Sanctities6

Sanctities,
blasphemies and the (Jewish) Nation: Commemorative Inscriptions in a
National Memorial Site in Israel

Prologue

In
a recent annual meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association,
an accomplished colleague and I were discussing a recent ethnographic
research that I conducted at the Ammunition Hill National Memorial
Complex (West Jerusalem, Israel). The memorial complex is dedicated
to the memory of soldiers who died in the Jerusalem Front during the
1967 war. Shortly before the meeting took place, I spent a month at
the Ammunition Hill site, where my research focused on the site’s
impressive commemorative visitor book . My colleague heatedly argued
that, “the heydays of the Ammunition Hill are long behind us,”
and that the site is rundown and ill-kempt (two points with which I
generally agree). With specific respect to the visitor book, he
argued with noticeable disdain, “I know what’s going on
there. It’s a shame. Delinquent youths from nearby
neighborhoods and other passers-by come there and masturbate on the
book. It’s filthy!”

This
reaction puzzled me. While I understand that some bodily practices
and secretions (which he also mentioned) are viewed in some cultures
as dirty and impure , the coarse symbolic conjunction between
memorialism and autoerotic practices took me by surprise. In
addition, I did not know whether my counterpart was familiar with the
urban history of the Ammunition Hill, where, prior to its
construction, prostitution took place there, under the pine grove on
the hill. However, it was clear that my colleague was keenly arguing
that the commemorative book is a metonym of the site, and that both
were being desecrated; that instead of being sites of consecration
that showed and commanded respect to those who sacrificed their lives
for the nation, they were sites of violation and desecration.
Masturbation and bodily secretions were employed as animated,
embodied illustrations of the degradation of the commemoration
site(s) during the last years.

In
what follows, no further reference to autoerotic bodily practices
will be made. The reason I opted to open with this exchange is that
it reveals some of the symbolic tensions between sanctity of places
and spaces, with a focus surfaces and practices of inscription, on
the one hand, and their various desecrations, on the other, drawing
on a particular illustration from ethno-national(ist) rituals in
Israel. These tensions evince the dialectics between sanctities and
blasphemies, which, though common, are infrequently commented on. In
the sections that follow, I will briefly describe the theoretical
background regarding the linkage between sacredness and nationalism,
which is derived from Robert Bellah’s highly influential
notion of “civil religion.” Then I will characterize the
ways that the Ammunition Hill institution constructs a sacred place
of national commemoration, which will be complemented by a close
examination of visitor book entries, which affirm and violate, adhere
and desecrate the sense of national scarceness and solemnity in the
site.

Ethno-national
civil religion and sacred national commemoration in Israel

According
to sociologist Bellah , civil religion concerns “[t]he
religious dimension that exists in the life of every nation through
which it interprets its historic experiences in the light of its
transcendental reality”; it is—as he famously argued with
regards to the United States—the “genuine apprehension of
universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could
almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American
people” . Bella’s concept was influential because it put
a critical mirror in the face of republican nationalism, indicating
that nations abundantly borrow symbols and rituals from religious
spheres, which they then employ in order to mobilize citizens in ways
that are uncannily similar to the powerful institutions which they
suggested to replace, namely the church.

While
the concept of civil religion originated with observations of
national rituals and memorials in the United States, it has been
fruitfully employed in other countries and societies, sometimes
comparatively. With specific regards to Israeli national culture,
Liebman and Don-Yihya’s initial work revealed the unique
synergy between traditional Jewish symbolism, on the one hand, and
the ideological symbolic apparatus that aims to mobilize and
consolidate the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, on the other.
Liebman and Don-Yihya observed that, “Zionist-Socialism was a
religious surrogate,” and that “[t]he major symbols of
Zionist-Socialism, its myths and ceremonies, were laden with
traditional motifs and representations.” Moreover, the authors
candidly admit that, “[i]t is almost impossible to convey in
English, especially to anyone unfamiliar with Hebrew, the elaborate
and intricate usage of traditional Jewish terminology in
Zionist-socialism” .

Nowhere
is this fusion more evident and effective than in the consecration of
national sacrifice and the celebration of militarism in Israel.
Numerous national rituals, ceremonies, days of commemoration, and
memorial sites and spaces embody and celebrate the Zionist fusion of
militaristic nationalism, through the use of symbols and rituals of
consecration. During the last two decades, a sizable body of
research, mainly within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology
and political science has explored these assorted sites, rituals and
events. Form the national days of Commemoration and Independence to
commemorative road signs, and from archeological sites of ruins that
have become materialized sites of national(ist) ethos to toddlers’
songs and pre-school ceremonies, this body of research documents
Israeli society’s “profound engagement” with
commemoration , amounting to “a national cult of memorializing
the dead” .

The concept of civil religion has been influential and productive
also because it is intuitive. For many Jews who grew up in Israel,
the sanctified collective narrative of nationalism-cum-militarism is
imprinted in personal memories from early days. Standing straight and
experiencing solemnity at the sound of the all-encompassing
sinusoidal national siren, heard during the annual National Day of
Commemoration, zealously partaking in hiking trips and ceremonial
marches, and many other collective practices were moments of embodied
performances of Zionist civil religion.

While Bellah’s concept was especially productive in
stimulating research of hegemonic and institutional (“top
down”) practices, plenty of room was left for examining
people’s actual ways of experiencing and participating in the
rituals, how they perform practices of national sacredness and
consecration, and—when this is the case—also how they
experience and perform practices of protest and violation of the
sacred national sphere.

Ethnography
of inscribed commemoration

The Ammunition Hill Complex was inaugurated in 1975, honoring the
Israeli soldiers who died in the Jerusalem Front during the 1967 War,
and celebrating the “liberation” of East Jerusalem and
the “unification” of the city. The complex comprises of
several spaces and structures, including an outdoor space that is
sprinkled with commemorative monuments and national and military
symbols, that are located between the original trenches and bunkers
where the fighting took place, and an indoor museum.

Wholly devoted to national commemoration and sacrifice, the
Ammunition Hill Museum is constructed as a typical
“national-militaristic shrine,” which materially and
ideology embodies Israel’s “cult of commemoration”
. The museum presents various images and representations of the
Ammunition Hill battle and the campaign over Jerusalem. Its inner
spaces are steeped in a venerated atmosphere created by a perfusion
of symbols and icons. Crucially, the museum’s physical
structure is half-sunken, dimly lit, and built of local
(“Jerusalemite”) stone—all of which produce an
authentic impression of war trenches and an atmosphere of somberness
and remembrance. The display mostly includes discursive devices that
serve commemorative aims, such as the Golden Wall of Commemoration,
where the names of those who fell in the battle for Jerusalem are
engraved, and a short film about the battle, which is narrated in the
(male) first body and is infused with machismo, heroism, and a touch
of grief for those of fell in combat. Other discursive artifacts
include soldiers’ letters, personal and war journals,
autographs and more.

The museum and the site host many commemorative ceremonies
throughout the year, from the National Day of the Unification of
Jerusalem, in which the Israeli president and prime-minister
participate, to more routine and everyday events, such as occasions
when high-schools bring their eleventh graders to receive their IDs
at the site (thus suffusing the monotonous bureaucratic documents
with the sacredness of national commemoration and militaristic
patriotism .

The ethnography I conducted at the museum took place in the summer
and autumn of 2006, and included observations and interviews. These
indicated that the visitors were either (local) Jewish Israelis doing
sightseeing in Jerusalem, or Ultra/Orthodox Jewish tourists-pilgrims,
mostly from North America, visiting Zionism’s “holly
sites.” These tourists-pilgrims were usually on planned tours
to Israel, organized by the Jewish Agency, the Taglit Project and
similar organizations promoting Zionism.

