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6 Remaking Place Cultural Production in Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museums TAMAR KATRIEL EDITORS' COMMENTS "Remaking Place: Cultural Production in Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museums" is the title of Tamar Katriel's chapter. Her focus is on current attempts in Israel to promote certain versions ofhistory by creating anew, by reconstructing 'old' places. The case she discusses involves the plethora of museums now being built to commemorate and celebrate the country's socialist-Zionist past and the values associated with this past. As she shows, the construction of such places should be seen in the context of history-making practices that inevitably construct selective interpretations of the past. She especially underscores how, within these practices, a certain selective image of Arabs is created to fit the aims of the museums. Recent work in the area of cultural studies has highlighted the nature of culture as an essentially constructed, potentially contested process involving a range of public communication forms and contexts (e.g., Appadurai 1981; Johnson et al. 1982; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984; Dominguez 1986, 1989; Borofsky 1987; Handler 1988; Leong 1989; Brow 1990; Gothercole and Lowenthal 1990). Tradition, in this view, "is a conscious model of past lifeways that people use in the construction of their identities" (Linnekin 1983:241). As studies in various parts of the world have demonstrated, historical museums are major participants in this ongoing cultural production 147 6 Remaking Place Cultural Production in Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museums TAMAR KATRIEL EDITORS' COMMENTS "Remaking Place: Cultural Production in Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museums" is the title of Tamar Katriel's chapter. Her focus is on current attempts in Israel to promote certain versions ofhistory by creating anew, by reconstructing 'old' places. The case she discusses involves the plethora of museums now being built to commemorate and celebrate the country's socialist-Zionist past and the values associated with this past. As she shouJs, the construction of such places should be seen in the context of history-making practices that inevitably construct selective interpretations of the past. She especially underscores how, within these practices, a certain selective image of Arabs is created to fit the aims of the museums. Recent work in the area of cultural studies has highlighted the nature of culture as an essentially constructed, potentially contested process involving a range of public communication forms and contexts (e.g., Appadurai 1981; Johnson et al. 1982; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984; Dominguez 1986, 1989; Borofsky 1987; Handler 1988; Leong 1989; Brow 1990; Gothercole and Lowenthal 1990). Tradition, in this view, "is a conscious model of past lifeways that people use in the construction of their identities" (Linnekin 1983:241). As studies in various parts of the world have demonstrated, historical museums are major participants in this ongoing cultural production 147 148 Tamar Katriel of a shared past and sense of place (Horne 1984; Lumley 1988; Clifford 1988). As such, they serve as major vehicles in the creation of contemporary "imagined communities" (Anderson 1983). Not surprisingly, many of these museums and historical sites are permeated with a spirit of nostalgia. A nostalgic interest in the past is a well recognized feature of fast-changing, postindustrial societies (Davis 1979). It finds its expression in a variety of history-making practices, of which the establishment of local heritage museums is a major one. Many of the aforementioned interpretive studies of museums and sites, which combine visual displays and verbal interpretation in telling a localized historical tale, have been highly rewarding both as contributions to the general study of cultural production and as a source of insight into the processes of social legitimation and identity formation of particular groups as they are reflected in the preservation and re-creation of their heritage. Writing about history museums in the United States, Wallace says that "on any given summer afternoon, a considerable number of Americans go to visit the past" (1981:63). In Britain, according to Lumley (1988:1), "new museums are being set up at the rate of one a fortnight." Documenting the recent museum boom in Israel, one recently published museum guidebook states that "there is a passion for museums in Israel, a passion for preserving and interpreting the past" (Rosovsky and Ungerleider-Mayerson 1989:6), while another guidebook states that these "museums have become a central cultural factor in Israeli society, so much that one can speak of a revolution, which finds its expression not only in the number of museums but also in the range of their activities" (Shalev 1990:13). The flourishing during...

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