It's refreshing to move on from Karen Armstrong's book which we have been reading since the beginning of the semester, and to finally read articles whose authors' biases are apparent in one way or another. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, especially in a class such as ours, because being aware of the differing opinions surrounding the Jerusalem conflict is quite significant in addressing the problem. It was obvious to me in reading this week's articles that the authors are Palestinian (or at least Arab), but like I mentioned before, I found this to be quite refreshing in getting points of view other than the historical, "non-biased" facts from Karen.
I found Issam's article on the 'Biblification' of Jerusalem in "service of colonialism" to be an interesting read. The topic of how photographers manipulate photos to convey various meanings was quite unique, and I found many of his arguments to be valid. For example, some early twentieth century European photographers were ignoring current Arabic names of buildings and monuments, and were instead referring to them by their ancient biblical names (an example: referring to the Aqsa Mosque as Solomon's Temple). This is an obvious example of how photographers "biblified" Jerusalem, yet I do not think this was purposefully to degrade and ignore the Palestinian people, which is what the author seems to be arguing. I feel like it is to be expected that individuals will portray and choose to see what is important to them, in this case, religion. After all, there is so much of religious significance in Jerusalem, how could this realistically be left out from photos?
Tamari's articles were about such a random assortment of topics, I was sort of confused about their relevance to what we have recently been discussing in class. There was one major point that stood out to me from the article "Lepers, Lunatics, and Saints" however. When Tamari is explaining nativism and ethnic identity, he mentions how Iran's nativism reaction and formation was in response to Orientalism, which was not the case for Palestine. I found this to be rather counter-intuitive, because I would think that with the strong British presence in the early twentieth century that perhaps orientalism would have at least some kind of effect on the formation of their ethnic identity. I think this concept of identifying oneself with the things which one is not is quite common for many cultures.
I hope tomorrow's lecture with Tamari will offer new, "insider" perspectives in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I look forward to hearing his opinions and research on the matter.
I found Issam's article on the 'Biblification' of Jerusalem in "service of colonialism" to be an interesting read. The topic of how photographers manipulate photos to convey various meanings was quite unique, and I found many of his arguments to be valid. For example, some early twentieth century European photographers were ignoring current Arabic names of buildings and monuments, and were instead referring to them by their ancient biblical names (an example: referring to the Aqsa Mosque as Solomon's Temple). This is an obvious example of how photographers "biblified" Jerusalem, yet I do not think this was purposefully to degrade and ignore the Palestinian people, which is what the author seems to be arguing. I feel like it is to be expected that individuals will portray and choose to see what is important to them, in this case, religion. After all, there is so much of religious significance in Jerusalem, how could this realistically be left out from photos?
Tamari's articles were about such a random assortment of topics, I was sort of confused about their relevance to what we have recently been discussing in class. There was one major point that stood out to me from the article "Lepers, Lunatics, and Saints" however. When Tamari is explaining nativism and ethnic identity, he mentions how Iran's nativism reaction and formation was in response to Orientalism, which was not the case for Palestine. I found this to be rather counter-intuitive, because I would think that with the strong British presence in the early twentieth century that perhaps orientalism would have at least some kind of effect on the formation of their ethnic identity. I think this concept of identifying oneself with the things which one is not is quite common for many cultures.
I hope tomorrow's lecture with Tamari will offer new, "insider" perspectives in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I look forward to hearing his opinions and research on the matter.
I couldn't agree more that it's refreshing to read to something other than Armstrong. (She served a purpose, but it was a dense read.) I also agree that the photographers discussed in the Issam article were not purposefully degrading Palestinians. However, I disagree that, when it comes to photography especially, individuals can take their own liberties in creating inaccurate captions. Photojournalism, which is what I took these early works for, is all about accurately portraying the subject. And captions especially are important so that the photographer can inform the reader in the most accurate way possible. This is my opinion only because I study journalism (and I just got done with a class with a professor that felt really strongly about this topic). Overall, I think photographers, if working to inform the public, need to be more accurate, especially in the case of Jerusalem where so many places and spaces represent several different things to different people.
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