The
research’s focus, however, was the site’s impressive
visitor book, where commemorative entries are inscribed. Two volumes
supply the database for the present examination. These volumes were
chosen because they were the most recent ones to be completed, and
because they are typical of the Ammunition Hill visitor books in all
respects: each contains 100 pages, took between one to two years to
fill (the first volume between May, 2003 and June 2005, and the
second between June 2005 and July 2006), and includes over 1,000
entries. Given this considerable number and the location of the
books, they provide a representative sample of visitors’
inscribed actions at a symbolic site. Most of the entries in the
books are written in Hebrew (50%) and the rest are mostly in English
(45%, but also in French, Spanish, Russian and more).

The
entries were examined in light of the performative appreciation of
the book’s function, whereby it is viewed as a sacred stage for
visitors inscribed performances. In the analysis of the entries, I
avoided employing rigorous procedures (such as content/discourse/text
analyses of sorts), and preferred a contextual reading that enjoys
sensitivities promoted by the fields of (critical) discourse analysis
and multimodality studies .

Institutional
construction: The visitor book as a sacred Jewish stage

The
Ammunition Hill commemorative visitor book serves as a sacred
stage that facilitates and invites inscribed performances of
participation in the Zionist ethno-national civil religion. While I
have elsewhere argued for a performative view of this book , I
propose that the book functions as a stage insofar as it is construed
by its users as a consecrated Jewish media. In other words, the
semiotics of performance, on the one hand, and Jewish symbolism
surrounding national commemoration, on the other, are brought to the
fore as the notions of “sacred” and of “stage”
become mutually confirming. This unique condition is attained by a
number of contextual framing cues, by which the sacred function and
the national-performative function are joined, materially and
symbolically.

First,
while visitor books are typically located near sites’ and
attractions’ point of exit, where they allow visitors to
recapitulate their experiences and comment on their overall visit, at
the Ammunition Hill Museum the book is located in one of the
innermost halls. It is positioned in the hall that is near the Golden
Wall of Commemoration and
the eternal flame, where a low and solemn voice of a male narrator
continuously recites the names of the fallen soldiers, their military
affiliations and ranks, praising their youthful beauty and innocence.
This unique location, inside the museum’s commemorative “holy
of holies,” endows the book with the semiotic status of a
sacred device that is an organic part of the museum’s authentic
commemorative exhibit. Conceptually, the book’s unique location
is the complete opposite of the typical location of visitor books,
because it invites acts of ideological and emotional participation in
a national rite, rather than reflections on a completed visit.

Second,
the book’s framing as a scared stage is further augmented by
the psychical structure on which it rests. The book is installed on a
large and impressive structure, consisting of two columns of black
steel, each of them about one meter thick (Figure 1 below). The
shorter column functions as a pedestal on which the book rests, and
beside it is another pillar some four meters tall. The pedestal is
made of thick and impressive wood, giving the book’s platform a
particularly respected appearance. The entire structure rests on a
base that is slightly elevated from the floor, so that those wishing
to read or write in the book must step up and enter a specially
designated—elevated—zone.

Figure
1: Book and hall: Solemn national spaces

Here
again the sacred function of the book is cued. The special
construction cues a sacred function, because it suggests that the
book is not a bureaucratic document that is meant to capture
information about visitors (names, dates of visit, etc.), nor even
impressions regarding the visit, but a cherished medium that invites
ritualistic acts in which visitors may engage in situ as part of
their embodied participation in national commemoration. This framing
is further augmented by the fact that the book is the central exhibit
in the hall where it is located (see Figure 1, above). This
arrangement, too, frames the book as a unique medium, which demands
special attention on behalf of the visitors.

Note
that because the book is located as in a special public space inside
the museum, the entries visitors inscribe in it immediately become
elements of the commemorative (Jewish) display at the site.
Here is a transformative medium, where individual inscriptions are
instantaneously granted a public nature and become collective acts of
embodiment of the commemorative ideology at the site.

Third,
the metonymic association between the tangible device of the book and
the intangible ideology of ethno-national commemoration is
established not only through the spatial positioning of the book, but
is also reiterated from “within”: through the book’s
pages and their design. In terms of materiality, the book is a heavy
and sizable volume that includes 100 thick pages made not of paper
but of parchment. The size and material of the book’s pages
offer a point of interface between text and texture, where inscribing
practices are granted a particular embodied sense. In terms of visual
design, each of the book’s pages is printed with a vertical
line of four large symbols (Figure 2, below). These include (in
descending order) the symbol of the State of Israel (the Menorah or
candelabrum), the symbol of the City of Jerusalem (a lion), the
symbol of the Israeli army (a sword and olive branch in a Star of
David), and the logo of Ammunition Hill (three arches). These symbols
are repeated on large flags that hang near the installation, and
correspond with other ethno-national and military emblems that are
profusely exhibited throughout the site. They reiterate the
connection between the ethno-national sanctity of the spaces/stages
of the museum as a whole, and the same with regards to the
spaces/stages of the visitor book, stressing the tripartite bond
between Zionism, Judaism and militarism.

The
framing cues that I briefly described suggest that the book can be
conceptualized as a sacred stage or media, serving to embody Zionist
ethno-national ideology. First, due to the symbolic and material ways
that the book is framed (its potentialities) and the populations that
can and do access it (its usage)—recall that Jews exclusively
visit the site—the pages of the visitor book embody exclusive
ethno-national Jewish spaces. Moreover, the materiality of the
book conjures particular embodied ways of interacting with it, which
index traditional Jewish practices. The respected pedestal on which
the book lies, which demands readers and writers to stand or to lean,
the book’s parchment pages, which clearly echo the material of
the Jewish Sepher Torah (or Torah Book), and the elevation of
the entire space surrounding it—all are symbolic and at the
same time all offer a stage on which Jewish practices can be observed
and performed.

Figure
2: Sacred text(ture)s: Logos and inscriptions on parchment

Finally,
the nature of the object of the visitor book, and much of the display
in the museum, concern literacy related objects and activities.
In fact, the largest category of exhibits in the museum consists of
textual objects. This detail is not coincidental and suggests that
the site holds a particular textual ideology. The
museum’s visitor book is such a central device because it
embodies the site’s textualist ideology, and as such it does
not only absorb meaning (in the form of visitors’ entries), but
also projects it: its presence in situ says something about the site
and its literacy-related orientation.

There
are obvious reasons why literacy would receive prominence in this
memorial museum. First, because it conjures “traditional
[Jewish] motifs and representations” . Further, presenting
handwritten documents is an effective way of claiming authenticity
(in tourism in general, handmade products have a special value
because they index their creators). In Sabra (native Israeli)
culture, where informal and un-institutionalized modes of
communication—notably handwriting—are highly esteemed and
regarded as “authentic,” this quality enjoys a particular
cultural accent . Lastly, literacy in general and specifically the
association to Jewish symbolism serve to construct an image of the
moral Israeli; after all, what is commemorated at the site is
a battle, an instance of institutionalized brutality and violence.
For the Sabra worldview, which aspires to liberalism and humanism,
these events suggest a moral issue that requires an adequate
resolution. Literacy here tells that the warriors commemorated are
portrayed as literate and educated; they were “men of the
sword,” but also “men of the pen” (savage but
noble, etc.)

