Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site (Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed.

Auteur

Chaim Noy is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on qualitative and performative approaches to communication and interaction. He is Associate Professor at the University of South Florida.

Contenu

Prologue Itinerary Part 1. SIGNING IN 1. Tourists' Traces Performing tourism Languaging tourism and heritage The ethnography of texts A medium's history Visiting visitor books 2. The Ammunition Hill Museum: Authenticity, Bunkers and Language Ideology In the museum Generals' autographs and soldiers' love letters Postscript I Part 2. THANK YOU FOR DYING FOR OUR COUNTRY 3. The Ammunition Hill Visitor Book: Inside-Out and Outside-In Commemorative affordances from within Figures of the 2005-2006 visitor book Commemoration community Collective articulation Aesthetic articulation Material articulation 4. "I WAS HERE!!!": Indexicality and Voice Commemoration literacies and writing and reading rituals Signing A matrix of signatures Signers' identities, signers' anonymity Open addressivity structures 5. Articulating Commemoration Mediating commemoration Contesting performances Theological non-Zionist challenges Hyper-Zionist ethnonational challenges 6. "Write I was impressed and not I enjoyed": Co-Writing Commemoration Playful utterances Words, drawings, and visual narratives 7. Gender and Familial Performances "Fought like Lions": Institutional representations of men "IDF Soldiers - I'm mad about you" Families' commemoration performances Contesting masculinities Part 3. SIGNING OUT 8. "Like a magazine loaded with bullets": The VIP Visitor Book Managing autographs: The pragmatics of signing Autographs' capital and the reconstitution of hegemony "For Kacha the untiring!": Elite networking "The Temple Mount is in Our Hands" International VIPs: Jews, Generals and three Jordanian Officers 9. Ethnography² Undoing the ethnographic Dasein or being (looked at) there Collecting practices The story toes tell: (Dis)embodied (re)presentation Performance ethnography and the occurrence of the academic text 10. Conclusions Postscript II Transcription conventions References