Sarah Gold

Archeology, Politics and Nadia Abu El-Haj

Even normally obscure scholarly books can benefit from a blast of publicity. Witness anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj’s Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Univ. of Chicago, 2001). It’s the kind of title that makes the average reader’s eyes glaze over.

But in the wake of Jane Kramer’s article in this week’s New Yorker about Abu El-Haj and the kerfuffle over her ultimately successful tenure application at Barnard (full disclosure: my alma mater), her controversial book has jumped to #4,505 on Amazon , which also reports that it is out of stock.

#4,505 isn’t quite the ranking most authors aspire to, but for a scholarly book, it seems ex-traordinary. (It’s also a good example of why Amazon has been such a boon for university presses.)

I have no opinion about El-Haj’s book, since I haven’t read it—although many others, in Kramer’s account, appear not to share this scruple. (They must be devotees of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read: not reading a book, he says, should never be an obstacle to having an opinion about it.)

(By the way, if you want to learn about Prof. Abu El-Haj, do not go to nadiaabuelhaj.com. It is not her own Web site, but that of her opponents, who have appropriated her name, one supposes, in order to lure unsuspecting Web surfers into reading their attacks.)

But based on Kramer’s article, one can see that Abu El-Haj is writing about the use of archeological finds for national/political purposes: ancient artifacts as a way for a modern people to establish a link to the land and a sense of national identity. And controversial as that has been in relation to her study on Israel, Abu El-Haj is not the only scholar making the argument that archeology is used in this way.

I’ve just edited a review of Who Owns Antiquity (Princeton, June) by James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. And his subject is also a controversial one: should ancient relics be “repatriated” to their country of origin?

This debate has bedeviled several major museums in recent years. I doubt that Cuno wants to be drawn into the Abu El-Haj debate, but his argument seems strikingly similar to hers. He writes, “There is no natural and indelible connection between antiquities and modern nation-states. The battle over our ancient heritage today is over false claims of ownership. It is a matter simply of politics.”

As a museum director, Cuno, PW’s reviewer acknowledges, has a stake in favoring the claims of a shared culture over those of nation-states. But he makes a strong case that could add fuel to the fire raging over ownership of antiquities.

Paris Update: More on Gregor Dallas’s Métro Stop Paris: “Gregor Dallas’s book has created quite a stir.  It’s Parisian launching was at W.H. Smith, and it was packed!”

That report is from Hilda Cabanel-Evans, the gracious owner of Tea and Tattered Pages. On a sadder note, she is considering selling the store, hopefully to someone who will “keep its character and spirit.” So if you’ve always dreamed of living in Paris and owning a charming bookshop cum tea room on the Left Bank, contact me and I can put you in touch with her.

What’s in My Bookbag: Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922. Remember Jeffrey Eugenides’s harrowing account of the Turks’ ravaging of Smyrna in Middlesex? Paradise Lost is the history of that terrible event, and Milton is a vivid writer who made a smashing de-but with Nathaniel’s Nutmeg in 1999.

Posted by Sarah Gold on April 18, 2008 | Comments (4)