More
generally, the construction of the visitor book and with it the
linguistic ideology index for the (Jewish) visitors Jewish practices
.

Of
course, from the perspective of national identity, literacy brings to
mind Anderson’s famous work, which also focuses on acts of
reading, and how these allow the creation of imagined communities and
consequently nationhood across large spaces. With regards to the
Ammunition Hill visitor book, the spread, which in Anderson’s
work is geographical, is temporal: different people arrive at the
same place—to read and write—in different times.

Inscribed
performances: Performing sanctities and blasphemies

The
fact that the spaces of the museum and of the visitor book therein
are institutionally cued so as to elicit national Jewish sacredness,
does not necessarily imply that visitors—construed as
users/consumers—indeed understand these cues or comply with the
ideological agenda they promote. The fact is that only a
third of the visitors who arrive at the hall where the book is
located approach it, and about 10% of
these chose to inscribe in it. Hence the
majority of visitors do not respond to the invitation and simply pass
on the opportunity offered by the book. These findings are
actually not surprising when considering the observations, which
indicate that quite typical of museum goers, many visitors to the
Ammunition Hill site are sometimes in a hurry, tired, bored,
preoccupied with social interactions (within their groups or
families) or otherwise disinterested.

That
been said, the book overflows with inscribed acts of consecration, in
the shape of commemorative visitor book entries that have various
characteristics of religious language . The first illustration to be
discussed (Example 1, below), was chosen because it is characteristic
of normative entries in this book, i.e. entries that employ the
sacred register of national commemoration with the aim of
accomplishing a commemorative (inscribed) performance. Following its
discussion, entries which do not perform normative or
confirmative voices will be examined.

Example
1

“In
their death they commanded us to live”

Thanks
to the courageous fallen [soldiers] on

Ammunition
Hill, we and our children can

stand
here presently in unified

Jerusalem.

Holly
are these men.

The
Shiffman Family

Hadera

19.10.05

This
illustration is typical of a normative, i.e. confirmative entry,
because it affirms the ideological agenda of the
national-militaristic heritage site: it repeats the transcendent
tenets of Zionist ethno-national civil religion, in its commemorative
facet, namely the (casual) connection between past and present (and
future) and in this case, the justification of the Israeli occupation
of East Jerusalem (and more broadly, of the entire West Bank). In
this and in other entries, the (mythic) past is populated by
sacrificial death, which enables life in the present. Therefore the
dedication on behalf of those living—through remembrance and
commemoration—to those who fell.

It
is not only the aims that are at stake here, but also the means,
which are conveyed confirmatively: the visitors’ inscribed
performance conveys that they have understood and internalized the
sacred register of commemoration. This is conveyed lexically (through
the choice of words, such as “Holly,” and by using
reference (citation, paraphrasing, etc.) to the discourse of
commemoration presented at the site. The entry’s opening
sentence is a direct quote (specifically marked as such by the
inscribers). Other varieties of sacred discourse make reference to
the pool of ethno-national(ist) idioms and icons, which include such
expressions as, “May Their Memory be a Blessing,” “Next
Year in Jerusalem,” “Jerusalem of Gold,” “For
the Glory of the State of Israel,” and icons such as the Star
of David and the Menorah (the Jewish candelabrum). We are reminded
that in order for performance to be effective, i.e. performative,
some aspect of repetition of authority should be exercised . Another
common stylistic feature which serves to mark the entry as
ritualistic and scared, concerns a direct address to the dead
soldiers. Entries that open or close with such expressions as,
“[T]hank you for dying for the Land of Israel,” are also
common in these book . Lastly, note that the entry above is not
preceded by the acronym “bh” or “bsd”
(In God’s Help), which typically precedes entries written by
Observant Jews. This means that the inscribers were most likely not
Observant Jews, which delineates the fact that when it comes to
national commemoration, the sacred register is specifically employed.
In all of these cases, inscribing entries facilitates the assumption
of a particular “inhabitable specking role,” through
which sanctification is accomplished .

Confirmative
entries amount to the majority of inscriptions in these commemorative
visitor books. Yet leafing through their pages clearly reveals acts
of violation and desecration. While statistically, violating entries
amount to less that 4% of the overall number of entries, they are
salient because they express critique rather than admiration and
affirmation, or, in the context of civil religion, performances of
blasphemies rather than sanctities. Also, they are highly visible
because the laws of saliency of this stage concern not only sheer
(quantitative) distribution, but also visibility (iconicity). The
next illustration (Example 2, Figure 3, below), is of a Hebrew text
that is inscribed on the space of an entire visitor book page (which
is usually occupied by 6-10 entries), a fact which clearly grants it
visual saliency.

Example
2

Bsd

Boo
to Sharon

who
made life bitter

for
Haredim [Ultra-Orthodox Jews]

and
[one] need[s] to blow up his

belly
with a needle.

From
Ben Ezra

Figure
3: Boo Sharon

The
mention of the name Sharon refers to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli
prime-minister at the time of inscribing the entry (around May,
2005). Publicly expressing a desire to stick a needle into Sharon’s
belly and to blow him up, are symbolic expressions of radical disdain
not only from the person of Ariel Sharon. Recall that like most
Israeli prime-ministers, Sharon too was a decorated general.¹
Hence an attack on Sharon carries with it symbolic value of “blowing
up” the Zionist association of militarism and nationalism.
Typically, the inscriber’s motivation is revealed—in this
case anger directed against Sharon on behalf of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish
groups. What is interesting is the fact that the stage of the
ethno-national commemorative book was found appropriate for
inscribing this entry. In light of the symbolic context, the entry is
not simply a hate graffiti that could have been inscribed anywhere,
but a situated performance that recognizes what the site—and
the visitor book therein—stand for, and wishes to “stick
a needle” and deflate the Zionist ethos and narrative that the
site recites.

Entries
of this type express violations of various degrees, which originate
with non- or anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox visitors. To some degree,
the occurrence of these entries is accounted by the urban location of
the Ammunition Hill, which is in vicinity to ultra-orthodox
neighborhoods (Ramat Eshkol).

Lastly,
figure 2 clearly shows that the page on which the entry was written
was torn off the book and crumpled. The story behind this inscription
is that there were additional large hate inscriptions, directed
against Sharon and Zionism, which were dealt with by the curator in
charge (who covered them with erasing marker liquid). Such
interventions on behalf of the staff are rare. However, at some
point, one of the site’s maintenance personnel got extremely
upset with these inscriptions and at a moment or rage tore the page
off, conducting thus an act of desecration on top of the violating
inscription itself. He was then was made to return the page to its
place in the book, where the inscription has not been erased (which
is how I found it in the archive).

If
this and similar entries express anti-Zionist motivated violations of
the sacred ethos of national commemoration, then the illustration
below is representative of violations that express what some Israeli
sociologists term Neo-Zionist (counter-)narrative . Hence, example 3
is typical of a cluster of entries that were written around the time
of Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Gaza Strip (August,
2005). These entries perform condemnation of the Zionist narrative
that is celebrated via commemoration at the site.

