Post on 22-Feb-2023
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“Jews are Awesome”: Mediated publics, performance, and
written interactions in two heritage museums
Chaim Noy
University of South Florida
Paper presented at the NCA, Chicago, 2014
Museal addressivities: Comments on visitors’ comments
Addressivity is organic to the communicative and dialogic view of
human cultures and sociality held by Bakhtin. For Bakhtin (1986),
addressivity is the utterance’s quality of “being directed to
someone” (p. 95), or its “quality of turning to someone” (p. 99).
As such, it is an essential feature of all utterances, “without
[which] the utterance does not and cannot exist” (p. 99), and
communication cannot transpire. Because studying addressivity can
promote a nuanced appreciation of actual, situated acts of
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communication, and can help discern how addressees – individuals,
publics, or audiences – are discerned through different message
designs, it has been adopted fruitfully by scholars researching
language and social interaction, linguistic anthropology, and
sociolinguists in a variety of contexts (Agha, 2011; Allison,
2013; 2000; Author, 2009; Lampert, 2009, 2011; Norwood & Baxter,
2011; Seargeant, Tagg, & Ngampramuan, 2012). Elaborating on
addressivity in specific relation to written utterances, Barber
(2009) nicely expands the definition, arguing that addressivity
captures texts’ “ways of evoking their readers and suggesting
particular modes of reception and engagement with the text” (p.
32. Also Barber, 2007). These ways of reception and engagement
are essential for linguist communication as an essentially
pragmatic and dialogic affair. Bakhtin (1986, p. 63) stresses
that, “language enters life through concrete utterances (which
manifest language) and life enters language through concrete
utterances as well”, and addressivity emerges as pragmatic
communicative resources that shape spaces’ semiotics, and that
can render them inclusive or exclusive with regards to various
publics.
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Approaching museal communication and semiotics with the help
of addressivity, as both a conceptual and an analytical tool, is
promising precisely because museums offer semiotically rich
public spaces. More specifically, the agenda the heritage museums
that I study, concerns explicitly defining and performing various
audiences and projected or imagined publics. It is no news that
the heritage industry is presently booming, and if modern museums
and exhibitions were about knowledge and information, more and
more contemporary museal spaces are about identity and heritage.
The heritage industry is part of a pervasive cultural infatuation
called variously ‘heritage revolution/crusade/revival, ‘nostalgia
wave’, ‘ascent of history’, ‘memorial frenzy’, and the ‘buzz word
of the 1990s/2000s’. It revolves around the politically charged
dialectics between re-narrativized pasts and presents, and how
they are evoked through new and old media, museums artifacts and
displays, and archeological and historical sites and discourses
(Nora, 1999).
The formidable agenda of reconstituting pasts and futures
hints at why heritage sites offer rich data for performance-
inspired studies, where addressivity structures help reifying
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collective identities. By definition, the materiality of heritage
is built on the embodiment of intangible myths and narratives:
since under western epistemology ‘past’ and ‘future’ cannot be
immediately accessible to our senses or experienced directly,
there is need for mediatory work if the intended ‘experience’ is
to be performed. Consequently, heritage projects stand or fall on
how proficiently and persuasively they ‘Produce the Past’ (to
employ the title of Tamar Katriel's 1997, work), and the future
as well (see also Ashworth, 1994; Katriel, 1997; Poria &
Ashworth, 2009; Poria, Reichel, & Biran, 2006; Timothy & Boyd,
2003).
Open addressivity structures, indexicality, and
explicit/implicit addresses
I offer a short conceptual discussion, seeking to clarify and
promote a nuanced vocabulary for understanding addressivity and
its uses. Briefly, and as is the case with face-to-face
interaction, addressivity does not have to be made explicit in the
course interaction. Usually, an explicit address – a summons, an
evocation – is done in the beginning of the interaction or at a
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point therein where there is an intended change in the
addressee(s). In a research on family interactions inside cars
Noy (2012) recognizes how the youngest daughter (who is three
years old and is sitting in the back seat near her two older
brothers) is calling her mother. The mother is driving the car
and sitting in the front seat: “Mommy. It’s no fun for us
anymore” (p. 321). The address with which the girl begins her
call delineates hear intended – or ratified, to use a term
preferred by Goffman (1981) in his work on participation
framework – addressee in an explicit manner. In the context of
riding the family car, this move is communicatively required
because other potential addressees are in the physical vicinity,
and because the intended addressee (the girl’s mother) cannot
enjoy back-channel information that pertains to her daughter’s
communication (she cannot see her, etc.).
