Remaking of the Palestinian cultural landsape

1
Remaking of the Palestinian cultural landsape

• Natural process of sequent occupance, ethnic
  cleansing, or genocide?

2
What is culture?

• Culture
• The features of the way of life of a group of
  people transmitted from one generation to
  another.
• Tradition or custom.
• A system of signs and symbols.
• Two types of culture
• Material culture The material features of the
  way of life of a group of people. For example,
  style and material of dwellings, clothing, tools,
  monuments, etc.
• Non-material culture The non-material features
  of the way of life of a people that include
  religion, economic system, political system,
  historical experience, shared perceptions of
  group, and values.

3
Key elements of culture

• Language.
• Most important feature uniting people of a common
  culture.
• Language also defines cultural subgroups through
  language, dialect, pronounciation.
• Religion.
• The set of beliefs by which people in a society
  order reality so as to make it reality
  intelligible. Involves
• A system and body of belief and worship in
  supernatural powers.
• A set of values and behavioral standards.

4
Elements of culture

• Political ideology.
• The body of ideas that reflects the beliefs and
  interests of a nation, political system, or
  culture, etc.
• Underlies the nature and dirction of political
  action.
• Social, economic, and political organization.
• Social organization.
• Egalitarian groups (acephelous).
• Hierarchical groups.
• Sociopolitical organization.
• Bands.
• Tribes.
• States a sovereign political power or community.
• Territorial states.
• The nation-state.
• Supranational state.

5
Elements of culture

• Economic organization.
• Subsistence production
• Market or commercial production.

6
What is a cultural landscape?

• Aspects of the environment that embody the
  culture of a group of people.
• A cultural landscape is a geographic area that
  includes cultural and natural resources and
  artifacts associated with the continued occupance
  of a particular group of people.
• Cultural landscapes give us a sense of place.
• They reveal our relationship with the land over
  time.
• They are part of ones national heritage, and
  part of peoples lives.
• They form the taken for granted reality of a
  person.
• Cultural landscapes can be viewed as an
  expression of regional identity, works of art,
  texts and narratives of cultures.
• A cultural landscape exists in in an ecological
  context or human-environment relation.

7
What is a cultural landscape?

• The Area of a cultural landscape can range from
  thousands of acres of rural land to homesteads
  with small front yards.
• Man-made expressions of visual and spatial
  relationships that include
• Large estates.
• Farmlands.
• Public gardens and parks.
• College campuses.
• Cemeteries.
• Scenic highways.
• Industrial sites.
• Strip malls.
• Wal-Mart

8
What is a cultural landscape?

• A cultural landscape can be and usually is a
  palimsest.
• A parchment, tablet, etc. that has been written
  upon or inscribed two or three times, the
  previous text or texts having been imperfectly
  erased and remaining, therefore, still partly
  visible Websters New World Dictionary (2002).
• Some examples http//www.tclf.org/whatis.htm

9
What is a cultural landscape?

• A cultural landscape can be seen as the dynamic
  product of many individual decisions made at
  different times within social and physical
  environments (Norton 198976).
• Actions and attitudes of ideologically-motivated
  people may contribute to the decisions that go
  to build a cultural landscape.
• A cultural landscape is complex and competing
  ideologies may be evident.
• Ideologies compete with each other and a given
  society and landscape may have several different
  systems of symbolic representations existing
  within it simultaneously and antagonistically
  (Baker 19924-5).
• A cultural landcape may be the product of power
  and authority.

10
Change in a cultural landscape

• Generally occurs slowly.
• Places usually continue to preserve their
  original features.
• People take the principle of least effort (Zipf
  1948) in changing their landscape and are not
  receptive to radical change.
• Changes in the cultural landscape tend to be
  evolutionary rather than revolutionary because
  places are malleable and change with the
  surrounding landscape (Falah 1996).

11
Defining the landscape power, control, and time

• Cultural landscape change may be the outcome of a
  struggle among conflicting interest groups
  seeking domination over an immediate environment.
  
• When one group imposes its well-being over the
  places of another, the former completely or
  partially replaces the landscape symbols of the
  latter.
• If such a process occurs slowly over a period of
  time, geographers call it sequent occupance.
• If it happens relatively quickly we may call it
  colonization.
• If such change occurs precipitously, we call it
  ethnic cleansing.

12
Depopulation and level of destruction for
pre-1948 Arab villages in Palestine
Key 1) complete obliteration. 2) complete
destruction rubble of original houses clearly
identified no walls standing. 3) houses are
mostly demolished rubble contains walls standing
but without roofs. 4) most houses demolished at
least one house standing with roof intact no
Jewish-family-occupied houses intact. 5) most
houses demolished one or two houses occupied by
Jewish families. 6) partial destruction more
than two Jewish families occupy houses. 7)
inaccessible villages.
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The case of Palestine

• In a process of cultural transformation, Zionists
  systematically eroded and eliminated the
  Palestinians attachment to their places.
• This process entailed obliterating the
  Palestinian taken-for-granted reality of place
  and space and creating a mythologized Jewish
  cultural landscape.
• Central to the process was the Israeli denial of
  the Palestinian connection to the land.

15
Bibliography

• Falah, G. 1996. The 1948 Israeli-Palestinian War
  and its Aftermath The Transform at ion and
  De-Signification of Palestines Cultural
  Landscape. Annals ofrhe Association of American
  Geographers, 86(21), 256-285.
• Norton, W. 1989. Explorations in the
  Understanding of Landscape A Cultural Geography.
  New York Greenwood Press.
• Baker, A. R. H., and C. Biger. eds. 1992.
  ldeology and Landscape in Historical Perspective.
  Cambridge Cambridge University Press.