The Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures

The Faculty of the Humanities

TelAvivUniversity

Research Seminar (2007-2008)

The Construction of Identity: The Formation and Articulation of the 'Self'

Ever since the seminal, even if often criticized, project of M. Foucault on the formation of the modern state (throughout the late 60ies into the 70ies) and the publication of E. Said's 'Orientalism' (1978), even if equally found at fault, it has become obvious that notions of identity, whether sexual, social, or political, are not genetically or environmentally preconditioned, but rather evolving social constructs which are construed often, although not always, by pitting one's own sense of "self" against the image of the "other", in other words, by engaging in a discourse of "Alterity". With the publication of "Imagined Communities" by B. Anderson (1983), the European 'nation-state' formed in the 18th and 19th was likewise judged to be a construct built around invented, or at their best, artificial notions of a shared 'culture' or even 'language' by various interest groups of little or no shared "inherent" values. In his most recent work, "Under Three Flags" (2005), Anderson pushes these ideas even further, showing us how, by mainly analyzing closely the writings of the 'first Filipino' Jose Rizal, emergent nations of Asia constructed their identity of the "self", as a foil, on the one hand, to the colonialism rule which they very well knew, and on the other hand, as an inevitable continuation, and sophisticated modification, of the culture of their conquerors. Anderson demonstrates that identity is not something 'out there', but a result of a discourse. In this work, he surmises, in fact, the great deconstructionist endevour of the last decades of the 20th century, often conveniently labeled, "Post-colonial Studies", which aims to fracture fixed ideas about of ethnicity, race, and language and their role in the formation of identity.

There is no doubt that such issues have influenced and continue to do so our research areas, as much as they have in the same or even more intensely way affected our daily existence on the political and social levels.

The aim of this seminar is then to open to discussion how the identity of the 'self', be it the individual, the group, the territorial state, or nation was constructed, developed, and articulated, as made manifest by the material remains, such as archaeology and art, and by the archival or historical textual sources.

Basic Reading List

Anderson, B. 1991 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., London: Verso.

Anderson, B. 2005. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination. London: Verso.

Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press.

Bhabha, H. (ed.) 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. 2004 (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language & Symbolic Power. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre; 1961). New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines; 1966). London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir; 1975). London: Routledge.

Rizal, J. 1997 (1887). Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer).

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Young, R. 2004 (1990). White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.

Young, R. 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Routledge.

פונקשטיין, ע. 1991. תדמית ותודעה היסטורית ביהדות ובסביבתה התרבותית. עם עובד, תל אביב.