Wednesday, October 25, 12:00 PM EDT

Sponsored by Xenia Seminars

This presentation seeks to identify and describe a field of scholarly work on cultural heritage in Palestine/Israel which points us towards visions of a future underpinned by hope rather than a despair born of a sense that violent and repetitive killing in the region is forever inevitable. The presentation was prepared partly in Tel-Aviv, partly in Bethlehem, and partly in London before and during October 2023. The pillars of the field include the following.

There is, to start with, the now classic work by Ammiel Alcalay, the highly distinguished City University New York/Queens College based scholar and poet with Jewish/Jugoslav/Serbian heritage who worked with Bosnian voices during their war to peer into a Levantine landscape “beyond Arabs and Jews”. His work finds an ethnographic and historical soul mate in the great Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari’s reading of the lives and work of the biographies of Arab and Jewish citizens in the formative years of the Arab Enlightenment in Jerusalem.

The emphasis Tamari makes about times and places of social and cultural sharing between Jews and Arabs before 1948 (despite the violent years between 1936-1939) is incorporated in the insistence by the founder and curator of Bethlehem’s Palestinian Museum of Natural History, Professor Mazin Qumsieh, that the “land of Canaan” has, historically, for the most part, been shared by all its citizens irrespective of religious, ethnic, or any other determination.

Ideas about sharing have, in turn and more recently, been explored by Safet HadžiMuhamedović whose ideas on shared sacred and secular spaces, expressed as they have been with motifs central to the formation of Xenia, wove and weave their way into his ethnographic and theoretical research work in Bosnia, a country related as first cousin (in a variety of ways) to Palestine. Most recently, Tamar Katriel, Professor Emerita of Education at the University of Haifa, has explored the “defiant discourse” used by Israelis opposed to the Occupation about the relation between speech, truth, and power.

A concluding and significant part of the presentation focuses on research by graduates of Bethlehem University’s master’s degree in tourism, pilgrimage, and cultural heritage, a university programme founded by Tom Selwyn in 2007 for the European Commission’s TEMPUS programme. Reference is also made at this point to work by more senior scholars and cultural specialists associated directly and indirectly with the themes discussed in both the MA and the Xenia project.

Tom Selwyn is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. He is widely published in the anthropological fields of tourism, pilgrimage, belonging, and cultural heritage, with regional interests in the Mediterranean, in particular Palestine/Israel. He is co-editor of the series Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials and Homecomings publishers and co-editor of Travelling Towards Home (2018) in that series. He is one of the founders and coordinators of the Xenia Series.

To register: 'Life After’ a talk by Professor Tom Selwyn Tickets, Wed 25 Oct 2023 at 17:00 | Eventbrite