On the Ethnography and Historical Geography of Palestine

Abstract
 

My presentation will examine the two contrasting ethnographic approaches to the study of Palestinian peasantry by Gustav Dalman, the most prominent of European orientalists at the turn of the twentieth century, and Tawfiq Canaan, the ‘nativist’ author of Muhammadan Saints and Sanctuaries, and the most prolific ethnographer of Syrian Palestinian peasantries in the twentieth century.
 

At the turn of last century, we witness several approaches to the Ethnography of the Arab East.  The main European ethnographies were derived from archeological excavations and in which the natives were seen as residual living embodiments of old semitic cultures—biblical cultures in particular. Ottoman ethnographies by contrast were aimed at showing Arab and Turkish adaptations to modernism.
 

Biblification was the main form that defined European historical geography and ethnography of the Middle East, and Palestine in particular, in the late nineteenth century, and most of the 20^th century. This applies to the pioneer mapping of the holy land by the British based Palestine Exploration Fund, as well as the modern ‘scientific’ archeology by Ganneau, MacAlister, and Bliss. All of them were guided by their framing of their surveys of the holy land by attempts to discuss contemporary peasant lore as residual features of Biblical practices. Gustav Dalman, the famous theologian of the Palestine Institute, used his expertise in semitic languages to examine those practices with a primary focus on philology. His crowning achievement can be seen in his multivolume ethnographic study Arbeit und Sitte in Palestine.

Arab Ethnographers challenged this approach in a number of ways.

Nu’man al Qasatli, a draftsman working for the PEF produced one of the most original native ethnographies of Gaza and Hebron in Damascus  Al Rawdah al Nu’maniyeh(1878)

Muhammad Kurd Ali in his magisterial Khitat al Sham was a pioneer of a historical geography in the tradition of al Khitat al Tawfiqiyyeh by Ali Mubarak—which was basically a social history of Bilad al Sham.  
 

In the work of  Rafiq Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat they relied on positivist sociology to describe peasant and urban social fabrics using Weberian methodology in works commissioned by the Ottoman state. They also introduced modern ethnographic mapping of Syria and Palestine in placing Palestine within the ethnisities of the Ottoman east (1915). [Wilayat Beirut and Filastin Risalesi]
 

Canaan and Dalman were the two towering figures of peasant ethnography in Palestine.  Both framed their work in the context of biblical studies. Both Canaan and Dalman examined peasant lore in its many manifestations of material and spiritual life. Canaan, the doctor and expert on leprosy, was focused on healing practices and the cosmology of peasant life (saints, magic, water demons)—Dalman, the philologist and theologian, was focused on the agricultural cycle of peasant life (language, food, and daily life). Dalman was conscioiusly working with the German imperial civilizing vision of the “Orient”, exhibited in his study of imperial topography of Palestine, through the military mapping of WWI. Canaan by contrast was an Arab nationalist with a cumulative civilizational approach to Palestinian culture.

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