Facts" on the Ground
David Rosen
Professor of Anthropology, Fairleigh Dickinson University
The very title of the Nadia Abu El-Haj's Facts on the Ground invites controversy. The phrase "facts on the ground" originally referred to a cardinal principle of the post-1967 Israeli settler movement, which held that by building and occupying settlements in the newly-controlled West Bank it would be able to create an undeniable dominion over Palestinian lands that would be impossible to dislodge. As used in El-Haj's book, the phrase refers to the entire archeological enterprise in this region of the world, which beginning in the 19th century, she charges, invented a mythological story of Israelite and Jewish historical presence in the land of Israel, and imbued that story with the false aura of factuality that has also proven impossible to dislodge. In her view, archeology is a "colonial science" whose main goal has been to intellectually erase the history of Palestinians from the land.

Since its publication, the book has engendered controversy that continues to resound throughout academia and the media. Some responses have been quite predictable. It would be hard to imagine that passions would not be raised by such a broad scale attack on two centuries of archeology in this region. But the book has also been the subject of serious and sober scholarly reviews, both in Israel and abroad—some harshly critical, others more laudatory. One of its harshest critics, the Israeli archeologist Aren Maeir, regards the book as having virtually no scientific merit, and describes it as simply a "political manifesto." Even more sympathetic archeological reviewers, such as Tim Murray of La Trobe University in Australia, describe the analysis of archeological theory and socio-politics of the discipline itself as "limited" and "idiosyncratic." These reviews suggest that the book demonstrates a poor grasp of archeological theory and practice. In stark contrast, numerous non-archeologist anthropologists have described it as "sophisticated," "meticulous" and "important." The cleavage between the archeologists and non-archeologists is profound. How can a work that apparently demonstrates an impaired understanding of the archeological sciences be regarded as good anthropology?

Part of the explanation can be found in the political climate in which cultural anthropological knowledge (as distinguished from archeology) is created. Although ethnographers continue to produce important and scholarly work, many areas of anthropology are guided primarily by political considerations. Hostility to the state of Israel and the Jewish nationalism is the norm in many sectors of anthropology. In this intellectual climate, it is routine to regard Israel as a colonial or neocolonial state, an agent of imperialism, and an oppressor of the Palestinian people. One hardly needs to be Braveheart to be openly antagonistic to Israel at a meeting of anthropologists.

But politicization also derives from the impact of literary criticism and cultural studies upon anthropological method. Facts on the Ground is profoundly shaped by Edward Said's book Orientalism, which clearly rejects the idea of the objectivity of knowledge. Said's view is that science itself developed in the context of colonialism. By locating the scientific enterprise within the colonial, it becomes possible for writers like El-Haj to create labels such as "colonial science" that treat archeology in much the way old line-Marxists used the idea of "bourgeois science" to try to expunge Mendelian genetics from Soviet scientific thought. Like genetics, archeology is treated as suspect because it allegedly serves the interests of ruling groups.

But the problems with this approach actually run much deeper. In Orientalism, Said argued that the traditional scholarly study of the Middle East constituted a racist and imperialist discourse. As borrowed from Foucault, the concept of discourse refers to a set of interconnected ideas. One of the most distinctive conceptual elements of "discourse" is that it is not rule-bound; its connective threads are neither empirical nor logical but political and often comprise a disparate collection of ideas strung together in a come-what-may manner. Small wonder that Jacques Derrida, one of the framers of the concept of discourse, was immediately attracted to Claude Levi-Strauss' concept of bricolage. In his classical study of mythology, Levi-Strauss argued that all myths are essentially a bricolage; their stories, characters, and conceptual elements constructed willy-nilly out of what was at hand. Derrida married the study of myth to the study of discourse by arguing that all modes of thought could be understood as bricolage. But almost in imitation of its subject, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, and their anthropological progeny have now adopted bricolage as their primary methodology. Borrowing thoughts and ideas indiscriminately from the worlds of literary criticism, literature, law, politics and in this instance from archeology, they construct their analyses with little concern for empirical or logical connectedness. Like mythology, they are masters of the found object, and pull in anything to create a story. This methodology has no connection to science. Its power lies in its politics and its aesthetics, and not in such boring ideas as validity and reliability.

It is within this framework that Facts on the Ground is situated. Post-colonial discourse has intellectually colonized much of the anthropology of the Middle East. As a form of bricolage unburdened by rules of evidence or proof, it pulls together snippets of anything and everything to weave its dismal tale of unfettered nationalism and colonialism. The task is made easier by the book's definition of archeology, which intentionally conflates professional and scientific practices with popular and political uses of archeological material. Imagine the results if this definition were applied to cultural anthropology in the United States. Every use of anthropology, from the crackpot to the sublime, could be attributed back to the profession. And so it goes: a potsherd here and a potsherd there, a bizarre comment by a tour guide, a film in a museum exhibition all become grist for the mill.

The book is rife with instances of this mode of analysis. For example, Facts on the Ground takes issue with the archeological exhibition at Burnt House, a museum located in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. The official interpretation is that Burnt House is the home of a wealthy Jewish family, possibly of the priestly class, that was destroyed during the Roman siege and conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD. El-Haj participated in a tour of this Museum and other related sites along with an "American writer" and a "British archeologist," both of whom are unnamed. El-Haj recounts that during the tour, the unnamed and uncited American writer whom she describes as "having authored several books and articles on the politics of archeology in Israel" objected to the established narrative of Burnt House. He argued that the destruction of the house might have resulted from class conflict among Jews in Jerusalem, the result of the simmering anger against Jerusalem's nobility by working class laborers whom Herod the Great had imported to build the temple. He postulated that Burnt House might have been burnt down by an angry Jewish mob long prior to 70 CE. The curator countered that a coin found at the site and dated to approximately 66 CE suggests that the house was burnt close to the 70 CE time period. (The building of Herod's Temple began in about 19 BCE. Herod died in 4 BCE, but the building project may have continued well past his death.) El-Haj counters that this evidence does not preclude the possibility that the site, including the House, may have been burnt down more than once. The unnamed "British archeologist" apparently adds another view by asserting that "most cities burn every twenty to twenty five years."

The point here is that El-Haj suggests there are possible interpretations other than the established narrative. If the Museum were to present either the class struggle narrative or the natural cycle of fire narrative as alternative possibilities, it would, in her view, be a strong corrective to the narrative of national loss and ascendance that she believes wrongfully pervades Israeli archeology. But the text offers no evidence that either of these alternate narratives is probable or even plausible. What weight would any scientific study accord to this exchange other than it demonstrates a passion for contested narratives? It certainly offers nothing probative of the existence of any facts different from those now presented at Burnt House. Certainly it would be interesting and important if El-Haj were actually able to demonstrate that the ethos of Israeli nationalism screened out important and contradictory data. But she offers nothing stronger than anecdote to make the case. Given its methodology, Facts on the Ground accords carefully constructed archeological evidence and off-the-cuff anecdote exactly the same weight.

Facts on the Ground is a book that turns the gaze of post-colonial discourse to the subject of archeology. Inspired by mythology, it tells a powerful story that never lets facts get in the way.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/current/articles/fall2007/searching-for-facts-on-the-ground.html

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