Nadia Abu El Haj: some recommended reading
I’ve been following the controversy around the work of Barnard College anthropology professor Nadia Abu El Haj for a while now, since becoming interested in her analysis of archaeological practice in Israel as presented in a number of periodical articles and her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). In particular, I’m interested in her claims about the place of the bulldozer in Israeli archaeology, which I read in the context of the image of the bulldozer in the culture of the Middle East more generally. For more on this, see my essay ‘Bulldozer archaeology? Excavation, earthmoving and archaeological practice in Israel’.
In a wider sense, Nadia Abu El Haj’s work has become a focus of hostility among those who claim that she sets out to disprove the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. I would not want to go that far, but I do think that an anti-Israeli bias suffuses and, to some extent, undermines her work. Some have argued that her work is so tendentious in its uses of evidence and polemical in its argument that she should be denied the tenure for which she is currently being considered by Barnard College (which is a part of Columbia University). This debate is, in my view, illegitimate: whatever you think of tenure, awarding it to a scholar is an internal academic process that cannot be subject to public influence. A petition does not lend credibility to an attempt to interfere with that process, while the fact that some of those participating in the campaign are Barnard College graduates is neither here nor there. The fact that someone graduated from an educational institution in the past does not give them a say in the internal administrative and academic processes of that institution. They will be wanting a veto on the stationery budget next. Finally, to usurp somebody’s own personal name and use it as the domain name for a site attacking and denigrating her is simply despicable (particularly when at least some of the contents of such a site are in flagrant violation of copyright).
So, given the somewhat acrimonious and unpleasant tone of much of the debate around Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, are there any resources on the internet that are balanced, intelligent, thoughtful, are, in short, worth reading by someone wishing to inform themselves about what is going on? The answer is yes; the list that follows gives some of the resources that I have found useful and informative, across the spectrum of opinion.
- Review of Facts on the Ground by Jacob Lassner, Middle East Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 3 (summer 2003)
- ‘Bulldozing the [arti]facts’, article by Daniel Martin Varisco at Tabsir
- Jim Davila’s review of Facts on the Ground at his blog Palaeojudaica
- Deepti Hajela, ‘Controversy over New York prof’s tenure’, Associated Press, 12 Sep 2007
- Carolyn Slutsky, ‘Tenure battle at Barnard gains fresh urgency’, The Jewish Week, 21 Sep 2007
- Scott Jaschik, ‘Middle East tensions flare again in US’, Inside Higher Ed, 6 Sep 2007
- Alan F. Segal, ‘Some professional observations on the controversy about Nadia Abu El Haj’s first book’, Columbia Spectator, 21 Sep 2007
The following blogs have also given the Nadia Abu El Haj issue thorough coverage. They all have their own axes to grind, but the commentary and analysis they offer is consistently valuable and informative.
Of course, inclusion in this post does not imply an endorsement by the author of every aspect of the sites listed.
