Building Crafts in Palestine: From Production to Knowledge Production

Abstract

Since its establishment in 1991, Riwaq has recognized the challenging complexities of preserving Palestinian collective memory through projects that document and restore architectural heritage sites across the West Bank and Gaza. Riwaq is distinguished by its focus on rural areas in Palestine, where tens of historic buildings were restored as community and cultural centers, mainly for marginalized groups. Because of the huge demand for restoration and the scarcity of human and financial resources, Riwaq has been prioritizing and implementing “The 50-Village Rehabilitation Project” in which rehabilitation and safeguarding of heritage in Palestine function as a tool for socio-economic and political development. Throughout its life span, Riwaq has turned to the field of heritage as a medium of thinking about urgent and emergent social-economic-cultural-political concerns. In this paradigm, heritage is not only a field for knowledge production but also for change. See https://www.riwaq.org/our-story.

Keywords:

• building crafts
• Palestine
• rehabilitation
• memory
• intangible cultural heritage

Notes

1 For more about decorative cement tiles see Suad Amiry and Lena Suboh, Palestinian Decorative Tiles (Ramallah: Riwaq, 2002).

2 For more about the Pro-Jerusalem Society and the destruction of the Jaffa Gate clock tower, see The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904-1948, eds. Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar (Northampton, Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2014).

3 The creation of the state of Israel was a direct result of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, known as the Nakba (literally means "disaster," "catastrophe," or "cataclysm"), during which more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were sacked and urban centers were almost entirely extinguished.

4 For shifting meanings of heritage as a result of the Nakba, see Khaldun Bshara, “The Structures and Fractures of Heritage Protection in Palestine”, in Challenging the Dichotomy: the Licit and the Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses, ed. Les W. Field et al (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016), pp.106-126.

5 For the role of NGOs and civil society in heritage protection and development, see Chiara De Cesari, “Creative Heritage: Palestinian Heritage NGOs and Defiant Arts of Government”, American Anthropologist 112, no. 4 (2010): 625–637.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Khaldun Bshara

Khaldun Bshara is an architect, restorer and anthropologist. He is currently the Director of Riwaq Centre in Ramallah, Palestine, where he has worked since 1994, documenting, protecting and restoring Palestinian built heritage. He received a BSc in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University in 1996 and an MA in Conservation of Historic Towns and Buildings from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2000. Interested in refugees, space and memory, Khaldun joined the University of California, Irvine on a Fulbright scholarship, where he obtained an MA in Anthropology in 2009 and a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology in 2012.