The Politics of Authenticity in a National Heritage Site in Israel

©2 20 00 05 5--2 20 00 09 9 Q Qu ua al li it ta at ti iv ve e S So oc ci io ol lo og gy y R Re ev vi ie ew w V Vo ol lu um me e V V I Is ss su ue e 1 1 w ww ww w. .q qu ua al li it ta at ti iv ve es so oc ci io ol lo og gy yr re ev vi ie ew w. The Politics of Authenticity in a National Heritage Site in Israel Abstract This paper offers a multifaceted appreciation of the political roles played by authenticity in modern tourism. The study, located at a national heritage and commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel, traces authentic occurrences-manifestations and representations-that culminate in an ideological ecology of authenticity. Through this depiction, the active and often veiled role authenticity, understood as a social structure, plays is foregrounded. A special place within this ecology is reserved for the role performed by the site's visitor book. The paper conceptualizes the commemorative visitor book as an ideological and institutional interface, which serves as an authenticating device. This device allows a transformation of visitors unto ideological social agents who partake in the structure of national commemoration in Israel

Traversing Hegemony: Gender, Body, and Identity in the Narratives of Israeli Female Backpackers

This article explores travel narratives of Israeli female backpackers, depicting their participation in a tourist rite-of-passage. The exploration addresses the meeting of narratives of the masculine, adventurous male hero, on both local (Israeli culture) and global-Western (backpacking) spheres, with regard to which the travelers position themselves and negotiate their gender identity. The article deals with two complementary sites of tourist gender performances: one is the actual trip and the other is the performance of travel narratives. The findings indicate that the backpackers assume several, shifting, positions in relation to an oppressive masculine social norm: while some adhere to the norm, others resist it through a subversive participation in alternative backpacking activities or through a reinterpretation of the normative activities. The article foregrounds the central role played by the body in mediating between the individual and the collective. Finally, it proposes further research on how culture and tourism are interwoven, so as to allow a nuanced picture of gender construction in women’s biographies in particular, and in the biography of marginalized people in general

Writing Ideology: Hybrid Symbols in a Commemorative Visitor Book in Israel

This article joins recent ethnographies of written documents which shed light on embedded practices and codes in and through which writing is produced and consumed. The article explores the linguistic ideology of writing through examining inscriptions made in a visitor book in a war commemoration museum in Jerusalem, Israel. These settings supply a dual ideological framework, fusing the modern ideologies of authenticity and national commemoration. Under attention are the physical affordances and circumstances of the visitor book and how they contribute to an “authentic” mode of commemoration-cum-participation via inscribing, where language ideology and national ideology reinforce each other. The analysis suggests that the category “writing” is reductionist, and that under embodied sensibilities it should better be viewed as an array of textual, para-textual, and non-textual visual signs that are fused into the production of materialized hybrid inscriptions. Further, the situatedness and corporeality of inscribing practices carries far reaching semiotic implications, including the transformation of the ontic state of “texts” into that of symbols, calling for the rematerialization of inscribing. [handwriting, language ideologies, museum, commemoration, visitor book

Performing Identity: Touristic Narratives of Self-Change

This article explores how identity is constituted through narrative performance. It contends that in an interpersonal context of narration, a profound experience of self-change is achieved intersubjectively, in-between narrators and audiences. Performatively, the narrators\u27 adventurous travel-narrations, which are generated by a particular type of touristic practice--namely backpacking--collapse the divides between denotation and expression, between the narrated events and the events of their narration. A heightened experiential state is attained when performers conversationally position their audiences in a unique role, a role that subtly implicates the audience and suggests that it too is undergoing self-change while listening to narratives. Because performances are social events, the personal sense of self-change tourists establish materializes in the social realm, where the backpackers assume a desired social identity

Pages as Stages: A Performance Approach to Visitor Books

This article offers a contribution to the fields of tourist performance and language. By exploring a visitor book located at a heritage site in Jerusalem, Israel, it argues that texts produced by tourists can assume the semiotic status of performances. Consequently, tourists’ texts should not be viewed merely as instances of “discourse” or “language”, but also as organic parts of the aesthetic and semiotic aspects of tourism. The article describes four dimensions that establish the visitor book as a particular “stage”, and the texts therein as the tourists’ situated performances. Taken together, these dimensions constitute a model for the analysis of linguistic performance and for the semiotic interrelationship between stage and performance in tourism

This Trip Really Changed Me: Backpackers’ Narratives of Self-Change

This paper explores Israeli backpackers’ travel narratives, in which a profound self-change is recounted. These tourists are construed as narrators, whose identity stories, in which the powerful experience of self-change is constructed and communicated, are founded on, and rhetorically validated by the unique experiences of authenticity and adventure. The relation between the travel narrative, attesting to an external voyage toward an “authentic” destination, and the self-change narrative, attesting to an internal one, is examined in light of two major discourses in tourism: the semi-religious and the Romanticist. The paper addresses the sociocultural context, that of contemporary Israeli culture, against which the self-change narratives construct a collective notion of identity, and wherein they can be viewed as effective performances

Travelling for Masculinity: The Construction of Bodies/Spaces in Israeli Backpackers\u27 Narratives

This chapter explores narratives of hegemonic masculinity, as these are represented in, and socially constructed through, travel narratives Israeli backpackers tell. This chapter is also inspired by phenomenological sensitivities and seeks to reveal the personal experiences of men and to elaborate upon the telling and sharing of these experiences

Thank You for Dying for Our Country: Commemorative Texts and Performances in Jerusalem

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors\u27 public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists\u27 and visitors\u27 texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book\u27s many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site (Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site\u27s management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed