the greycat blog

Two new essays are published at greycat.org today (well, the model railway essay is a revised version of a draft that has been around for some time, but the revisions are so extensive that it counts as new).

‘Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950′ - a study of the sociocultural history of railway modelling in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, examining issues from philosophical and historical questions of the nature of leisure to the presence of modernism and nostalgia in model railways.

‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ - in June 2004 Marvin Heemeyer used an armoured bulldozer to stage a destructive assault on the town of Granby, Colorado. Taking this incident as a starting point, ‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ explores the significance of the bulldozer as a weapon, ‘simultaneously tank and tractor, tool and weapon, creator and destroyer’.

Theodore Sturgeon’s short story about a killer bulldozer, published in 1944, is the origin of the term ‘killdozer’. The story was turned into a film in 1974. This flash game is much more exciting than the film. Make sure you have your sound on.

History News Network have published a new article from me, dealing with the history of the bulldozer, a theme I have been researching and writing about for some time. Why the bulldozer, of all things? This is why (from the conclusion of the article):

[The bulldozer] is a machine that deals with fundamentals: the earth, transformation, creation, destruction. It buries the past while it builds the future, demolishing in order to construct, leveling the ground and starting anew from a cleared and emptied landscape – it is the year-zero machine. Celebrated as an icon of social progress or despised as a symbol of destructive exploitation, hymned as a machine of liberation or feared as a tool of repression, the bulldozer has reshaped cultural perceptions as it has transformed urban and rural landscapes. To follow in its tracks is to understand the history of the modern age.

You can read the entire article, ‘The bulldozer: one of the overlooked wonders of technology’, here. I hope you’ll soon be able to explore the history of the bulldozer at even greater length, in one of the must-read books of 2008.

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.]

Richard L. Cravatts of Boston University has contributed an essay on Nadia Abu El Haj and Israeli archaeology to History News Network: ‘Archeology and the propaganda war against Israel’. Cravatts is strongly critical of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, and I find myself in broad agreement with much of his criticism. He highlights the overall context of the ongoing effort by Palestinian advocates to rewrite the history of Israel in a form that eliminates the Jewish past - their ultimate aim, of course, being the elimination of Israel itself:

It is part of a relentless and continuing effort to delegitimize Israel and finally eliminate it through a false historical narrative that is repeated in Palestinian schoolbooks, in sermons, in the Arab press, in Middle Eastern study centers at universities, and in the politicized scholarship and dialogue generated by Israel-haters, anti-Semites, and Palestinian apologists around the world.

Dr Cravatts does, however, make the same mistake as many other people who have written about Facts on the Ground when he refers to it as ’a book of archeology’. Nadia Abu El Haj is an anthropologist, not an archaeologist, and Facts on the Ground (whatever one may think of it) is not an archaeological study but an anthropological study of archaeological practice. 

[UPDATE 16 Oct 2007: the Cravatts article has been pulled from the HNN site.]

[UPDATE 17 Oct 2007: it has popped up again at American Thinker.]

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.

• Solomonia Blog
• Tikun Olam
• Dr Jim West

Of course, inclusion in this post does not imply an endorsement by the author of every aspect of the sites listed.