3. Take 1 Performance and Discourse in Tourism: The Narratives Visitor Books Tell
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11. Illustration: Doing heritage 9.8.05 The visit taught us of the difficult battles and of the high and dear cost we paid in blood so that today we would be able to stroll and live in Jerusalem quietly and freely. It was very moving. [The] Shaked Family.
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15. Take 2 Epistemologies and their practices: A performance approach to ethnography in tourism
Matreial c. and all that in imples – rights for mobility, etc.
100 pages / I year 1,000 entries The VB is framed by the AHNMS itself (not a research artifact) The book is a monument – Symbolically unmovable, immobile.
First, observe the graphic symbolism printed on (all) the pages/stage. Second, observe the inscribed entries as performances.
I am asking questions about my research there and my ethnographic stay there. These questions that I am asking are basically epistemological. They reflect a reflexive and critical re-view of my ethnography. The first point here are Authenticating practices, as they are pursued in two institutions and ideologies: national commemoration on the one hand and academic discourse on the other. I’m asking how can my stay there be understood differently.
Presence of research equipment (cameras, tripod, technical equipment) – the point is that this is equipment that “ makes ” me the SS I am; it’s not just technical apparatus, it’s part of my role. I execute authority, marking myself from other visitors (situating myself above them in terms of the range of actions and authority that are available to me).
They exhibit awareness of my “being there,” which, though trivial in and of itself, helps me re-situate myself there ontologically. לא היה עלי כל סימן או מדבקה שאני " אתנוגראף " ולכן זהותי היתה נתונה שם למשא ומתן ולפרשנות . This and other illustrations shoed me that while I was a researcher, my role and identity there… I know that I was there but who I was there and what my role was is open and negotiable.
If I could I would have told the camera to ignore me, but the automaticity of the camera can be its agency . And because unlike other visitors I ignored or tried to ignore the video camera, I looked all the more suspect, walking ghostly across the screen.
Thus far I dealt with my “being there” and with re-positioning me—tracing me—there. But the relationship between academic research practices and those of the commemoration museum had similarities.
Now I want to talk not so much about writing but about images
This is the image at it waspublished, but there’s a story behind this image that is not told, because science isn’t reflexive or embodied. Here we have the disappearance of the “author,” i.e. ethnographer.
We can see here twofold embodied traces of bodies: the bodies of the visitors and the body of the researcher The story that’s in the margins . The margins - not the center– tell the story behind the picture. This story – the story of the trivial practices involved in the “making of social science”– does not come to the fore, and is left, as it would be said in tourism vernacular, in the backstage.