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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2017
Heritage is a key site of politics in the Middle East. Recent episodes of the relentless destruction and construction of heritage in the region convey just how deeply intertwined it is with the making (and unmaking) of the postcolonial state. In Palestine/Israel, heritage has developed over a long history into an important site where both state power and resistance against it are produced, reshaped, and disseminated. A current proliferation of urban regeneration projects there is linked to the struggle against the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, as well as the incomplete, truncated emergence of a Palestinian state. Most of these heritage projects are carried out by semi- or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In this essay, I argue for the value of thinking about heritage in terms of government and state-making, or more precisely in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to reveal the kind of work it performs in Palestine and beyond. States govern also by heritage, and both states and the local communities they attempt to control mobilize the language of heritage for a variety of different purposes in a variety of different settings. What is distinctive about Palestine is the central role NGOs play in the institutionalization of a heritage field. In their work, they collapse the divide between mobilizing heritage to defend vulnerable communities and resist the encroachment of the (Israeli) state, and using heritage to develop institutions and help build the (Palestinian) state.
1 See De Cesari, Chiara, “Postcolonial Ruins: Archaeologies of Political Violence and IS,” Anthropology Today 31 (2015): 22–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This roundtable essay is based on my forthcoming book, Heritage and the Struggle for Palestine (Stanford, Calif.; Stanford University Press).
2 Bennet, Tony, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; Smith, Laurajane, Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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4 See El-Haj, Nadia Abu, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
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7 See, for example, Hammami, Rema, “Palestinian NGOs since Oslo: From Politics to Social Movements?,” in The Struggle for Sovereignty, ed. Beinin, Joel and Stein, Rebecca (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 84–93 Google Scholar.
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10 De Cesari, Heritage and the Struggle for Palestine.
11 Clarke, John, Coll, Kathleen, Dagnino, Evelina, and Neveu, Catherine, Disputing Citizenship (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), 175 Google Scholar.
