The Palestinian Land Studies Center at the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Finnish Institute in the Middle East (FIME), and the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) are pleased to welcome you to the international symposium titled: ”The Land of Palestine: Early Ethnographers, Late Archives, and Present Law.” The symposium will start a keynote lecture by historian-sociologist Salim Tamari at the Orient-Institut Beirut on January 14th 6–7.30 pm.

The lecture will examine the two contrasting ethnographic approaches to the study of Palestinian peasantry by Gustav Dalman, the most prominent of European orientalists at the turn of the twentieth century, and Tawfiq Canaan, the ‘nativist’ author of Muhammadan Saints and Sanctuaries, and the most prolific ethnographer of Syrian Palestinian peasantries in the twentieth century.

At the turn of last century, we witness several approaches to the Ethnography of the Arab East. The main European ethnographies were derived from archeological excavations and in which the natives were seen as residual living embodiments of old semitic cultures—biblical cultures in particular. Ottoman ethnographies by contrast were aimed at showing Arab and Turkish adaptations to modernism.

More information on the lecture can be found here.

More information on the whole symposium can be found here.