Public Event

A New Industry in an Ancient Land

Due to COVID-19, event cancelled. 

New industries in Ancient Lands (NIAL) considers the vocabularies of tourism to think about the ways in which Palestine was both produced and consumed by both Arabs, Jews and Europeans.  Archaeology, archaeologists and photography are central: they informed the tourism industry through the production of travel guides and tour manuals, photo books and postcards, and the framing of holy sites and biblical cartographies.

NIAL also considers the relationship between tourism and cultural diplomacy, and thus archaeology, which was central to such endeavors given the formation of the joint British, French and American Archaeological Advisory Board and the ways in which such cultural diplomacy shaped the presentation of archaeological materials. The Palestine Archaeological Museum, now the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, stands testament to such processes.

NIAL will address how local cultural production may have formed as a response to Western scholarly interests in the region. Archaeology became increasingly entwined with both Western diplomatic aspirations in the Levant, but also part of the circuits of popular tourism. In this respect, the biblical overtones of ‘Holy Land’ tourism is both a product of modernity (especially the technological infrastructures that enabled it), but also a projection into an ancient past that undermines such modernity.

Jasmin Daam (U. Kassel)

Sary Zananiri (Leiden University), Annelies Moors (UvA, tbc): ‘Tourism and postal cards’

Karène Sanchez Summerer (Leiden University), Willy Jansen (U. Radboud Nijmegen, tbc), ‘The Holy Land Foundation (1903-1930); Holland and the Holy Land, The Holy Land in Holland’