Example
3

With
the completion of the deportation of Jews from Gush Katif ²

a
museum needs to be built

a
memorial

in
the memory of a country

that
was severed, destructed and vanished

in
the hands of evil and damned people

with
no heart, with no pity

The
interesting point with this entry, over and above the violation it
performs, is its reflexivity. The entry’s focus concerns the
very apparatuses through which national commemoration and sanctity
are performed, namely museums, memorials and rituals. The (unsigned)
inscriber suggests that alternative sites and rituals should be
constructed in order to commemorate the “destructed” Gush
Katif. By doing so, the inscriber does not dissociate notions of
sacredness from sites of commemoration, but rather protests and
suggests that national (Zionist) commemoration is erroneous. Entries
of this type, both inside the visitor book and outside Ammunition
Hill, de-legitimize the association between Judaism as understood and
practiced by some and the Zionist Movement. Note that the Hebrew term
used for the word “memorial” (Yad Vashem) is a
particularly charged one, because it is the name of the official
National Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Site
in Jerusalem. The entry is thus inter-discursive, because it alludes
to the claims of settlers in Gush Katif, who drew comparisons
between their state and the state of Jews in the Holocaust.

The
final illustration (Example 4, Figure 4, below), presents an act of
desecration of a rather different ideological background, and
concerns the politics of ethnicity in (Jewish) Israeli society and
specifically within the Israeli army. The entry was produced
sometimes around January, 2006.

Example
4

Golani
respect!!

[an
image of a tree]

All
the paratroopers shall die!! [an image of a crossed out snake]

[an
image of footsteps]

I
was here…

Figure
4: Anti-commemoration: Ethnic desecration

Golani
is an infantry brigade which has a long standing rivalry with the
Paratrooper brigade. The icon of the first is a (green) tree while
the icon of the latter is a (red) snake. The entry may be understood
as an occurrence within this rivalry, which celebrates Golani over
the Paratroopers. This entry accomplishes this celebration by
expressing a desire for the death of the paratroopers. This act is
expressed through both discursive and iconic means, which amount to a
“hybrid entry” that effectively enjoys the communicative
resources made available in and by the book. This act’s meaning
could have been limited only to the content of intra-military
rivalry, but for the fact that the Ammunition Hill celebrates the
paratrooper Brigade and is associated with this brigade. The site
and the museum present many pictures and heroic tales of the
legendary paratroopers, who were the first to arrive at and to
“liberate” the Western Wall. The symbolic execution of
the paratroopers that the entry accomplishes, rather than their
commemoration and preservation, is actually directed at the
Ammunition Hill site and the (ethno-)national narrative it tells.

The
meaning performed by the entry is even a more complicated, because
the Golani and the Paratrooper brigades have different popular images
of men and masculinities associated with them. While paratroopers are
associated with older images of elite Sabra masculinity, usually of
Ashkenazi background (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe), the
popular image of Golani soldiers is that of a rougher model of
masculinity, usually of Mizrahi background (Jews who immigrated to
Israel from Muslim countries). Hence within the frame of Israeli
politics of ethnic identity, an assault on the Paratrooper brigade
carries ethnic hues, and amounts to an assault on Ashkenazi hegemony.
It is directed at the local politics of commemoration, which lie
beneath the sacred register, exposing the fact that sacred
ethno-national commemoration (and ethno-militarism) is a
prestigious cultural resource. As Weiss indicates, Israeli culture
of commemoration “ultimately presents itself as a key symbol
that cuts across historical periodizations and ethnic divisions.”
Hence we see that the entry’s violation is not limited to
(symbolically) executing rather than commemorating paratroopers, but
also to exposing or the politics behind national commemoration and
social prestige and mobility that are bound to it.

Conclusions

It
is no news that where norms exist deviations and violations soon
follow, and where sanctities exist blasphemies and profanities can be
expected. At the commemorative visitor book in the Ammunition Hill
National Commemoration Site, these dialectics assume the body of
inscribed Jewish performances. There are two points that account for
this. First, the stage for visitors’ discursive-cum-iconic
inscriptions is cued as a “Jewish” stage, which is to say
that it has the semblance of holly Jewish symbolism and rituals that
concern writing and reading. This staging is pursued intentionally
and ideologically, in line with Zionism’s “civil
religion,” notably with regards to the pivotal moments of
sanctified commemoration, sacrifice and emotions of profound
indebtedness.

Institutional
staging, however, supplies only one half of the overall semiotics of
the site, i.e. the invitation. The complementary half, i.e. the
response, is supplied by the visitors themselves, which, according to
the ethnographic observations, are solely Jewish. Hence the site as a
whole and within it the surfaces of the visitor book, on the one
hand, and the consumers that populate these spaces, on the other, are
exclusive (and excluding) Jewish.

The
second point with regards to the dialectics of inscribed Jewish
performances, concerns the discursive nature of the stage. As argued
above, the medium that serves in this occasion, i.e. handwriting, is
not coincidental. It, too, marks the stage and the utterances therein
as “Jewish” performances. It, too, alludes to the
esteemed symbolism of the written word—and of occasions of
reading and writing it—in traditional Jewish custom. The
visitor book emerges as a politically mobilized cultural site of
entextualization.

Within
these Jewish dialectics, most entries in the commemorative visitor
book, confirm the Zionist story that is told at the site. They do so
through repeating and reciting its ideological tenets and its scared
register of discursive and iconic national commemoration. Perhaps
more interesting, and definitely more intriguing are those entries
that do not confirm or affirm the narrative unfolded at the site and
refute the sacredness that the site endows. What is both interesting
and paradoxical about these violations, is that they do not express
secular or liberal worldviews, which aim to dissociate the civic
sphere from religious symbolism. Instead, these violations are
predominantly expressions of fundamentalist Jewish ideologies, which
view the conjoining of national and religious worldviews as
problematical.

References

1
Shimon Kahaner, who is the Head of the Ammunition Hill Association
of Friends and the institution’s central authority, is a close
friend of Sharon and has formerly served with him in the army.

2
Gush Katif is the Israeli name that designates the area where
Jewish settlements were built inside the Gaza Strip.

1

TourismEpistemologiesAndTheirPractices2

Epistemologies
and their practices:

A
performance approach to ethnography in tourism

Chaim
Noy

Introduction:
Performing knowledge

This
chapter attends to tourism epistemologies, which concerns ways of
knowing tourism and tourists and the types of knowledge that academic
research on tourism produces. The chapter is part of a growing
critical movement—a critical turn—within the field of
tourism studies, seeking to reflect upon and appreciate the processes
by which discourses and practices of tourism research serve to
construct academic knowledge . This critical movement explores common
discourses and practices in tourism studies, which shape the type(s)
of knowledge(s) in the field, offering critique of received
traditions, on the one hand, and fruitful “creative vistas”
(Ateljevic, personal communication) for future research, on the
other.

The
deconstructive move I offer is accomplished through a reflexive and
critical (re)examination of a particular research project I conducted
recently. The research is an ethnographic study of a national
commemoration site in Israel, which was conducted during the summer
of 2006 , and which supplies a case study of the production of
academic knowledge. As part of the research, I spent about a month
observing and interviewing tourists and other visitors at the
symbolic site’s memorial museum, focusing on the impressive
visitor book which is centrally positioned therein. Importantly, my
approach to the memorial museum and as a whole, and specifically to
the visitors’ commemorative entries in the visitor book was
performative. I viewed the symbolic spaces of the site and of the
visitor book as stages on which tourists may act meaningfully. The
paradigm of performance studies is generally concerned with how
meanings and identities are socially created, sustained and
challenged, and with the practices and discourses through which this
is accomplished. The performance paradigm is inspired by radical
social construction, suggesting that social reality (defined broadly)
should not be presumed as a given, but is rather continually
(re)created, shaped and negotiated by ongoing struggles between
hegemony (the powers that be) and various oppositions. Within tourism
studies, the performance approach is highly creative and critical,
radically suggesting that tourism as whole should construed
performatively; that tourism is arguably defined as power-ridden and
embodied scenes on which some of the most central dramas of our days
unfold .

In
light of this, this deconstructive move concerns addressing my
ethnographic research in terms of performance. Performance
sensitivities and sensibilities are shifted from the tourists unto
the(ir) researcher, as my ethnography at the symbolic site is itself
rendered performatively. In other words, the tourism ethnography that
I conducted will be (re)viewed and theorized in a fashion that
resembles the ways I viewed and theorized visitors’
actions in situ, putting visitors’ visits and researcher’s
ethnography on similar footing. A performative rendering of
ethnographic practices is promoted, which is to say a
problematization of tourist ethnography, suggesting that research
practices in situ may be viewed not in terms of “academic
research” but in terms of “tourist visits.” By
doing so, the power and authority of the modern institutions of
tourism and specifically museums are critically acknowledged, and so
are the authority and the taken for granted social roles and
definitions of who are researchers. The traditional positivist
notions of neutrality and objectivity, and the view that holds the
researcher as an uninvolved observer occupying a position that is
external to the observed events and ideologies (a “fly on the
wall”) are undermined. Hence the reflexive (re)view of the
academic research sheds light on the different ideologies and
epistemologies that typically compete over frames of interpretation
in tourism.

In
what follows, I will make three stopovers, at what I call “research
scenes,” where academic knowledge in tourism studies is
socially constructed and processed. The first scene illustrates the
performative rendering of my ethnographic practices and ethnographic
presence at the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration Site, located
in Jerusalem, Israel. Yet a performance rendering of ethnographic
practices does exhaust the entire process of academic knowledge
production. Alternatively, ethnographic practices do not actually
terminate once the researcher leaves the site/field. Hence the
chapter will move to inquire into two additional scenes: practices of
decontextualization (to be refereed as “collecting practices”),
followed by practices of representation. In the capacity of exploring
the dialectics between the practices that serve to construct and
represent knowledge in the fields of tourism and academic research of
tourism, in these three scenes I will attend (albeit not
systematically) to three issues, namely embodiment, technology and
visuality.

Scene
1: Dasein or Being—looked at—There

Heidegger’s
famous notion of Dasein comes to mind when I reflect performatively
on my ethnography at the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration
Museum. The notion of Dasein promotes an ontological realization of
my (ethnographic) presence at the site. Literally defined as “life”
or “being,” and commonly taken to mean being-in-the-world
or being there, the concept is helpful in acknowledging the
existential weight of occupying a space and a social role in a given
field. When applied to ethnography, the notion of Dasein suggests an
embodied and occupied presence. The expression’s twofold
designation points at the complexities involved in doing ethnographic
inquiry in symbolic spaces, where competing frames of interpretation
and similar practices concerning knowledge creation in academia and,
in the present case, in symbolic sites of national commemoration. The
term “being” touches on an existential notion of
presence; a Heideggerian being-in-the-world which underlies the mode
of performance. This type of being-in-(the world
of-)ethnographic-research concerns the meanings and implications of
being within physical and semiotic confines of various places.

Yet
the sense of being is not abstract. It has times and spaces as
possibilities of materialization . The notion of Dasein concerns
particular locals—a sited-ness—in which “being”
transpires. This is true for all beings-in-the-world, and it is
complicated in particular for ethnographic inquiry, which is by
definition a situated and embodied inquiry that is pursued in
distinct “fields” or “sites.” As a method of
research, ethnography concerns being—of observing,
recording, interviewing, participating, interacting, feeling,
etc.—there. In situated practices are defined and
understood by spatial references to places and locations, which
reveal the relations between the researcher and the field. “Here”
or “there” are common spatial (deictic) terms at use to
describe distances and relations between the field and the homeplace.

Interestingly,
the deictic terms “here” and “there” are also
profusely used by tourists who inscribe in the site’s
impressive visitor book . These deictic terms are used as indexicals
that accomplish the task of producing entries performatively, through
fusing the text with the place in which it is uttered. Accomplishing
a meaningful and effective statement of presence, i.e. a performance,
necessitates an anchoring of the text in the space/on the stage
whereat it is revealed as a meaningful social action . For visitors
at the symbolic site, the actual (corporeal, “authentic”)
presence in the site is of crucial importance, and it is vital for
the effectiveness of their performances. Visitors make this clear by
repeatedly indicating that their performances are produced in
situ, and that they are anchored to the “here” or the
“here-ness” of the site.

The
next paragraphs supply examples of the notion of the researcher’s
presence or being, and show the uniqueness of Dasein when viewed
under the ideologies, epistemologies and circumstances characteristic
of modern tourism. These examples are illustration of observable and
traceable presence of the ethno-grapher or touist-grapher in the
symbolic site.

First, the presence of my research installation, which included a
notebook, a tripod, a camera and a video recorder (and additional
technical equipment), drew some attention on behalf of the museum
visitors, who sometimes interpreted it as a display of sorts. This is
not very surprising, considering the fact that these devices were
located inside the museum and inside spaces of exhibition, and that
museum goers are typically curious with regards to objects and
devices which they understand to be part of the display. Since the
presence of a researcher in such spaces is not commonplace, it is not
routinely expected. (Re)viewing the video recordings reveals the
interest visitors exhibit with regards to the devices I used: they
approach and examine them, sometime looking directly into the lends,
and discussing their meaning with fellow visitors. This was the
visitors’ way of indicating that the research apparatus is part
of what they take to be the exhibit. In fact, the video recording
captured a number of instances where I had to actually approach
visitors and kindly ask them to avoid manipulating the tripod and the
cameras (I had forgot these uneasy instances and was reminded of them
when viewing the video recordings). While the motivations behind
these interactions were obvious, the point is that in the symbolic
and semiotic spaces of the museum, these interactions illustrated an
expression of authority on my behalf, marking myself off form other
visitors and situating myself above them in terms of the range of
situated actions that are available to me. In other words, this was a
way to say “this is not an exhibit.”

Second,
my embodied presence too drew visitors’ attention. This took
the shape of both direct and indirect references. On a number of
occasions I was addressed directly, such as when inquiries regarding
the museum were addressed to me (questions regarding the location of
museum halls and lavatories). On one occasion, a visitor (who was an
Ultra-Orthodox Jew in his thirties) approached me smilingly,
announcing that “the Messiah will come!” (Hamashi’ah
yavo).¹
Indirect references to me were also made by visitors. These were
usually whispers and sneak glances (sometimes also chuckling), in a
way that revealed that my presence is a matter of/for discussion,
entertainment and perhaps some discomfort too. A memorable instance
occurred when I was attending to the equipment, and did not notice
that a few high school students approached the nearby hall. Since I
was absorbed in fixing the camera to the tripod, I did not realize
that they were able to observe me, when I suddenly heard the
surprised call from the first of these youths to have noticed me:
“Wow! I thought it’s a sculpture! Look!” (“Yuuh!
hashavti sheze pesel! Tir’u”). Since the video camera
was recording, the tape clearly discerns this cry. Indeed, why should
my figure, bent over the camera and tripod in an empty, darkly
lighten museum hall, not be taken to be a statue, which is to say why
should the researcher there not be taken in the context of a museum
to be a display of sorts? If in this context I am not viewed as a
visitor, what else might I be there? What else might my
actions there embody, and in whose (ideological) eyes is my
presence acknowledged and evaluated? What are the other
interpretative possibilities that are available for visitors who
encounter the ethnographer’s being in situ? In any case, the
video recorded the momentarily surprise—actually, a horrific
moment—when what seemed to the youth walking ahead of his
friends to be an inanimate commemorative sculpture suddenly started
moving. This moment of animation amounted in the eyes of the visitor
to nothing less than an act of resurrection. Note that this lies
squarely in the commemorative ideology of the site, which attempts to
“bring to life” the dead soldiers it commemorates.

