Displacement, Memory, and Community Heritage Work in the Old City of Acre (Israel)

Author(s): Evan P. Taylor

Year: 2018

Summary

In 2001, the Old City of Acre, a Palestinian quarter of the mixed Jewish-Palestinian municipality of Acre in northern Israel, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and state projects are underway to transform the Crusader and Ottoman-era landscape into a tourist attraction. This research asks how residents, most of whom belong to internally displaced families of 1948, are navigating the state heritage project. Memories of displacement  and of the relative safety and autonomy found in the Old City in the years thereafter converge with aspirations toward maintaining the area as place of possibility for Palestinians in Israel. This paper summarizes select residents' projects as they engage with and resist the commodification of their city. It also considers contributions that ethnographic research on memory and community resistance make to the critique of archaeological practice in Israel/Palestine and the potential for heritage practice grounded in local ethics of care.

Cite this Record

Displacement, Memory, and Community Heritage Work in the Old City of Acre (Israel). Evan P. Taylor. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441389)

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Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 711