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.”

Symposium Description

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion reaffirmed that Israel bears a legal obligation not only to return ”cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions”, but expressly includes within this mandate the restitution of ”archives and documents” (ICJ Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024, sec. 270). This explicit recognition ia a reminder that archival collections are never merely repositories of paper or object – they are instruments of cultural heritage, political agency, and legal self-determination. In contexts of foreign domination and dispossession, archives become active sites of struggle: they shape the narratives a people can tell about themselves, the legal claims they are able to substantiate, and the futures they are permitted to imagine.

This recognition invites a broader intellectual and political reframing. Early ethnographers, often working under colonial or mandate regimes, produced knowledge that would later become embedded within state archives, libraries, and legal classifications. Their writings, collections, and fieldnotes — often obtained under conditions of unequal power — continue to influence contemporary understandings of Palestinian culture, society, and territoriality. At the same time, Palestinian archival heritage itself has been fragmented, seized, displaced, or rendere inaccessible through successive political upheavals.

Bringing these elements into conversation—the ethnographic record, the trajectories of displaced archives, and the evolving international legal landscape—creates an urgent interdisciplinary field of inquiry. It forces us to examine how knowledge about Palestinians was created, by whom, and for what ends; how archival materials have been controlled or weaponized; and how international law now provides tools for redress, restitution, and the reconstitution of political sovereignty.

Our aim is to outline this field and to highlight how the entangled work and personalities of early ethnographers, the fate of archives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the new legal openings presented by the ICJ’s opinion together shape the conditions for a significant intervention. Such an approach not only matters for the future of Palestine—it has implications for the entire region, where questions of custody, memory, and justice converge in similar struggles over archives and the right to self-determination.

The symposium will start with a conversation with early ethnographers who all conducted fieldwork around the same time in Palestine, during the British Mandate. These connected yet independent engagements with the land of Palestine and its people form a remarkable historical coincidence and meaningful confluence: each worked to document daily life, customs, and traditions at a time of profound political and social transformation. They were scholars of the time, but their methodologies often resisted the overt Orientalism of their contemporaries. They bequeathed a rich living record of local practices and popular beliefs before the Nakba – one that laid the foundations for the cultural anthropology of Palestine that continues to inform and shape knowledge production and representation today.  The symposium takes as its central focus the archives and collections emerging from these early ethnographic encounters. Many of these collections are dispersed across regional but also European institutions – from Birzeit University and the Arab Center for Research and Studies to German archives and the British Museum.

We will also look at the current stake of the archives, accountability, justice and decolonization. For instance by looking at the digitalization efforts that offer new possibilities for accessibility, yet also raise pressing questions about ownership, interpretation, and the ethics of archival recovery. Other archives kept abroad also raise concern of coloniality. The politics of archiving in and about Palestine are inseparable from broader struggles for memory, justice, and decolonization. Therefore, the symposium will explore how archives serve as mediums of accountability, extending beyond the preservation of memory to engage the language of justice. It will ask questions like: what happens when collections are annexed, displaced, or erased? How do archives ”vanish” and re-enter the political arena? What does it mean to decolonize the archive in the context of Palestine? These inquiries resonate amid ongoing debates about restitution, knowledge sovereignty, and the legal futures of endangered archives.

By bring together scholars, archivists, and artists, this event situates the historical concidence 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 materialis 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?

We also aim to draw on the knowledge generated in this symposium to advance our work on questions of legal restitution and archival recovery, as outlined in the ICJ Advisory Opinion.

Preliminary program:

The symposium will take place on the 14th and 15th of January, 2026. On January 14th from 5.30 onwards, 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, 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.