If the address accomplishes a communicative orientation to
an explicitly specified addressee, then contrariwise, sometimes
the case is that an explicit and specified addressee in not
called upon. I return to family interactions inside the cars,
where the mother, expresses an angered reprimand, which relates
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to the slow and disobedient conduct of her children that morning,
which resulted in taking very long to leave the house. As the
mother enters the car and begins driving, she says, loudly and
angrily: “I can’t believe it’s ten, since eight [I’ve been]
trying to leave the house with them” (Noy, 2012, p. 317). This
utterance does not have an explicitly specified address, but no
one inside the car is misunderstanding the utterance’s intention
or its ratified recipients. The latter are clearly discerned
because where there is no explicitly specified addressee, all
parties involved are held responsible. To rephrase, everyone who
hears the reprimand, which is everyone inside the car, is taken
to be responsible. The issue is simple and concerns physical
proximity – Goffman (1959, p. xi) initially referred to it as
“physical confines” and later, more complexly, as an “immediate
presence [which is] a fundamental condition of social life”
(1983, p. 3) – that brings indexicality to the foreground. I see
addressivity as tied to indexicality, because the latter concerns
physical connection between signifier and signified (unlike
symbolic or iconic significations). In the shared spaces afforded
by the family-car, and differently, by heritage museums, the
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presence of addressers and addressees becomes socially meaning-
bearing through indexicality. I will refer below to utterances
that have a general or unspecified addressee as possessing ‘open
addressivity’. Communicative acts which evince open addressivity are
cases where basically everyone who is physically proximate is
addressed, or everyone who can and do access the utterance,
whether inscribed or spoken (for elaboration see Author, 2009).
My focus in this article lies with inscribed utterances and
dialogues that are performed in Jewish heritage museums. I focus on
visitor books, which I refer to as an umbrella term, covering a
variety of artifacts and media, that both convey and serve to
elicit audiences’ written communication (guestbooks, logbooks,
comment books, registers, genres, autograph albums, booklets, and
signing books are just a handful of terms that re used commonly
and interchangeably in both research and popular discourse). I
turn to present inscriptions offered by institutions, i.e.
heritage museums, and by these intuitions’ audiences, i.e.
heritage audiences. I begin in the next section by presenting
background information on two sites that I studied. Then, in the
following two sections, I discuss visitors’ utterances – first at
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Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, and then at the American Jewish
History Museum in Philadelphia. In relation to these sites I
first discuss open addressivity structures, and then settings and
utterances where addressivity is direct and is explicitly
specified.
(Be)Longing: Utterances and inscriptions in Jerusalem’s
Ammunition Hill and Philadelphia’s American Jewish History
Museum
The Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site is located in
North-East Jerusalem, at the location of a known battle that took
place between the Israeli army and the Jordanian Legion during
the Six Day War (on June 6, 1967). The site was inaugurated in
1974, and was formally declared a National Memorial Site by the
Israeli Parliament in 1990. It possesses a clear ideological
mission: the commemoration of Israeli soldiers who died in the
battle, as well as in the Jerusalem Front more broadly. The site
conveys a highly conservative, Zionist ethnonational narrative,
centering on and celebrating the “liberated and unified
Jerusalem.”
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Ammunition Hill holds a special aura in Israel’s
commemoration landscape and it is a ‘must’ site for Jewish
visitors to Jerusalem – both Israelis and international tourists.
Also, many schools visit the site, as well as many military units
and personnel. In my ethnographic visits during 2006-2012, I
observed and spoke with visitors and with the site’s management.
All the visitors I saw and spoke with were Jewish, and they consisted
of three main Jewish publics: local Israelis sightseeing in
Jerusalem, international Jewish heritage tourists who travelled
to Israel as part of a Zionist organization (such as the Taglit
or Birthright project), and Ultra-Orthodox youths and families
who live in the surrounding Jewish neighborhoods and who enjoy
the site’s spacious outdoor spaces.
