I've been asked to post this review of Nadia Abu El Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, generally only available through university sources, and I'm happy to oblige. Readers will be familiar with El Haj -- see previous posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

First is the short version that was actually published: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Alexander H Joffe. Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Chicago: Oct 2005. Vol. 64, Iss. 4; p. 297. Those interested can read it here, in PDF.

The much longer version can be found, in full, in the extended entry below.

Looking Glass Archaeology

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. 312 pages. 20 figures. 4 maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. $50. *

Few Middle Eastern societies have had the dubious fortune of enduring the full gaze of Euro-American social science. Israel has been analyzed like few societies globally, in no small part by indigenous social scientists, and it was only a matter of time until the subject of archaeology was scrutinized. Nadia Abu el-Haj’s new volume brings both a deceptive style of erudition and high level of tendentiousness to the subject. So much so that the book is in fact more revealing of academic trends than it is of Israeli archaeology and society. What it reveals is not good.

Her book, a revision of her 1995 Duke University dissertation, proports to analyze the role of archaeology in creating modern Israel’s “origin myth” (p. 3), a formulation that tips her hand immediately. In the tradition of Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, nationalism for Abu El-Haj is a purely modernist, artificial and invented phenomenon, which is intimately related to the Zionist colonial project. She is equally dependent on analyses of ‘settler-colonial’ phenomena by Nicholas Dirks, Partha Chatterjee and others. In her view Israeli archaeology is an instrument in the “formation and enactment of the colonial-historical imagination and the substantiation of its territorial claims” (p. 2).

Abu El-Haj argues that the role of Israeli archaeology was to “efface Zionism’s colonial dimension” by assuming the archaeological record contained “remnants of nations and ethnic groups” (p. 4-5). To understand how archaeology became and functioned as a “cardinal institutional location of the ongoing practice of colonial nationhood, producing facts through which historical-national claims, territorial transformations, heritage objects, and historicities “happen”” (p. 6) she adopts an approach from the history of science. Derived from the work of David Bloor, Ian Hacking and others, she seeks to “explicate the processes through which science and society were and are actually reconfigured. I do so by focusing on the interlocking institutions and communities of practice out of which artifacts, maps, names, landscapes, architectures, exhibitions, historical visions, and political realities, as well as arguments, have all been constructed.” (p. 7).

Her approach may therefore be characterized as broadly construed social constructivism, with her apparent goal the unraveling of what she obviously regards as a collection of interlocking fictions. At the heart of her critique is an undisguised political agenda that regards modern and ancient Israel, and perhaps Jews as a whole, as fictions. Her work should therefore be seen in the context of recent deconstructive analyses of Biblical Archaeology, and the Bible itself, with which she shares a remarkable vehemence. (1) The comments below critique what is a deeply disturbing and badly flawed book.

Writing about archaeology typically lurches between extremes, not exactly the sublime to the ridiculous, but rather from admiration to admonition, even loathing. Amy Dockser Marcus’s The View from Nebo (New York, 2000) is one example of the former, grasping at a bare handful of hopeful signs and portents, operating on the theory of world peace through archaeology, a prospect as undesirable as it is unlikely. Professionals are not much better: Witness the shrill tone of contributors to the collection edited by Lynn Meskell, Archaeology under Fire (London, 1998). The ill-disguised anger, even self-hatred, evinced by professionals is only the latest example of our belated grasp of the obvious, that we ‘knowledge workers’ are weak, subordinate, and complicit, occasionally to dark forces. The question then becomes what to do about it. Some retreat into ‘science’ but the socially conscious and liberation minded usually propose equally credulous variants on the ‘power to the people’ theme, and leave implicit the wise guidance of the vanguard. (2) At the root of the problem are the social and political roles of the scholar. Are we to ‘objectively’ document or to participate? Can such a distinction be made at all? These are by no means new questions, but they are especially poignant once again.

The author does not present a history of Israeli archaeology as such, but rather an anthropology of the relationship between an archaeology and its society. A considerable portion of the book (roughly chapters 2 through 6) does present a sort of history of archaeology, from the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865 through the Six-day War of 1967. In doing so she is at pains to demonstrate how the settler-colonial-national archaeology of Israel emerged seamlessly from the colonial archaeology of the West. She has admirably assembled a mass of material, and to employ her tortured metalanguage, shows how the ‘staging’ of geography, cartography, linguistics, archaeology and allied fields were ‘entangled’ in the colonial project.

Much in the same fashion that Claude Condor and his Victorian counterparts referred to the Bible for authoritative accounts and a sense of legitimation, Abu El-Haj cites the Jean and John Comaroff, Gyan Prakash, Thomas Kuhn, of course Edward Said, and other like-minded luminaries of post-modern and post-colonial anthropology. Such persistent appeals to academic authority (rather than historical evidence) are typical of both post-colonial and graduate student rhetoric. But these appeals are strangely constrained; Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural production is mentioned, but Antonio Gramsci and hegemony are not.

Taken a few paragraphs or even a few pages at a time her historical analysis is useful and convincing, if not entirely original. Her focus, however, is far too narrow. She ignores most dimensions of the 19th and 20th century worlds. Imperial politics are virtually unmentioned, along with finer grained developments with a bearing on her ‘settler-colonial’ thesis, such as the image of the ‘Holy Land’ in the West, central intellectual debates in the development of archaeology like the problem of race in early Assyriology and the ‘Babel und Bibel krieg,’ early archaeological institutions, and the emergence of Middle Eastern travel and tourism. (3) In this respect she displays her debt to Said; a narrow selectivity and dramatic disregard for material which does not fit the thesis.

The theoretical key to her argument lies in the nature of science and reality. Abu El-Haj largely follows the ‘Strong Programme” and proposes that ‘science’ should be regarded as an enterprise which reproduces and reinforces the values of the dominant social group, and that science itself is regarded as ‘progressive’ value in itself. Beyond this instrumental character, the very epistemology of ‘science’ creates ‘facts’ that are then situated into preexisting categories. This is to say that archaeological data are not discovered but invented. It is from this foundational assumption that the remainder of her argument flows. There are many weaknesses to this, not least of which is that it assumes archaeology is a science. While many inside and outside the profession fervently wish this to be true, it is not.

Straddling uncomfortably several ‘human sciences’ and drawing on the techniques and, unconvincingly, a smorgasbord of hard science theory, archaeology is at best an unstable boundary phenomenon. More to the point, during the 19th and half the 20th century, archaeology was an adventure, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, sometimes dressed up as a science. And for Zionism and Israeli archaeology as a whole even the rhetoric of science in archaeology is largely absent. The critical issue is not how science was construed or even done but how it was received. Archaeology was and largely remains a uniquely popular phenomenon, dependent on public interest, goodwill, and largesse to vastly greater degrees than other disciplines. In America the scientific stance is as much an opportunistic adaptation to the political economy of science as it is to its putative ideology. (4)

Latour has also pointed out that the types of analyses which have explored the social operation of laboratory sciences simply do not apply to the social sciences. (5) Abu El-Haj’s science studies approach is a means to put a new and more scientific gloss on standard post-colonialist tropes. This is precisely the sort of appeal to authority that she accuses Israeli archaeology of, only in her case it is a kind of anti-science. It is unconvincing and one wonders whether she believes it herself. But it is not surprising that the bulk of this is relegated to a long series of footnotes (pp. 285-288) that do not ‘conjoin’ with the bulk of her narrative. Overall, the constructivist stance undermines the entire exercise. The choice of worlds appears to be between Wittgenstein and Popper, worlds of our own making and one which we more or less all share. (6) Without a shared, if critically understood reality, there is no a priori reason to continue, or to read the book. Her politics, however, flow directly from her epistemology. Since reality is what we make of it, anything that is done may be undone. In terms of scholarship, however, it apparent that her representation is so selective and partial as to bear little resemblance to her subject. What is written must therefore by judged largely by what is absent.

The central issue is obviously the relationship of archaeology to society. Archaeologists themselves have begun exploring the impact of their discipline on high culture, albeit with mixed success. (7) Where they have largely failed thus far is grasping archaeology as a low culture concept, which it surely also is. Abu El-Haj would retort that settler-colonial archaeology utterly and profoundly reshaped the entire physical and cognitive landscape, making its results (or inventions) implicit in all surroundings. But like studies of archaeology and nationalism as a whole, this observation verges on becoming a truism. Charting and naming space as a means of exerting a claim are hardly unknown in the world, nor are expressions of complex ideological blends of the past and future through the architecture and planning of the present, but one would not know it to read her account. Surely a trip to see the obelisks and temples of Washington, D.C., perhaps via the healing waters of Bethesda (John 5:24), or the port of Alexandria, might prove this point.

