performative potsherds

there's an intriguing article by jane kramer in the new yorker this week, about the work of nadia abu el-haj. not my field, but a very exciting performance studies site as concerns the construction of the identity of place. pretty important place, too:

"She received her doctorate in 1995, and turned her dissertation into a book called 'Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society' . . . . The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. Specifically, it traced the history of a persistent 'grammar of biblical recovery . . . increasingly recast within the terms of Jewish national revival and return,' and the ways in which that grammar had produced a particular 'reading' of ancient stones, potsherds, inscriptions, and even bones by the scientists who unearthed them--or as one member of the Jewish Palestinian Exploration Society put it, in the nineteen-forties, 'Pottery is not pottery, it is Eretz Yisrael.'"

full disclosure: i haven't finished reading the piece. but abu el-haj's struggle for tenure in the face of her seemingly clear scholarly achievement is its own site for a discussion of performance. the article's not online, sadly, but you can read about george clooney.