the greycat blog

An article in The Independent, published on 17 October 2007, looks at some of the volcanoes that are overdue for major eruptions, including Vesuvius (’another big one is due’), Unzen (’warning signs that a cataclysmic blow is on its way’), and of course Yellowstone (’the cavernous vats beneath the surface are refilling with magma’). Unusually for The Independent, they do not blame any of this on global warming.

Mary Morgan, ‘Volcanoes: ready, stead [sic], blow’, The Independent, 17 October 2007

At Paleojudaica, Jim Davila has a thoughtful and perceptive post on the latest in the Nadia Abu El Haj controversy, in which he discusses, among other things, the ‘pure political fabrication’ issue (see my earlier post here). He describes me as writing ‘in defense of [Paula] Stern’, which isn’t a characterization of my position I’m particularly happy with, but he is very judicious in his analysis of what Abu El Haj says, and what her critics (notably Paula Stern) have said about what she says:

She seems to be implying that although archaeologists do not regard “the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins” as on the same level as “Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots,” they really ought to. This is not stated clearly (it’s a good example of the argument by innuendo for which I criticized her in my review), but I don’t see how else to read it in context. I have commented on the general question of Jewish vs. Palestinian cultural and genetic continuity with ancient Palestine here. Abu El-Haj’s phrasing is vague enough that it’s hard to be sure what she’s trying to compare, but I think the most positive thing I can say is that if she means what she seems to be implying, she’s wrong: they are not comparable. But I’m inclined to put the paragraph under Popper’s category of being “not even wrong” — not sufficiently clearly formulated to be evaluated critically. Still, I think Stern should have phrased her criticism more cautiously and carefully.

As my earlier post makes clear (I hope), I see the same meaning as Jim Davila does in this passage, and indeed can’t see how it can be read any other way, despite its lack of clarity. Richard Silverstein’s point in his comment about the possible meaning of Abu El Haj’s italics gave me pause, but in the end I don’t think his suggestion is credible. I think the italics are there to emphasize the claim that even if Israeli archaeologists are prepared to concede that to some degree ‘the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ is a political fabrication, they are not prepared to accept that it is pure political fabrication, and that she thinks they should. It’s hard to tell, though, not least because Nadia Abu El Haj, as with so many postmodernist academics, is unduly fond of italics (recalling Christopher de Bellaigue’s comment on Edward Said: ‘he is constantly wringing his hands as he writes’).

To return to what Jim Davila has to say (and leaving aside the small point that his link to my post has an incorrect URL) he also notes that he has signed neither the petition in support of, nor the petition against, Nadia Abu El Haj receiving tenure: ‘I don’t think tenure decisions should be made by petition’, he writes. Absolutely right.

The unhinged ravings of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists may be contemptible by any standard of rational and moral human conduct, but they nonetheless constitute a serious and disturbing phenomenon and need serious study. Dr Richard Landes, eminent historian of millennialism, has made a start.

9-11 Conspiracy constitutes the most powerful conspiracy theory in the brief history of the internet age. Within hours of the attacks, accusations that the Israeli Mossad had planned and executed the attacks while “4000 Jews stayed at home,” appeared, particularly in the Arab world, a textbook case of internet conspiracy mongering. In the Muslim world these theories became the dominant public voice. There, traditional conspiracy operated: We are innocent, our enemies are guilty.

[…]

Many Americans still prefer not to even discuss this matter: the owl’s first line of defense is to ignore the roosters. The necessary disproofs, including a new, peer-reviewed Journal of Debunking 911 Conspiracy Theories (2006-) — are available online for all to consult; what more need be said? That, as in so many cases of conspiracism, reasoning takes a back seat to desire? That people can visit a site with good evidence for a plane crash, and still believe the conspiracy. That the consequences of not thinking clearly about this may be very serious?

An excellent piece of work. Read the whole thing at Professor Landes’s blog, Augean Stables.

[Found via Screw Loose Change.]

Once again the most-read paper on greycat.org over the past seven days is ‘Aristotle and citizenship: the responsibilities of citizenship in the Politics‘.

Picture: Alexander the Great and Aristotle. [Source]

Perhaps the fullest and most balanced article yet on the Nadia Abu El Haj Facts on the Ground controversy:

The Jewish Week News: Flinging Dirt in Archaeology Dispute

Still at The Times, one wonders if those who think up the headlines there ever actually read the results:

UN chief Ban Ki Moon skates over Antarctica row

Here’s a superb article from The Times: Sarah Baxter, ‘Where do you stand in the new culture wars?’ I particularly like this bit:

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

There’s also a quiz to help you find if you are a true progressive or a phoney liberal. It can be found here (warning: it’s a PDF. Unlike the people at The Times, I think you should know that in advance).

