Settling History in the City of David: The Space-times of Pilgrimage to an East Jerusalem Archaeological Site

Abstract
This paper considers the efforts of a group of East Jerusalem religious Zionist settlers to produce the City of David archaeological site as a pilgrimage destination for Jews, in part by mediating multiple space-time frameworks of biblical and national history on tours. I situate these efforts in the context of a broader political campaign to maintain Israeli state control over East Jerusalem, as well as to populate the area with Jewish residents, in light of proposals to return it to Palestinian hands. Using Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, and drawing on linguistic anthropological notions of narrative transposition, the paper discusses the complex inter-relation of different space-time frameworks and how they produce a sense of realism on tours of the site. I also argue that the practices that produce such realism are essential to a global imaginary of the Holy Land, on which the settlers draw.

Short Bio
Alejandro Paz is a linguistic anthropologist broadly interested in language and ethnicity in transnational and diasporic contexts, the role of media in publicity and publics, Israel in the Middle East, as well as the linguistic issues of pragmatics, interaction, and textuality. He received his PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics (with distinction) from the University of Chicago in 2010, and he is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Humanities at the University of Toronto, with a graduate appointment in Linguistics as well. His first research project focuses on the emergence of ethnolinguistic identity among (non-Jewish) Latino labour migrants and their children in Israel, including the role of children in media campaigns to gain citizenship. His second research project explores practices of translation, commensuration and cultural mediation with Israeli online newspapers published in English. Paz is the winner of several international fellowships and awards, including, most recently, the 2008 Sapir Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology for his research paper, “The Circulation of Chisme and Rumor: Gossip, Evidentiality and Authority in the Perspective of Latino Labor Migrants in Israel,” which appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology in 2009.