Finally,
my embodied presence and movements were also captured, somewhat
paradoxically, by the technical devices which I used in order to
document visitors’ activities. As I look at the video tape my
own body is occasionally discerned, crossing the frame somewhat
ghostly (always looking away and not at the camera); at other times I
am recorded talking with my mobile phone or writing in my notebook
(see figure 1, below).

Here
I acknowledge the agentic role of the recording and documenting
devices which I used. I follow Latour’s line of thought as I
realize that in these circumstances, the video camera, which was
operating continuously, had its own role and performed its own
performance; once operating, it was not completely subordinated to
me. In other words, from the perspective of the camera’s lends,
my figure does not enjoy any particular (esteemed) status, and I am
caught in the frame just like any other museum visitor. The camera’s
framing, therefore, (re)positions and (re)presents me and inside the
museum, as I pass in front of it, rather than assuming the
photographer’s/tourist’s position behind it. The camera
is saying: “you too are observed.”

Figure
1: (Un)observed?: The researcher

Regardless
of whether these were face to face or technologically mediate
interactions, or whether they took the shape of direct or indirect
references, what these illustrations share is the delineation of the
ethnographer’s presence in situ. These interactions supply
documented instanced that make the presence of the ethnographer
visible and embodied, and hence traceable and documentable. A bit
like a chemical of which presence is revealed through interaction
with another chemical, both visitors’ and my equipment trance
my presence in situ. Moreover, all of these interactions not only
record my “being there,” but also propose various
interpretations and frames of understating. These are situated
interpretations that do not construct me as a “researcher,”
which is how I would have had it, but as an actor that occupies
various other meanings and social roles.

Scene
2: Collecting practices

Once
the ethnographer’s presence in situ is acknowledged, that is
once the diverse potential for physical and symbolic roles embodied
by the researcher in situ are recognized, the way is open for
examining another aspect which contributes to the ideology of
knowledge construction presently under investigation. This aspect
concerns collecting and documenting practices and materials, which
are pervasive in and pertinent for any type of empirical science .
Indeed, the very term ethnography includes a suffix that
conveys the importance and centrality of writing on processes of
constructing (social) knowledge and a social science discipline.

There
are numerous types of materials, data, and information that can be
gathered and collected through just as many methods of research. From
mass telephone surveys to in-depth interviews, and from structured
questionnaires to participant observation, in one way or another data
is gathered. ??(עוד קצת
על תפקיד איסוף
הידע במדעים
בככלל ובמדעי
החברה).
--Similar to many other forms of empirical research, ethnographies
too are concerned with collecting, storing and classifying data. Over
and above interviews with visitors, the research at the AHM was
dedicated to documenting visitors’ entries in the visitor book.
Furthermore, the data that is gathered must be of particular
worth, and not just anything can be gathered. Rather, the data must
be “authentic” on a number of grounds: for instance, it
must not be contrived (it is original), and the ways by which it was
accessed and collected must be revealed.

Within
the general context of tourism and specifically in the context of the
national commemorative museum, practices of collection and the
resultant collections are matters of central (ideological) concern.
“It is the museum, not the library,” Stewart correctly
argues, “which must serve as the central metaphor of the
collection.” This point was reiterated recently, in Macdonald’s
observations: “The idea of the museum has become fundamental
to collecting practices beyond the museum ... practices that
cannot only produce knowledge about objects but also configure
particular ways of knowing and perceiving.” The point of the
ensuing paragraph related to Macdonald’s mention of collecting
practices’ and role and how these practices are exercised
“beyond the museum.” In other words, the following
examples try to juxtapose evidences of research collecting practices
with of tourism and museums.

Typically
of ethnographers and others working with qualitative research methods
and data, what I “brought home from the field” eventually
amounted to a collection. Qualitative research is sometimes (dully)
concerned with what to do and how to analyze this vastly rich
material,²
yet presently the focus lies on acknowledging the fact that images
are transposed from the field unto the researcher’s workplace.
My research experience at the national memorial museum was no
different, perhaps beside the fact that compared to earlier research
projects, it contained not only a wealth of data, but data that was
gathered by various techniques and stored in various modalities.
These included field notes, audio recordings of ethnographic
interviews, digital documentation of various documents (including a
significant number of complete volumes of the site’s
commemorative visitor book), and video recordings.

Since
my research focused on the site’s voluminous visitor book and
visitors’ entries therein, a number of complete
volumes—including the one presented during the time I was there
and a number of volumes that I from the museum’s archive—were
digitally photocopied. What these documentation practices have
created to is a comprehensive collection of photo(copie)s of pages of
visitor book, that amounts to a second-order type of documentation of
the commemorative site’s corpus of visitor books. Figure 2
(below) shows the digital collection of pages of visitor books. The
collection, which includes high quality pictures of hundreds of
pages, is located on my computer’s hard disc. The image in
figure was created by screen capturing software. It illustrates a
page (a “window”) which includes twenty-four visitor book
pages. In the center of the figure, under the smaller images of the
book’ pages, information about the images is indicated, framing
them thus not as authentic commemorative scenes (which is how they
are framed in the museum), but as research data, to be organized and
analyzed.

Figure
2: Pages in the Window: Ethnographer’s collections

The
screen capturing operation allows to see not only the ethnographer’s
collection—high resolution pages of the authentic visitor book
at the Ammunition Hill museum—but also to notice the new
context into which the book’s pages have been transposed. While
the center of the screen (figure 2) is populated with the visitor
book pages, the top, right and left of the image reveal the
environment—the virtual workplace—where these images are
stored and available for analysis. For instance, on the bottom of the
screen, Microsoft Windows logo is recognizable (albeit the text is in
Hebrew), and so is Microsoft Windows Ruler, which shows that other
windows are open and other activities and programs are presently
underway (such as MS Outlook and Mozila Firefox browser, etc.).

Scene
3: Representation: Dis/embodied

The
final scene that plays centrally in the construction of disciplined
scholarly knowledge is of course that of representation. While less
critical attention has been given to the two scenes that were
examined examine above, much has been written about seemingly
“scientific” modes of representation in the social
sciences.

While
the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration Site promotes an embodied
sense of commemoration, which seeks to arouse patriotic sentiments
and emotional involvement within the visitors, scientific
representation is marked by disembodiment which aims at sustaining
neutrality and objectivity. From a critical perspective, both stances
are ideological, and both have technologies and esthetics at their
core. However, in the western-modern culture, the body—and
therefore embodied notions—is viewed as occupying a lower
stance on the latter of intellectualism and cultural capital, while
abstract notion—embodied so effectively by the very notion of
intellectualism, are highly esteemed .

