''We Do Not Care'': American Evangelism and the Exhibition of Palestine (CISA seminar, March 2027)
When:
—
Venue:
TBC
What happens when objects taken from Palestinian landscapes circulate through museums, churches, universities, and public programmes in the United States? This lecture examines the exhibitionary afterlives of archaeological material excavated in the occupied West Bank by American evangelical organisations. I argue that such exhibitions are organised to substantiate biblical history while the political geography of their extraction is eradicated from view.
I draw on Ashish Avikunthak's (2021) ethnography of the trench as laboratory and epistemic square. While Avikunthak (2021) shows how micro-practices in the trench recognise, discover, and transform material culture into evidence within a non-objective organisation of time and space, biblical archaeology stages the trench as something more than a laboratory. It becomes a site of public witnessing, where stratigraphic procedure, the unearthing of objects, and the archaeologist's interpretive voice are made visually and devotionally available. The trench does not simply provide evidence for a narrative of the past; it authorizes the conditions under which a biblical narrative seems to rise directly from the earth to travel all the way to Tennessee.
Mazen Iwaisi is currently a Research Associate in the Politics of Sustainability in Heritage at the University of Southampton. He was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York for 2025/6. Mazen is working on his first book, titled Anticolonial Archaeology? Epistemic Precarity and Palestinian Archaeology, the proposal for which has been accepted by Stanford University Press. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, examining the concept of archaeopolitics in the making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan (PNSP). Mazen is currently working with Colleen Morgan, Eva Mol (University of York), and other scholars on a project titled ‘Gaza on the Shelf: Palestinian Heritage in Museum Collections’ funded by the CBRL Research Grant.
Contact name: Katy Pettit
Tags: