No State, no NGOs: Reflection on Families’ Approach in Converting Traditional Houses into Local Museums in Palestine
Résumé
What benefits can a family-focused museum approach offer in addressing the everyday challenges faced by local communities in Palestine? If state-funded museums are usually located in urban metropoles and subscribe to universalised approaches to museum practice, what spatiality and regime of values do family-based museums embrace? What memory do they pertain to remember? What histories, written and oral, do they present? What materiality do they exhibit in assembling their family museums? In answering this question, this article explores how families' commitment to protecting and managing cultural heritage can turn their houses into new spatiotemporal spaces: As family museums, they open up the possibilities to restore affection, knowledge, experience, living legacy, success, and doubt in families' experience of preserving heritage outside the realm of quasi-state apparatus like the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and NGOs. It is through the reclaiming of and epistemological accreditation of this agency that families restore their silenced voices. This article intends to implement a shift in how local knowledge is sourced, shared, and represented by exploring the relationship between family and knowledge in a context of occupation. It examines how family-generated knowledge can inform and shape our understanding of the world and can be a powerful tool for preserving, rehabilitating and vindicating cultural heritage under the Israeli colonial regime.
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