In
the available space, I will supply an illustration of the erasure of
the researcher’s embodied presence in situ. Like the
illustrations above, the example will refer primarily to visual
practices of “scientification” in tourism and not
textual ones. Figure 3 (below) presents a digital photo of an opening
taken from one of the visitor books at the Ammunition Hill Museum.
The image nicely captures the vividness of the visitor book pages,
and their visual-cum-textual nature . Also, the pages show how
visitors’ entries to the book are captured and stored in situ.
In other words, once visitors chose to write in the book, their
written entries endure after they leave, and they are publically
accessible for the consumption of following visitors. Hence visitors’
inscriptions become animated elements within the museums’
display. This occurs because the visitor book is not located near the
site’s exit, but rather in one of the site’s innermost
halls, near the Golden Wall of Commemoration (which supplied the
emotional peak of the visit). In this way, the function of the
visitor book is transformed: it is not positioned there merely to
record visitors’ details (such as date of visitor, etc.), or
even reflexive impression, as visitor books typically do. Instead,
the book supplies a stage for ritualistic commemorative performances.
The visitor book achieves its ideological goals as a stage for
commemoration due to the fact that it is a documenting device.
Which is why literally speaking, what figure 3 evinces are traces
of visitors’ visit.

Moving
from the memorial site’s ideological use of documentation to
the social scientific use of the same, it should be noted that in
order to produce an image of satisfactory quality, I had to remove
the visitor books which I was photocopying from the dimly lit
archive, where they are stored, to a more convenient and location
outside the building. The margins of the photo in figure 3 show/tell
the story of its production, a story of the scientific reproduction
of images: the image’s perimeter evinces the building’s
outer wall (typically made of “Jerusalem stone”), and at
the bottom the researcher’s sandals and his toes are
discernable as well. These are the researcher’s footsteps
(literally speaking), which are traces of the embodied practices of
reproducing images in situ—the heavy volumes had to be
positioned on a lower location (in this case a low stone wall), in
order to be able to take their picture vertically from above. These
images supply evidence of the embodied presence of the researcher
taking the picture (thus anchoring back to the ethnographer’s
performance), and of the specific background wherein the picture had
to be taken.

Figure
3: Embodied twofold: Ethnographer’s (and tourists’)
footsteps

Of
course, while for the sake of (social) “scientification”
embodied traces of the visitors must be well preserved, the embodied
traces of the researcher must be omitted. Figure 4 evinces a
manipulated version of the same digital photo presented in figure 3,
of the type of that appeared in publications on the Ammunition Hill
Museum . In this version, the material context of production and the
embodied presence of the researcher are erased, and what is left is a
purified and disembodied “scientificated” image, which
conceals the story of its production. This act of cleansing
represents a(nother) step away from the embodied Dasein—with
its (presence) traces of presence—towards decontextualized
representation of the type that is (still) all too common in the
social sciences.³

Figure
4: Embodied visitors/Disembodied ethnographer

Conclusions:

--the
three scenes that were described above are spaces of performances.
Together, they contribute to the construction of a hermeneutic
circle, moving between sites of being, practices of collecting, and
eventually practices of representation.

--The
semiotics of traces in tourism, and of being in places.

--through
the way it was organized and through its means of representation,
this article also stressed and echoes the visuals clues and traces
that are so abundantly available in tourism.

--Finally,
nate that with all its subversiveness, what I did in this chapter is
actually and highly recommended and approved by basic social science
textbooks, some of which are adamantly positivist. The claim that
social science in general pushes for new research, rather that
re-examining (and when possible re-conducting) older research and
experiments is shared by most observers of the fields.

--(from
the abstract) Altogether, the inquiry leads to insights into the
construction of academic knowledge with regards to tourists and
tourism (i.e. epistemology), and to enriching tourists’
ethnographies (i.e. methodology). The inquiry is located in the
junction of critical explorations of ethnography, on the one hand,
and museum studies, on the other, with the performance paradigm in
tourism as the connecting thread. The research develops earlier
conceptualizations regarding the construction of meaning and power
relations between researchers, tourists and tourism institutions
(Noy, 2007).

--Lastly,
I use the term ethnography throughout referring not only to the
traditional (anthropological) practice defined as “field work
proper,” nor even as to ““ (ציטוט
ממישהו בספר
הביקורתי הכותב
על כמה שכיחה
האתנוגראפיה).
Instead, and in line with performative sensibilities, I see any and
every type of research in the social sciences as ethnography.
Let me explain: insofar as documents of sorts are created and crafted
(“graphy”) during or in any other way in respect to
social interactions, what we have as a result is ethnography . In
other words, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder or
(Goffmanesque) framer or interpreter, and the fact that some
researchers “deliver questionnaires,” while others
“conduct telephone poles,” and yet others “do
fieldwork”—they are all accomplishing situated and
interactional social roles.

Furthermore,
if the above concerned a broadening of the concept of ethnography,
then the following presents a type of specification, which concerns
the charged field of tourism and its research. Contra the claim of
positivist science for ?? of methods, methods are actually
field-sensitive. Research methods are not some kind of ideology-proof
devices that can be put in use identically regardless of the context.
First, and this is quite know, research methods are bearers of
ideologies, or epistemologies (from Edensor??). Further, they are
also implicated by the fields and by the ideologies where they
operate. This statement is rather iconoclastic, because it pulls the
carpet from beneath one of the strongholds of positivist science. Yet
as Urry’s repeatedly argued, tourism pervades our lives, and
where exactly does tourism transpire is a tricky question. Surely,
such symbolic suits as the Taj Mahal or the French Riviera are
tourist spaces; yet contemporary tourism scenes are by no means
(de)limited by and to the physical areas where tourists travel. As
shown elsewhere, much can be learned about the field of tourism from
attending closely and critically to the methods themselves, and
interviews with tourists might become sites where the semiotics of
tourism are central .

Cited References

1
In contemporary Israeli society and culture, this statement should
not be taken literally but politically. It marks the politics of
Jewish messianism and often fundamentalism.

2
Qualitative textbooks typically dedicate sections to the ways that
qualitative data should be treated. One memorable treatises is
Kvale's “the 1,000-page question.”

3
In line with sensitivity to the technologies that are involved in
the production of academic knowledge and to their roles therein, and
with the risk of remarking a negligible point, notice the paperclip
on the right side of the image. Indeed, in all the images that I
have produced, paperclips are visible. These paperclips helped me
hold down the surface of the visitor book pages horizontally, which
is required if a quality image is to be achieved taken (because the
shape of the book, the pages’ center tends to round and rise
thus creating an uneven surface, which does not allow the camera a
good focus). In Latourian terms, these paperclips are “tiny
hands,” that allow the researcher to hold the camera while
they are holding the pages. These are low-tech devices that join
others in the (subtle) manipulation that occurs during processes of
collecting and gathering data.

1

TourismEpistemologiesAndTheirPractices1

Epistemologies
and their practices: A performance approach to ethnography in tourism

Abstract

I
wish to take this space to rethink a research I recently conducted,
reported in the previous lecture (titled Performance and Discourse in
Tourism: The Narratives Visitor Books Tell). I employ reflexivity in
order to critically examine the production of academic knowledge with
particular reference to ethnographic practices in tourism research.
The deconstruction builds on an appreciation of the fact that there
are different epistemological discourses that compete over the frames
of interpretation in various tourist attractions (in this case, the
National Commemoration Site in Jerusalem, Israel). In this vein,
tourists' ethnography will be (re)viewed and theorized in a fashion
that resembles the ways I viewed and theorized visitors' actions in
situ, putting visitors' visits and researcher's ethnography on
the same footing. A performative rendering of ethnographic
practices is promoted—a problematization of ethnography which
is pursued by viewing researching practices in situ not in
terms of 'academic research' but in terms of 'tourist visits'. By
doing so, the power and authority of the modern institutions of
tourism and museums are acknowledged.

