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 take place on the 14th and 15th of January, 2026. On January 14th 6–7.30 pm, we have the pleasure of co-hosting a keynote lecture by historian-sociologist Salim Tamari at the Orient-Institut Beirut. On January 15th, the Symposium will continue with a full-day schedule at AUB (Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, Conference Room, 4th Floor), beginning with a keynote lecture by anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj. The program will proceed with various panels touching on the themes of early ethnographers in Palestine, collections and their afterlives, decolonizing knowledge and the ethics of archiving, and legal personhood of archives and the politics of accountability.
By bringing together scholars, archivists, and artists, this event situates the historical coincidence and confluence of early ethnographers in Palestine within today’s urgent debates about the ownership, salvaging of knowledge and legal restitutions. We seek not only to recover lost or dispersed materials but also to critically examine how we engage with them now – as scholars, as institutions, and as inheritors of complex archival legacies. What can these early collections assembled under British colonialism teach us about the politics of documentation today—and how might they be reactivated as tools for justice, accountability, and decolonial scholarship?
The symposium also aims to draw on the knowledge generated in this workshop to advance our work on questions of legal restitution and archival recovery, as outlined in the ICJ Advisory Opinion. For those interested in conversation between law and humanities, please get in touch with us.
Salim Tamari’s keynote lecture at OIB: On the Ethnography and Historical Geography of Palestine
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.
- Abstract for the keynote lecture can be found here.