[Found via Tim Blair, to whom acknowledgements and thanks.]

Of all the controversial passages in Nadia Abu El Haj’s Facts on the Ground, few have been so chewed over and have provided such fuel for polarized debate as this one, from her chapter 9, ‘Archaeology and its aftermath’, page 250:

While by the early 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice from the quest for Jewish origins and objects that formed an earlier archaeological project, the fact that there is some genuine national-cultural connection between contemporary (Israeli-)Jews and such objects was not itself generally open to sustained questioning.⁹ That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing archaeologists, fundamental. (Although archaeologists argued, increasingly, that the archaeological past should have no bearing upon contemporary political claims). In other words, the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as pure political fabrication. It is not an ideological assertion comparable to Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots.¹⁰ Although both origin tales, Arab and Jewish, are structurally similar as historical claims, Broshi’s argument betrays a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity” is conferred only upon the latter (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 21).

The text as given above is precisely as it appears in the book,* complete with footnote numerals, italics, brackets, and typographical error (that full stop after the bracketed phrase ending ‘contemporary political claims’ should be inside the closing bracket).

Most of the attention this paragraph has received has focused upon the phrase, or rather fragment, ‘pure political fabrication’. Critics of Nadia Abu El Haj have taken the words as indicating that the author is arguing that that ’the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ is a ’pure political fabrication’, sometimes reproducing the author’s original emphasis, sometimes not (here are some examples). In response to these charges, others have argued that the words ‘pure political fabrication’ have been taken out of context and misinterpreted, and that Nadia Abu El Haj is saying precisely the opposite, that Israel’s ancient history is not a pure political fabrication (examples here).

Paula Stern, author of the anti-tenure petition and a persistent critic of Nadia Abu El Haj, has just revisited this passage with a trenchant rejection of such claims: ‘”Pure political fabrication.” that is how Nadia Abu El Haj describes the “modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Jewish origins”.’ This posting has been picked up by Solomonia, where the point is amplified:

The critics say that when El Haj writes “The  modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as a pure political fabrication”, she’s crediting Israeli archaeologists for not doing so (and agreeing that they should not, i.e. that it is not a “pure political fabrication”). Taken in context, however, contra the El Haj defenders, she is specifically not doing so: [the colon is followed by a lengthy quote from Stern]

This one may well run and run, but it really shouldn’t, because Nadia Abu El Haj’s meaning in this passage (if not her syntax) is perfectly clear. In short, Paula Stern and the other critics are right: Abu El Haj’s position is that ‘the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ should be ‘understood as pure political fabrication’, as an ‘ideological assertion’ and, as Stern correctly notes, she is being critical of Israeli archaeologists for not accepting that: they ought to, she thinks, but they don’t. What makes it worse, the reader is encouraged to conclude, is that Israeli archaeologists were in denial about this as late as the 1990s, a fact that undermines the claim of modern Israeli archaeology to be a truly scientific enterprise.

You really need to read the whole book to understand what Nadia Abu El Haj is doing here and to appreciate the full impact of her claims, rather than relying on the fragmented chunks made available via Amazon Reader or, even worse, taking at face value what other people choose to quote or misquote.

For me the most interesting part of this passage is not the ‘pure political fabrication’ bit but the portion slightly further on, where Nadia Abu El Haj is discussing Magen Broshi’s unwillingness (as she represents it) to accord the ‘Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots’ the same status as the ‘Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’. Reading to the end of the paragraph, with his or her mind prepared by what has gone before, the reader might reasonably be excused for coming away from this sentence …

Although both origin tales, Arab and Jewish, are structurally similar as historical claims, Broshi’s argument betrays a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity” is conferred only upon the latter.

… with the impression that intellectual commensurability exists between the two sets of ‘origin tales’, and that the conferring of ‘facticity’ upon one rather than the other is arbitrary and ideologically determined. For structurally similar must mean similarly reliable, surely?

Of course not. Consider two claims I might make about how I came to be living at my present address. The claims ‘I moved into my present house after buying it from the previous occupants, who are now living abroad’ and ‘I moved into my present house after murdering the previous occupants, who are now buried in the cellar’ are structurally similar, but only one is a reliable description of reality.** The fact that things are structurally similar tells you nothing about their accuracy, verifiability or evidential base.

It’s clear, however, that for academics of the postmodern persuasion a ’hierarchy of credibility’ in which competing claims are compared with the evidence is something to be distrusted. I imagine that if presented at the end of the month with the competing (but structurally similar) claims ‘your salary has been paid into your bank account’ and ‘your salary has been paid into the bank account of a random stranger’ even the most skeptical professor would be pretty keen to erect a ‘hierarchy of credibility’ in which ‘facticity’ is conferred upon the interpretation that sees her getting paid. But of course our imaginary postmodern professor’s suspicion of ‘facticity’ would almost certainly manifest itself in a highly selective way. Generally speaking such skeptical critiques are fine when applied to other peoples’ lives, but really won’t do for one’s own.

* The reference to ‘Broshi’ in the passage from Facts on the Ground is to Magen Broshi, ‘Religion, ideology and politics and their impact on Palestinian archaeology’, Israel Museum Journal, vol. 6 (1987), pp. 17-32. Footnote 9 refers the reader to Ze’ev Herzog, ‘Deconstructing the walls of Jericho’, Ha’aretz (English edition), 29 October 1999; footnote 10 to Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Villard Books, 1996). The final citation is to Frederick Cooper & Ann Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

** It’s the first, in case you were wondering.

The ongoing and very detailed critique of Nadia Abu El Haj’s Facts on the Ground at Sam Hardy’s ‘human rights archaeology’ blog continues with the publication of a post on ‘bulldozer archaeology’. It’s an illuminating piece of analysis, balanced and judicious, and everyone interested in the controversy around Nadia Abu El Haj and her work should read it carefully.

There are only two points on which I would want to add further comments of my own (which do not amount to disagreement with what Sam Hardy has written).

First, there is a distinct difference in tone between Nadia Abu El Haj’s 1998 article (‘Translating truths: nationalism, the practice of archaeology, and the remaking of past and present in contemporary Jerusalem’, American Ethnologist, vol. 25, no. 2 (May 1998), pp. 166-88) in which her claims of ‘bulldozer archaeology’ first surface, and the way in which she treats the same claims in Facts on the Ground (2001). The book is much more polemical than the article on this as on other issues, and I would argue that the 2001 text cannot be treated simply as a continuation or restatement of the 1998 text.

Second, it is my view that Nadia Abu El Haj’s characterization of ‘bulldozer archaeology’ cannot be properly understood outside the context of the significance of the bulldozer image in the Israel/Palestinian conflict more generally. The bulldozer has come to be seen as an epitome of Israeli brutality and destructiveness, and I believe Nadia Abu El Haj is consciously drawing upon that significance in laying such emphasis on the destructive ‘bulldozer archaeology’ supposedly practiced by Israeli archaeologists. This is essentially the point I make in my ‘bulldozer archaeology’ essay, which Sam Hardy cites in his posting.

More generally, there is no substitute for reading Facts on the Ground entire and complete. The sense of the book’s overall tone cannot be fully appreciated in any other way. Jim Davila, in his review of Facts on the Ground, describes the book as being characterized by ‘an extreme perception of Israel as a colonial state’, and that position of hostility to Israel colours the entire text. The impression one comes away with of the Jezreel ‘bulldozer archaeology’ account when it has been read in the context of what comes before and after it in the book, and under the influence of this generalized and pervasive ideological slant, is quite different to what one might think after reading that section alone, or as one among a number of isolated passages.

[Click here for earlier Nadia Abu El Haj postings.]

Thanks to the Victorian Peeper I’ve been reading about the exhibition ‘Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860′, which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 25 September until 31 December 2007. The Peeper’s article, with photographs, is excellent and I’m not going to try to duplicate it here; I’ll just say that this looks to be a fascinating exhibition. Apparently it is not visiting Britain, but will be at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris next year, so perhaps I’ll get to see it there.

The New York Times review of the exhibition is well-written and informative, but includes this assertion:

The bulk of the photographs here feel remarkably sedate, almost anesthetized. This is partly because moving things couldn’t be recorded in early photographs. But in his catalog essay Roger Taylor argues something else: that the peace and harmony in British calotypes mask the deep anxiety of the Victorian age, in which the life expectancy at birth for professional men was about 45, and for laborers 22.

Good grief, I’m sure Professor Taylor doesn’t say anything quite so fatuous. If an image is full of violence and angst, it’s expressing the deep anxiety of the age. If it’s peaceful and harmonious, it’s masking the deep anxiety of the age. Your classic one-size-fits-all cultural/historical critique.