LA MEMOIRE ET L'OUBLI A ARTAS : UN ELEMENT DE L'HISTOIRE RURALE DE LA PALESTINE, 1848-1948

摘要

Remembrance and Forgetting in Artas: an element of Palestine's rural history, 1848-1948 This thesis deals with the way the inhabitants of the village of Artas remember some and forget other parts of one hundred years in the history of their village which is located in a fertile valley close to Bethlehem. This thesis is particularly concerned with their memory narratives about the Western presence in the village, a presence which began earlier than in other parts of Ottoman Palestine. This Western presence included European and North-American millenarist settlers, the family of an Alsatian missionary, a Catholic convent, Zionist settlers, biblical researchers and folklorists as well as the Finnish anthropologist Hilma Granqvist. The attractiveness of Artas for all of these persons was generally due to its association with Solomon's gardens called Etam, mentioned in the Old Testament, but aside from this attractiveness, the persons and groups drawn to Artas pursued different projects there and they maintained different relations with the local population. The history of this Western presence and the way it has been integrated into the collective memory of the villagers is analyzed in a back-and-forth movement between archival and oral sources, and relying on methodologies which combine social history and anthropology. Interviews conducted with refugees from Artas living in Amman as well as with descendants of the Alsatian missionary reveal the different meanings attributed to this shared history of an intercultural encounter. The contemporary inhabitants of Artas and the refugees from Artas living in Amman seem to have discarded the memory of the millenarist settlers while carefully preserving the memory of two European women who lived in the village for several years in the beginning of the 20th century: Louise Baldensperger, the daughter of an Alsatian missionary, and Hilma Granqvist. Granqvist even posthumously inspired a villager to create a heritage centre in Artas which is built on a nationalist conception of peasant heritage and on a desire to take advantage of this heritage for development projects, especially in the area of tourism.