Furthermore, the cartographic and linguistic aspects of Western imperialism and Zionism have been most extensively discussed by scholars such as Dov Gavish, Haim Goren, and Ruth Kark, whose work Abu El-Haj ignores. (8) Similarly, the attitudes of individual imperial age archaeologists, most notably W.F. Albright but also lesser lights such as R.W. Hamilton, are overlooked, along with unique ‘multi-cultural’ institutions such as the Palestine Oriental Society. She even neglects key Palestinian figures such as the physician-ethnographer Tewfik Canaan and the Department of Antiquities member and later American University of Beirut faculty member Dimitri Baramki. (9) These omissions, the very fabric of “interlocking institutions and communities of practice,” do not inspire confidence. Once Zionism becomes the primary subject, her approach becomes even more selective and focused. To “forge” obviously has a dual meaning for Abu El-Haj. She also drives home her point and animus with, among other things, the irritating use of italics, to highlight her every insight, quotation marks to accentuate the artificiality of the denoted phrase or concept, and long, rambling footnotes.

But any discussion of how high culture connects to low culture must include a review of the locations where this really happens in an active sense, not least of all school curricula, pamphlets, and newspapers. On these Abu El-Haj is largely silent, choosing instead to retread the familiar ground of Zionist nature walks. Her omission may be contrasted with the work of Amatzia Baram on Ba’athist Iraq or Asher Kaufman on ‘Phoenicianism’ in Maronite Lebanon, not to mention Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s on Masada in Israeli culture. (10) Her determination to focus on high culture products such as museums and ‘space’ is again in the tradition of Said. Not coincidentally, these are precisely the subjects explored most cogently by leftist Israeli academics, whom she cites approvingly and repeatedly. They, like the revisionist Israeli ‘New Historians’ are at least familiar with their subjects.

Whatever might have been said or created by archaeology is received differently by pluralist society. People heard, and hear, what they want to hear; as Yaacov Shavit notes, in a critically important English-language paper not cited by Abu El-Haj, Israeli archaeology was many different things to different people. (11) Historical memory, a concept she invokes without mentioning Pierre Nora or Maurice Halbwachs, is produced throughout every society and not merely among intellectuals. As if to compensate for her elevated focus, she tries to grasp the ‘meaning’ of the ‘facts’ she has gathered by a kind of crypto-ethnography, overheard snippets of tourist chatter, conversations with unnamed informant archaeologists, and commentary from ever reliable tour guides. Does this chart public opinion or public policy in any meaningful way? It is a flimsy and unconvincing method for entering into the gestalt of Israeli society. If nothing else it is undone by her pretending to straddle the impossible boundary between observer-independent and observer-dependent relations. Her understanding of Israeli politics is simplistic and falls back on convenient dichotomies; religious versus non religious, Mizrahi versus Ashkenazi, and of course, religious-nationalist ‘settlers’ versus everyone. (12) Ultimately, Abu El-Haj’s anthropology is undone by her epistemology and ill-informed narrative, intrusive counter-politics, and by her unwillingness to either enter or observe Israeli society with a modicum of sympathy or generosity.

Archaeologists, it must be admitted, do not typically write useful social histories. But with a few notable exceptions such as George Stocking and Marshall Sahlins, neither do anthropologists. Situated in the timeless present, anthropology is especially ill suited to the task of building and then interpreting social and intellectual history. Its acute sensitivities to questions of power and knowledge are rarely matched by an appreciation of how things got that way. It is, frankly, too hard for most anthropologists, there are too many twists and turns, too much detail, history, narrative, biography, and politics to integrate. Her approach is therefore schizophrenic. On the one hand there is reductionism, as she extracts issues out of context, such as 1950s debates over early Israelite settlement and collar-rim storage jars, and makes them proxy for fundamental debates over Israeli identity and nationhood. On the other is the kitchen sink approach, as in her chapters on Jerusalem, the navel of all complexities, which bounce almost incoherently between issues of archaeology, urban planning, architecture, heritage, and the like, and are in any case a repetition of her 1995 journal article. And in the middle things are strangely skewed. L.A. Mayer, for example, is mentioned only in connection to somewhat obscure excavations he undertook in Jerusalem and at a synagogue site rather than his monumental work on Islamic art and archaeology. The effect is a representation of Israeli archaeology that is simply bizarre.

