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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8504-4816
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Anthropology
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Elizabeth Chilton
Second Advisor
Krista Harper
Third Advisor
Michael Sugerman
Fourth Advisor
Toby Applegate
Subject Categories
Archaeological Anthropology | Human Geography | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Urban Studies and Planning
Abstract
The “old city,” a widely recognizable category of urban space, has long been a locus of development projects, state monitoring, and mass tourism, while also being home to resident communities. This dissertation explores the intersections of community life and state-driven heritage projects in the Old Town of Rhodes, in the Greek Dodecanese, and the Old City of Acre (‘Akka), a Palestinian community in northern Israel/Palestine. Both old cities are UNESCO World Heritage sites and subjects of intense state-supported tourism development. However, their resident populations and their built environments, which coalesced mainly under Crusader and Ottoman rule, challenge the authorized heritage discourse of both Greek and Israeli states in that they reflect a specifically other-than-national heritage. I examine how residents develop life projects—work aimed at making a good life for self and community—in the wake of state heritage projects—work aimed at crafting citizens and places as subjects—in these two old cities. I adopt the lens of archaeological ethnography to account for the lived experiences of my interlocutors in relation to the old cities and their ongoing material formation. Residents of both places similarly experience state heritage as a process of alienation, but different histories of state intervention, tourism, and residents’ own memories of displacement and dispossession have led them to work against and beyond state heritage in distinct ways. Through interviews, participant observation, and photographic surface survey, I examine how residents are engaging with tourism and preservation while reclaiming the terms of heritage from the state. I argue that residents’ practices in both old cities embody relations to past and to place that evade conventional heritage frameworks and contribute to an alternative and decolonized theorization of the heritage concept that accommodates concerns of livability, local sovereignty, and redress.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/28622575
Recommended Citation
Taylor, Evan, "Making the Old City: Life Projects and State Heritage in Rhodes and Acre" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 2575.
https://doi.org/10.7275/28622575
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2575
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Archaeological Anthropology Commons, Human Geography Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons