Sites of memory: Discourses of the past in Israeli pioneering settlement museums

Abstract

Heritage museums as sites of cultural production are explored in terms of the distinction drawn by historians between “memory” and “history,” which denotes fundamentally opposed orientations towards the past. The discursive practices employed by museum guides in orally mediating the material displays in Israeli settlement museums are examined in relation to this distinction, suggesting the need to develop a more nuanced view of the relationship between “history” and “memory” as dialectically defined orientations to the past, which combine ritual enactment and critical reflection in contexts of collective remembering. Strategies identified in museum interpretation include the use of a rhetoric of factuality, the narrative appropriation of objects, and the establishment of an indexical relationship between the museum's “master‐narrative” and its localized “object stories.” Some implications are discussed for exploring culturally focal “sites of memory” as part of a critically oriented, auto‐ethnography.