The Ammunition Hill museum presents information about the
1967 campaign over Jerusalem, and many commemorative exhibits and
devices, such as the Golden Wall of Commemoration, engraved with
the names of the 182 soldiers who died in the Jerusalem Front,
and a book-like device of which pages are made of large steel
leaves where information about the soldiers is supplied,
soldiers’ handwritten letters and personal journals, and more.
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Many of the artifacts are discursive, which serves to enhance the
display’s authenticity and personalize and humanize the image of
the soldiers. Inside the venerated and somber atmosphere, an
effective (and affective) ethnonational narrative of remembrance
is being narrated, a narrative which is partly communicated by
the use of the site’s commemorative visitor book. The first thing
I note about the museum’s commemorative visitor book is not what
it contains but rather where it is contained. Typically, visitor
books are positioned near sites’ exits, where visitors who
complete their visit encounter them. This choice of location
shapes the device’s function, and visitor books usually assume a
liminal position that lies betwixt-and-between: visitors who
choose to write in the book are still physically inside the site
but they are about to leave (facing the outside, as it were), and
it is this tension between the before and the after, the inside
and the outside, that the device captures. The location of the
book near the exit is ideally suited to elicit “an audience-
contributed gesture of closure”, as Katriel (1997, p. 71) puts
it. Yet the location of the book in the Ammunition Hill Museum is
not near the museum’s exit or entrance, but in a place that is
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the symbolic reverse location: in one of the museum’s innermost
halls, near the Golden Wall of Commemoration and the flickering
memorial flame. The book is located within a somber space that is
densely decorated with national symbols, including three large
flags that are hanging from its ceiling consecutively (the flag
of the State of Israel, the flag of the Israeli army, and the
flag of the Jerusalem Municipality). Positioned uniquely inside
the museum’s ‘deep’ and ‘sacred’ interior, the book is not aimed
at eliciting reflexive comments or closing gestures. Rather, it
enhances the sense of visiting an ideologically-charged site, and
supplies an interactional interface in the visit’s ideological
crescendo.
The book is offered inside a monument-like installation,
that is made of heavy, black steel. The installation’s steel
floor is elevated from the museum ground, so that visitors who
wish to read (or write) must rise for the occasion, where they
will see the book on a polished wooden platform. Befitting the
commemorative setting, and in line with the medium’s performative
role, the book itself is heavy and of a formidable appearance: it
has a hard leather cover, bearing a military logo in dark red
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ink, and 100 large pages (measuring 26 cm by 34 cm). And in its
material, too, it is distinct: it is made of thick parchment-like
material, and not of paper.
A few of these features resonate with Jewish audiences, and
evoke traditional Jewish rituals. The pedestal on which the book
rests, which requires the visitors to stand while reading and
writing, and the material of the book’s pages (parchment) echo
the materiality associated with the Jewish Torah Book (albeit
that latter is scroll and not a book). The fact that the
installation is slightly elevated from the ground evokes the
Jewish ritual of reading from the Torah at the synagogue in
particular ritualistic occasions (the Aliyah laTorah). In addition,
a silver plate attached to the pedestal addresses visitors in
Hebrew, with specific instructions as to how to write in the
book:
Students, Soldiers, and Visitors.
Please indicate your impressions in a concise and respected manner.
Kindly, regard the visitor book in a manner that is
appropriate to the Ammunition Hill Site.
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The wording and language of these instructions suggest
explicit addressees who the museum’s curators see as their
imagined and desired audiences, namely “Students, Soldiers, and
Visitors.” In a historical study of museums, Arnold (2006, p. 99)
notes that museum labels “stand in for the absent curator,
prompting a form of conversation of sorts,” and this label is
revealing in terms of both who the museum addresses as its
audiences, and how it imagines and instructs commemoration
inscriptions (“respected manner”). The label further helps
establish a connection between the device (the book) and the
site, establishing that both share the same ideological mission.
Looking inside the book’s pages suggests a further thickness
of military and ethnonational symbolism, which repeat, correspond
with, and augment the plethora of symbols crowding the site’s
spaces. Running down the center of each page is a column of four
symbols printed in shades of military- shades: the symbol of the
State of Israel, of the city of Jerusalem, of the Israeli Defense
Forces, and of the Ammunition Hill site. Again, while the
physical placement of the book inside the museum premises
designates it as an institutional artifact, the printed symbols
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discursively reassert this connection from within the books’ each
and every page. These pages comprise what Blommaert (2004, p.
654) calls, “‘special’ paper, inviting ‘special’ writing.” As the
image below shows (Figure 1), visitors’ texts are visually
enmeshed into the book’s symbolic layout, creating a hybrid
visual-cum-textual genre: it offers traces of interactions
between traveler and site, between impromptu individual
utterances and familiar institutional emblems.
Most of the visitors’ entries in the book present normative
utterances: short ideological expressions that comply with and
(re)affirm Zionism’s militaristic narrative, as it is recounted
at/by the site. Indeed, visitors’ basic inscribed performance at
this site is that of acknowledgment of the Zionist sacrificial
narrative, which consists of showing appreciation and paying
homage to those who fell in action. Yet the addressees of and for
these sincere emotional expressions vary.
I now turn to briefly describe the second Jewish heritage
museum I studied, namely the American Jewish History, located in
the historic district of Philadelphia. This museum was
established in 1976, yet was relocated and comprehensively
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restructured in 2010, which is when it assumed its present shape.
The museum narrates the history of Jewish immigration to and
experience of livelihood in the US, portraying a liberal and
progressive agenda with regards to history, identity and
heritage, and a high degree of integration of Jewish communities.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that this Jewish heritage museum
is not a Jewish holocaust museum, and the holocaust, though
presented, plays a small role in the overall exhibit space and in
the museum’s narrative. My first visit to the museum was by
chance opportunity, when I was on a fellowship at University of
Pennsylvania (2010-2011), dedicated to the study of Jews Travel.
On my way to my office, during that year, I would pass the museum
daily, until I eventually gravitated into the building, and spent
more and more time visiting its exhibitions and then studying
them.
Reminiscent of Ammunition Hill, the exhibition in Jewish
History museum in Philadelphia is rich with handwritten textual
artifacts, including historic originals, and reproductions and
representations thereof. From the inventory of the butcher Asser
Levy, who immigrated to the US and settled in Philadelphia in
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1682, through the many early immigration certificates and
documents (handwritten and/or hand-signed), to postcards and
letters written by members of the young Jewish communities in the
17th and 18th centuries, the museum’s contemporary an appealing
exhibitions offer indexical traces of writing activities
performed mostly, but not solely, by Jews. The exhibition spaces
are laid out chronologically, and within them a number of
surfaces for visitors’ inscription are offered. These surfaces
include post-it notes on which visitors can write their replies
to questions that the museum puts forth (where both questions and
replies are presented publically), and two notebooks that are
located in and as part of historic exhibitions, where visitors
are invited to write, and which function to some degree as museum
visitor books.
One of these notebooks is presented as a kind of travel
diary in a period room that tells of Jewish travel and
immigration to the West of the United States during the 19th
century. The notebook is located near several illustrative items
that travelers typically took on their trips. A label located
near the diary addresses visitors as follows:
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Think about the things you might want with you
during your long journey to the West. Some supplies are already
in your wagon. WHAT ELSE WILL YOU PACK?
This text engages the exhibition’s audience playfully, and
it scripts them into action in the midst of preparations for
travel. It differs from the instructions at the Ammunition Hill’s
visitor book in that it is less pedagogical, and intently
humorous and playful. I note that, symbolically, the visitors are
themselves travelers (they travelled to the museum), which raises a
question regarding what they have brought with them to the
museum, or alternatively what they have taken away from it. One
of book’s entries echoes this notion. The entry begins with the
historic date, Feb 15, 1853, and then humorously evokes the
present: Trip has been OK so far/except my iPad is almost dead/and 3G coverage is
spotty.1 The author of this entry is humorously playing on the
temporal duality evinced in any heritage museum, attempting to
reconcile bygones and immediate experience. It might be that for
1 I use a forward slash (/) to mark a line break in the inscribed entry.
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this visitor in this trip, the iPad was dead and cellular
coverage was spotty.
Further, I also note that the label requests visitors to
complete a collection (indicating that some supplies have already been
collected). Visitors are symbolically invited to supplement the
exhibition by adding to it; yet they add not material objects to
an old Jewish wagon, but texts to the contemporary discursive
“wagon” that metaphorizes heritage.
I IDF!♥ : Open and specified addressivities at Ammunition
Hill
Unless explicitly specified otherwise, the utterances visitors
choose to write on the publically available surfaces evince open
addressivity: they are directed to audiences who can access them.
In this way, these utterances have two main imagined audiences:
the museum’s curators and management, on the one hand, and fellow
visitors, on the other hand. Both groups of audiences are
imagined because they are generally not co-present. While the
former are usually unavailable and invisible to museum goers
(they occupy the institution’s backstages), fellow visitors have
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either been there before – and have left earlier traces in the
book, or they will be there later – futures readers and
commenters in the book, but in any case they are not immediately
available. Hence the need for mediation, which the visitors book
facilitates, and which (hand)writing accomplishes.
At the Ammunition Hill Museum, a typical open discursive
entry embodies a performative retelling of the narrative the museum narrates.
Consider the following entry (Written in Hebrew in August, 2005):
The visit taught us of the difficult battles
and of the high and dear cost we paid in blood
so that today we would be able to stroll and live in Jerusalem
in a quiet and free manner.
It was very moving.
The Shaked Family
This is a typical entry insofar as it accomplishes a
normative performance: it first addresses the educational nature
of the experience of visiting this heritage site (which is in
line with how the site’s management sees the site’s commemoration
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agenda), and then it repeats or re-tells the site’s commemoration
narrative. This narrative is at the core of the site’s
ideological agenda, supplying a moral account of the deaths of
the soldiers in the 1967 War, arguing that without their
justified deaths (in the past), the present – and the leisurely
everyday activities that inhabit it (strolling, living) – would
not have been possible. Hence, those visitors who are enjoying
sights and views of Jerusalem and Ammunition Hill, are indebted
by definition to the deaths of the soldiers, which are then re-
framed as ‘sacrifices’ (Author, 2008). Further, in terms of
discursive competence of commemoration literacy, such entries
account and validate that i. the undersigned visitors actually
visited the site, ii. they understood the narrative that it tells
to a point where, iii. they are able to reproduce it in their
words/voices.
The Shakeds’ entry is representative of normative
performances also in that it addresses the museum only
implicitly. The address is implied. Since visitor books are
commonly understood as surfaces of communication with the museum,
or as a feed-backing channel, there is no need for the address to
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be stated explicitly. This is why it is interesting to explore
how, occasionally, visitors do employ explicit addressivity
structures when directing their utterances at the museum. Such is
the case evinced in the two entries below (written in Hebrew
around August, 2003. The second entry appears in Figure 1, below,
on the right page).
Dear Museum!
I was very much moved, to the point of crying
from the movie and the general exhibition.
Onwards and upwards!
“If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”
Shai
To all the museum personnel!
If you ever reach this page please know that I was here
and that I was very impressed Respect to all the soldiers!!!
and warm regards to all those who know me!
Bye
Sara Rifkeind
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Safed
There are various reasons why certain visitors would choose
to address the museum specifically and explicitly. For some, this
type of address serves to personalize the message, which is
structured as an interpersonal act of communication (such as in a
letter or a postcard, which formulaically open with a specific
and explicit address). This is clear in the first entry, where
the museum is personalized and the text takes the rhetoric of a
letter. This specific and explicit addressivity tells of the
mediative function of the visitor book, and that for at least
some visitors writing an entry feels like sending a letter.
Reading Shai’s entry evokes the idea of role-distance (Goffman,
1959, 1961) and its relation to performativity. Consider the
entry’s fifth line, where the writer cites a well-known Psalmic
verse. The verse attests to the personal significance of
Jerusalem for Jews, and it is often sited on the pages of this
book. Citing it in this context is how the visitor is showing
knowledge of Psalms, and of the discursive arsenal of idioms and
verses, which is relevant for performing commemoration in situ.
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The point here is that the verse is cited within quotation marks.
Quotations indicate some perspective on the performance
undertaken by the inscriber: it can indicate some role-distance
on behalf of the writer, who shows how various writing actions
are performed: addressing the museum, citing well-known and
appropriate verses.