These are among the reasons that the book, like most post-colonialist work, operates in a closed world, addressed only to the intellectually and politically like-minded. The inaccessibility of her language and baroque form of argument seem deliberate. Her engagement in debating the narrow doctrines of the day and its impossibly recondite rhetoric makes a clerical analogy unavoidable, a point made long ago by Julien Benda and Raymond Aron. The very category, settler-colonial, a staple of post-colonialist writing, creates a structure for her anthropology that freely ignores the mass and nuance of history, culture, and politics in Israel, the Middle Eastern, and globally. On this we may quote Bruce Kuklick, writing in a wholly different context, American ‘cultural imperialism’ (13):

It may be foolish to think we can rid these concepts of evaluative overtones, but their primary characteristic ought to be their expository power. Many historians recognize these truisms but think they can define in a precise and limited way the concepts they wish to function in their explanations: "I will mean by 'appeasement' only the rational attempt to conciliate a possibly dangerous power." But when historians adopt a conceptual framework they inevitably generate ideas from our general educated store, and import into their history whatever penumbras of meanings the words have in ordinary life. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass Alice objects to Humpty Dumpty's belief that he can mean by a word just what he chooses it to mean; she doubts whether words will intend only what he wants them to. Humpty says that the question is: who is to be master, me or the word? Carroll wants us to recognize that the answer is, at least, that Humpty is not. Concepts are social products whose interwoven associations escape our individual control.

The source of Kuklick’s disdain for the doctrinaire application of categories is clear:

It is rather that I have a visceral dislike of the predictable and boring criticism that … educes from the writings of those using the terminology of cultural imperialism. Even more important, I am suspicious when such scholarly criticism is so obviously rooted in the politics of a certain era; so plainly bears the scars of that era; and was, as politics, so mightily contested.

In an offhand manner Abu El-Haj cites colonial American, the British Raj, and ‘Palestine/Israel’ as examples of ‘colonial-settler’ archaeology, but this is not explored. (14) One difference is of course that the colonial project in Israel was played out in 1/5 the time it was for North America, so it was measured in ‘real time.’ But despite the ponderous intellectual apparatus and metalanguage of anthropology, conspicuously absent is any trace of the comparative method. True, as noted above, no modern Middle Eastern society has received the same level of attention of Israel, nor has any other Middle Eastern archaeology. But studies of depth and sophistication are appearing on archaeology and nation-building in ‘invented’ countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran, which make the case of Israeli archaeology rather less special. (15) The denial of comparison has the deliberate effect of making Israeli archaeology appear almost singularly alien, placed, like Israeli society at large, into a condition of ‘alterity’.

The lack of comparison is the final, and fatal flaw, since it means the reader must rely on the total immersion experience of the author, and her observer-dependent conclusions, including her political agenda. Her quest is not comparison with other examples of real archaeology, but with ideal types and still broader quarry. A real comparison would necessitate in-depth knowledge of local history and global archaeology that would muddy the broad strokes that she so obviously wishes to paint. Fortunately, others have begun to fill in the gaps, and these inevitably complicate the story. But like post-colonial theory generally, her approach in effect declares everything that ‘existed’ before the coming of the West (and its intellectual habits) as somehow more real and more genuine. This essentialism, driven by an epistemology which sees reality as merely emanations of the mind or the will, is the basis of the new exceptionalisms, baroque victimographies, and solipsistic explorations that are the foundations of so much modern social science.

What then are the real goals the book? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the effort is designed to contribute to the deconstruction of the legitimacy of Israel as a modern, and ancient, entity. Her current research on the “use of genetic evidence in historical inquiry, specifically attempts to isolate distinctive genetic markers of Jewishness through which ancient histories of migration are being traced and claims to Jewish descent evaluated. This project will examine the implications of genomics for questions of history and identity, race and territory at the turn of the new millennium” (http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/faculty/bio/nadia.html) promises to extend this deconstruction to Jews at large, and her efforts have received enthusiastic support from the MacArthur Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Fund for Anthropological Research, and the Institute for Advanced Studies. From here it is a short step toward the logical conclusion advanced in another new book, which explicitly equates Israeli archaeological practice with that of the Nazis. (16)

Given that her counter-politics is explicitly Palestinian, what then of her understanding of archaeology in that society? Once again she both gets the story wrong and her method backfires on her. The most glaring omission from the scholarly point of view is her failure to mention Albert Glock, the father of Palestinian archaeology. (17) A transplanted American Lutheran with an Assyriology degree, Glock worked with Paul Lapp at Taanach, was director of the Albright Institute, and eventually set up the archaeology department at Bir Zeit University. He trained the first cadre of Palestinian students, but was pushed out in a power struggle and then was finally murdered, allegedly by Hamas. About Glock, a tragic and somewhat bizarre figure who for all intents and purposes wrote the manifesto and blueprint for Palestinian archaeology (18), Abu El-Haj has not a word. Possibly this is because his story simply doesn't fit her painfully circumscribed narrative, nor does it have a particularly nice ending. Obviously she was not writing an overt manifesto about Palestinian archaeology, but any meaningful discussion of Israeli archaeology must mention Glock, since he was unique in his approach and his devotion. Unlike Abu El-Haj he was neither coy nor clever, he did not conjure a fantasy world in order to tear it down, and his intellectual and political programs did not have a zero-sum mentality. And, it must be added, when he did archaeology instead of polemics he was a fine scholar, who maintained collegial relations with everyone including Israelis.

