the greycat blog

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.

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

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.]

An interesting series of lectures is under way at Columbia University, where the local branch of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East has arranged for some notable scholars with expertise in the history and archaeology of ancient Israel to speak on aspects of the archaeology of the Holy Land. Although no-one involved actually comes out and says so, this is at least partly a response to the controversy over Nadia Abu El Haj and Facts on the Ground - and as a response it is admirable, far better than the misleading petitions and anonymous smear sites favoured by some who dislike Abu El Haj’s arguments.

The second lecture was given by the very distinguished archaeologist William Dever, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona, on Monday. I have not seen the full text of his address, but (thanks to PaleoJudaica) I have read an account of the lecture in Forward. Towards the end of the Forward article, the following is attributed to Professor Dever:

‘Archaeology has never been edited,’ he said. ‘When we dig these things up, they are pristine.’[1]

Perhaps he didn’t say quite that, or perhaps the context qualifies the statement in some way. But, on the face of it, this claim is absurd. Archaeology is not the things that are dug up; it is what is done with them after they have been dug up. Archaeology is deciding where and how to dig, selecting what among the things dug up is important, subjecting those things to interpretation, and disseminating those interpretations. No stage in that process is value-free, and if anything really is ‘pristine’ when it goes into it, it certainly isn’t by the time it comes out. After all, if the things that are dug from the ground are sufficient in and of themselves, why have archaeologists at all?

Three-quarters of a century ago, archaeologists felt able to say things like this: 

The disinterestedness of archaeological evidence should also be emphasized. No one questions its utter impartiality … There is no biased note in its attestation, no prejudiced tinge in its evidence. What it vouches for belongs in the realm of fact.[2]

This comes from an article by the American archaeologist Raymond P. Dougherty entitled ‘The scope of Biblical archaeology’, published in the Journal of Religion in July 1930. More than seventy years later Professor Dever (if represented correctly in the quote above) seems to be saying precisely the same thing. 

Flawed and tendentious Facts on the Ground may be; but perhaps archaeology does need Nadia Abu El Haj and her critique of ‘Archaeological relics … fetishized as unmediated empirical evidence’[3] after all.

Notes

[1] Marissa Brostoff, ‘Archaeologists challenge Barnard professor’s claims’, Forward, 17 October 2007.

[2] Raymond P. Dougherty, ‘The scope of Biblical archaeology’, The Journal of Religion, vol. 10, no. 3 (July 1930), pp. 338-9.

[3] Nadia Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 79.

[UPDATE 21 October 2007: ‘anon’ has left an important comment on this post which you need to read alongside my observations above.]

[UPDATE 23 October 2007: here is an interesting comment by G. Ernest Wright (1909-74), one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century ‘Biblical archaeology’, which I thought was worth adding as an addendum to my posting above. It is from the September 1971 issue of The Biblical Archaeologist, the journal which Wright founded in 1934:

With regard to Biblical events, however, it cannot be overstressed that the archaeological data are mute. Fragmentary ruins, preserving only a tiny fraction of the full picture of ancient life, cannot speak without someone asking questions of them. And the kind of questions asked are part and parcel of the ‘answers’ heard because of predispositions on the part of the questioner.

Of course, it is a long way from accepting that predisposition and other forms of subjectivity influence the interpretation of archaeological evidence to believing that any interpretation is as good as any other. (Full reference: G. Ernest Wright, ‘What archaeology can and cannot do’, The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 34, no. 3 (September 1971), pp. 69-76, here p. 72.)]

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.]

This blog has been featured in The New Republic, in a posting by Marty Peretz, no less: he gives us a mention as a source of information on the Nadia Abu El Haj debate in ‘Another Columbia Controversy’. Most gratifying.

(Thanks to Emmet Trueman for letting me know about this.)

Further to my two earlier posts (here and here), some additional recommended resources relating to the controversy over Barnard College anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj.

Emmet Trueman argues that Facts on the Ground is a more partisan and controversial work than the PhD thesis from which it derives: ‘The thesis is not like the book’, at Solomonia Blog.

At the human rights archaeology: cultural heritage and community blog there is a lengthy ongoing discussion of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work as it relates to archaeology, and responses to it.

At the University of Chicago Press blog an excerpt from Facts on the Ground is available. Thanks to commenter Dean for drawing my attention to this.

It’s been pointed out to me, very gently, that I omitted a very important category of literature from my post ‘Nadia Abu El Haj: some recommended reading’: her own writings.

This is a significant omission, not least because it is clear from much of the controversy about Nadia Abu El Haj’s work that very few people have actually bothered to read with care what she herself has written. I can claim myself to have read the whole of her book Facts on the Ground, and those of her periodical articles that have a bearing on the history of archaeology and archaeological practice in Israel/Palestine. I have not, however, read her thesis, nor her articles on other topics. Access is a problem: anyone can buy her book (and even without buying it you can read quite a bit of it via the Amazon online reader) but only those with access to scholarly publications in electronic or hard-copy forms can easily get hold of her articles or her doctoral thesis. In the list below I have indicated where her articles can be located, but to make use of all but one of the links - the exception being the open-access Annual Review of Anthropology [no longer! see update below] - you will need to be a subscriber (via a university network, normally) to the services indicated.

Thesis

Nadia Abu El Haj, Excavating the Land, Creating the Homeland: Archaeology, the State, and the Making of History in Modern Jewish Nationalism (Duke University, PhD thesis, 1995).

Book

Nadia Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Periodical articles 

Nadia Abu El Haj, ‘Translating truths: nationalism, archaeological practice and the remaking of past and present in contemporary Jerusalem’, American Ethnologist, vol. 25, no. 2 (May 1998), pp. 166-188. [available via AnthroSource and JSTOR]

Nadia Abu El Haj, ‘Producing (arti)facts: archaeology and power during the British Mandate of Palestine, Israel Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (summer 2002), pp. 33-61. [available via Project Muse]

Nadia Abu El Haj, ‘Reflections on archaeology and Israeli settler-nationhood’, Radical History Review, no. 86 (spring 2003), pp. 149-163. [available via Duke University Press Journals]

Nadia Abu El Haj, ‘Edward Said and the political present’, American Ethnologist, vol. 32, no. 4 (November 2005), pp. 538-555. [available via AnthroSource]

Nadia Abu El Haj, ‘Rethinking genetic geneaology: a response to Stephan Palmié’. American Ethnologist, vol. 34, no. 2 (2007), pp. 223-227. [available via AnthroSource]

Nadia Abu El Haj, The genetic reinscription of race’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 36 (2007), pp. 283-300. [available via Annual Reviews]

[UPDATE 1 November 2007: the Annual Review of Anthropology is no longer available on open access. You now need some kind of paid subscription, or a willingness to shell out a tenner ($20.00 US) for each article. Perhaps the open access period was a mistake; or they are just embarrassed at the weakness of much of their material and want to stop people seeing it. Anthropology is such a mess these days.]

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.