Alternative
and competing "frames" (Goffman) are emergent, especially
in cases where research is pursued—performed—in highly
symbolic and ideological settings. Over and above research practices,
the lecture will move to discuss various modes of representation and
the convergence and divergence between the discourses of academic
knowledge in the social sciences and in national commemoration.

Altogether,
the inquiry leads to insights into the construction of academic
knowledge with regards to tourists and tourism (i.e. epistemology),
and to enriching tourists' ethnographies (i.e. methodology). The
inquiry is located in the junction of critical explorations of
ethnography, on the one hand, and museum studies, on the other, with
the performance paradigm in tourism as the connecting thread. The
research develops earlier conceptualizations regarding the
construction of meaning and power relations between researchers,
tourists and tourism institutions (Noy, 2007).

Notes

I
see ethnography not only in traditional (anthropological) sense as
"field work proper," nor even only as "" (ציטוט
ממישהו בספר
הביקורתי הכותב
על כמה שכיחה
האתנוגראפיה);
instead, and in line with performative sensibilities, I see any and
every type of research in the social sciences as ethnography.
Insofar as documents of sorts are created and crafted ("graphy")
during or in any other way in respect to social interactions—then
we have ethnography . In other words, it's all in the eyes of the
beholder or (Goffmaneque) framer or interpreter, and the fact that
some researchers "deliver questionnaires," while others
"conduct telephone poles," and yet others "do
fieldwork"—they are all accomplishing interactions social
roles.

--This
article attends to tourism epistemologies, which concerns the ways of
knowing tourism and the types of knowledge that academic research on
tourism can and is produced. The article makes three stopovers at
three decisive moments in the construction of academic knowledge on
tourism, via ethnographic research (defined broadly [not only as
being in the “field,” but also as interacting with
informant or interwers. With Urry’s (1990) oft quoted
suggestion that tourism pervades out lives, where the “field of
tourism” is located is a tricky question. Surely, such places
as the Taj Mahal or the French Riviera are tourist spaces. Yet
contemporary tourism scenes are by no means (de)limited by and to the
physical areas where tourist travel.])

--Edensor's
chapter about space and performance and also epistemology is very
good!

הספר
שלו מצויין כי
הוא עוסק—בעיקר
בפרק ראשון אותו
אני קורא—בשילוב
שבדיוק מענין
אותי בין מרחבים,
פרפורמנס
והבנות-פירושים
ומערכי כוח.
אולם הנקודה
שאני עוסק היא
בהשלכת הדברים
האלה שהוא כותב
על תיירות ותיירים
והכוחות הפועלים
(למשל ההבנייה
של אתר גבעת
התחמושת), על
המחקר של התיירות
ועל החוקר.
לכן אני קודם
כל טוען לנקודת
מבט פרפורמטיבית
המסבה את GAZE על
החוקר ועל הפרקטיקות
המחקריות. חשוב
להבין שזוהי
נקודת המוצא
הרדיקאלית
של הטענה שלי.
השמוש "ברגישויות
ובמודעויות"
פרפורמטיביות,
שהנן ממילא
ביקורתיות (א-לא
אנדסור או גימבלט
או אדלר או אני),
לגבי המחקר.
הביקורתיות
שלה נובעת בראש
ובראשונה מן
היציאה מן "הראש"
של החוקר
ומן הנכונות
להביט אחרונית
על המחקר במושגים
ובשיח שאינם
מחקריים.

(במונחים
של אפיסטמולוגיות
מחקריות, החוקר
אמור להית מעין
זבוב על הקיר,
לא נראה,
לא מתערב
ולא משפיע.
אולם שיטת
מחקר איכותניות
בכלל, והTURN
הביקורתי
בחקר התיירות,
הביאו לבחינה
מחודשת—רפלקסיבית
וביקורתית—של
היחסים בין
החוקר ובין
השדה. גם
אני הופך את זה
על פניו ורוצה
לראות מה קורה
עם החוקר ולחוקר.
כנ"ל
גם לגבי שיטות
מחקר וייצוג
בהן אגע בחלק
השני שגם הן
אמורות להיות
מדעיות-נייטראליות,
ואילו אדנסור
מראה מאוד יפה
מדוע המציאות
שהן המציירות
קשורה בכלי
היצוג והמסירה
של המיצאות הזו.
[לכן חשוב
להדגיש כי הראייה
הפרפורמטיבית
הזו ייחודית
למחקר בתיירות].

לא
ברור לי מה זה
הדסיין הזה והאם
צריך לציין את
זה בכלל. למה
דסיין? כי
הדסיין מייצג
את ההכרה העמוקה,
הקיומית,
בנוכחות
של החוקר בשגה,
וממנה נגדרת
הגישה מופעית
לנוחותו ולהתנהלותו
של החוקר על
הבמה בשדה.
דסיין זה
משהו נוכח מונכח
וממומש המדבר
על הנכוחות
האמיתי—הקיומית—של
החוקר בשדה
המחקר והיחסים
המורכבים ביניהם.
אני חושב
שדסיין נמצא
תחת כל גישה
פרפורמטיבית
שהיא תמיד גם
קיומית-נוכחותית
קצת.

...

כמו
התייר, גם
החוקר עסוק
בדברים די דומים,
ועל כך עמד
הדיון בין
אנתרופולוגים
לחוקרי תיירות
על הדמיון והשוני
בין הדיסציפלינות
(כאשר הראשונים
טוענים לשוני
ו"בורחים"
מן הדמיון
ומן ההשוואה
לשני, ואילו
השני טוענים
להיון התרבותי
של מגלי-מפרשי
תרבויות, הקשור
בראשון).

אני
אגע בשלוש פרקטיקות
מרכזיות, למחקר
איכותני-אתנוגראפי,
ששתיים מתוכן
משותפות למובעים
של החוקר ושל
התייר והשלישית
היא ייחודית
למופע ה"מדעי"
של חוקר.
הפרקטיקה
הראשונה היא
"ההמצאות
במקום" (אכן,
זו הסיבה
שיש דסיין).
הפרקטיקה
השנייה היא מה
שמקובל לחשוב
אצל תיירים
כצילום (ר'
אנסור המציין
יצלום כפרקטיקה
תיירותית).
אולם בעוד
שגם אני חושב
שחלק חיוני מן
המופע התיירותי
קשור בצילום
(אדנסור
ואדלר), עם
כל החשיבות שאני
מקנה לצילום
אני רואה את
הצילום כתת-פעולה
בתוך פעולות
האיסוף והתיעוד,
הכוללת גם
מזכרות, רשמים,
יומנים ועוד
(סטיוארט).
גם בהיבט
מופעי זה אני
רואה את הדמיון
והגשר בין החוקר
ובין התייר,
שכן גם החוקר
עסוק בתיעוד
וביצירה של כל
מיני סוגים של
רפרודוקציות
(נרטיביות,
חזותיות,
חומריות,
ועוד – על
כך גם אדנזור,
אדלר ואני
מדברים).

Introduction

Dasein
or Being (looked at) There

--a
number of people ,

--one
person (an Ultra-Orthodox Jew in his thirties) approached me
smilingly, announcing that "the Messiah will soon come!"
(Hamashi'ah ??); some other visitors whispered and sneaked
glances at me (sometimes also chuckling) in a way that revealed that
my presence there is a matter for discussion, entertainment and
perhaps some discomfort as well. Most of the visitor however, did not
show any interest in me and in my activities there, which sits well
with other indications of involvement and participation in visitor
activities, such as reading and inscribing in the visitor book
(only…)

Conclusions

Cited References