Relying further on a variety of news stories, Abu El-Haj seeks to demonstrate either that Palestinians are not interested in or do not need to emulate the Israeli approach to archaeology as heritage. But why should this be so? After questioning several unnamed Israeli archaeologists she states that “What becomes evident in all this talk about Palestinians, archaeology, and heritage is the manner in which the epistemic culture produced at the juncture of archaeological practice and settler nationhood has produced archaeology as the most appropriate form of historical practice, of temporal and territorial consciousness, and of nationhood itself.” (p. 258). This appears to state that the medium is the message, but fails to explain why Palestinians were not and are not interested in archaeology. The unintended subtext, however, is that Palestinians aren’t interested because they are timeless and essential, and the matter is dropped there. (19)

Filling in what is missing from her text becomes fatiguing. In the end there is no reason to take her picture of Israeli archaeology seriously, since her selection bias is so glaring. Beyond that, like all post-modernism the very tenets of her philosophy undermine her conclusions. As Zagorin notes, "What is commonly not understood or is overlooked, however, is that the skepticism and relativism endemic to postmodernist philosophy cuts the ground from any moral or political stand its adherents might take; for it historical facts are pure constructions and objectivity and truth have no place in history, the humanities, or the social sciences, then there is no particular reason to give any credence to the intellectual claims and moral or political arguments that postmodernists themselves may advance." (20)

But Abu El-Haj concludes on a truly shocking note, suggesting that with the destruction of the archaeological site called ‘Joseph’s Tomb,’ an attack during which a real person, a no doubt hybridized Israeli Druze named Yusuf Mahdat, was killed, “Palestinian demonstrators eradicated one of Israel’s ‘facts on the ground’” (p. 281). Are scholars now in the business of advocating the eradication of 'facts' rather than their explanation? If that is the case, what are we to make of the Waqf’s evisceration of the Temple Mount? In a footnote she approvingly cites Rashid Khalidi’s vulgar suggestion that the Western Wall only emerged in Jewish religious consciousness and praxis in the last few centuries. Is this merely another ‘invented tradition’ which may be wiped clean? (21) Are scholars then to remake the present as well as the past? We seem unworthy of being entrusted with either.

Archaeology and politics, though forever joined, are fundamentally incompatible. (22) That said, if the effort is not made to separate them, politics overwhelm and ultimately invalidate scholarship, poisoning high and low culture alike. In declaring this no one is trying to silence debate or suggest scholars should neither feel passionate nor be involved in affairs of the day, in fact, those sorts of accusations are more typical of attempts to silence. It only suggests that scholars should not act as politicians or propagandists, or make reference to their scholarship when they do so. Furthermore, politics that are liberatory, that are virtuous, are by definition immune from criticism, which makes them neither politics, nor scholarship, but articles of faith, the most dangerous thing of all.

What then are the responsibilities of the intellectual? Are intellectuals to follow the corrosive Marcuse-Foucault-Said tradition and act as celebrity provocateurs, or worse, cultural berserkers? Perhaps after 9/11 and the Afghan war intellectuals are in the same place as 1968, having first to make choices about civility and reason, or 1955 (to take the date of Aron’s publication challenging the communists and existentialists), or 1848, and so on. These are pivotal moments when we have to decide whether scholarship and universities are engines of narrowly defined progress, based on slavish adherence to romantic doctrines which promote good feeling equality but which demand in turn absolute obedience and ultimately violence, or something else, something much harder to define and to hold. If this demands a split in our lives, then so be it. As Abu El-Haj has once again demonstrated, without that split, without that even quavering aspiration to self-regulation, to objectivity and truth, however vague and elusive these may be, the results may be dark indeed. She is, however, hardly unique.

Speaking of the Red Queen, Alice observes that in the end “she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a little doll, and was now on the table merrily running round and round after her own shawl, which was trailing behind her.” Abu El-Haj has written a flimsy and supercilious book, which does no justice to either her putative subject or the political agenda she wishes to advance. It should be avoided.

Alexander H. Joffe
Purchase College

Notes
1. E.g., Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, (London, 1996); Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, (New York, 1999).

* A shorter version of this review will appear in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.