The reason for and function of the direct address in the
second entry are quite different. What Rifkeind’s entry
accomplishes is not the retelling of the site’s commemoration
narrative. Rather, the text begins (in line two, immediately
following the address), by inquiring – skeptically, humorously,
and perhaps also anxiously – whether the book is attended to and
whether the texts are read. Again, because the museum’s staff is
not co-present, visitors are obliged to ‘call’ them. The ‘absent
addressee/reader’ is an issue and an anxiety that are particular
and immediate, but also general and existential: is there anyone
listening/reading? In fact, communication philosopher Peters
(1999) argues that “communication with the dead is the paradigm
case of hermeneutics,” which amounts to “the art of
interpretation where no return message can be received” (p. 149).
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Rifkeind is not concerned with the dead, but the illocutionary
anxiety is apparent in here words. Indeed, the site’s staff
rarely attends to the book and almost never reads the texts. As
one of the sites directors told me, sarcastically, “it is there
for the visitors, not for us.”
In the following line in the entry, the writer moves to the
normative body of the message. She was “very impressed,” and
expresses “Respect to all the soldiers!!!” But, again, towards
the signature (line 4), the author irregularity addresses other
visitors explicitly, by sending them “warm regards”. There is
here a further elaboration of addressivity, which is as
infrequent as it is revealing, where the author acknowledges the
fact that the acts of writing she engages in are public and
visible to various audiences. Of all the visitors she delineates
a particular group, or even a public: “all those who know me!”
The subtext here is not if someone reads/hears these words, but
who does so – and the related issues of intimacy and anonymity
within the imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) conjured by this
medium.
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The next four entries employ delineations and specifications
of utterances’ addressees. However, their addresses are aimed at
other groups or publics, and not the museum’s staff or the
visitors. (With the exception of the third entry, which is
written in English, all the entries are written in Hebrew. The
first two entries were written during the summer of 2004, and the
latter two around the summer of 2005).
Figure 1
Soldiers, Officers, and Bereaved Families.
Accept our sincere salute
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For all those
expressions of sacrifice and devotion
for fighting and guarding our country
at utmost risk
From Forth Platoon, The Erez Regiment
I IDF!♥ 2
thank you for protecting
ISRAEL.
Thank you for dying for our country.
What you did enabled me and other Jews
to be able to live in Eretz Yisrael.3
with great respect,
Shira Zucker, NJ.
August 9 2005
2 I.D.F. stands for Israeli Defense Forces (tsva hagana le-yisrael)3 The words Eretz Yisrael are written in Hebrew
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YOU’RE WRONG!
[Those are] not the soldiers
who protect
but the Holy
Torah
protects and saves
period!
The writers of these entries employ explicit and specific
addressivity structures to re-direct the message away from the
museum, away from an ‘open’ addressivity communication, to the
specific audiences they wish to address and who they feel are
relevant for their message. The main addressees of the first
three entries are the soldiers who fought in the war. The
soldiers, and the bereaved families, are addressed specifically,
and are conjured in and by these utterances as the true
historical protagonists. The museum, and by association the
heritage/commemoration project as a whole, are not the addressees
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of these expressions of gratitude, and they are sidestepped in
favor of the soldiers and their families. While these entries
share a similar addressivity structure, they differ in terms of
register. Consider the opening verse of the first two entries:
the first is formal and mimics an opening of a formal speech,
while the second resembles a brief SMS message. Expressing
gratitude to the soldiers, and not to the museum, is taken ad
extremum in the third entry. In this entry, Zucker directly
addresses soldiers who are, by her account, dead (“Thank you for
dying”). Her primary audience consists of the commemorated fallen
soldiers. This addressivity design suggests that the entry’s
genre might be more akin to a prayer than most other entries that
are addressed to actual, or even potential, audiences. That said,
the entry nonetheless builds on the communicative affordances
that I mentioned earlier, which are typical of the media of
visitor books: all visitor book entries address and conjure absent
audiences: be them the site’s management, visitors who have left
already or who have not yet visited, soldiers who participated in
the war (or, again, soldiers who will participate in war), or
divine entities. In her book On Longing, Stewart (1984, p. 23)
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writes that the “desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the
absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire”. This
absence is a structural precondition of heritage institutions and
exhibitions. It is heritage’s true protagonist.
The fourth entry (YOU’RE WRONG!), commences with a second
body (plural) address, but it isn’t clear who is being scolded.
The content is clear enough, though, and suggests the utterance
is non-normative and it does not re-tell the ethos of national
(Zionist) militarism, but criticizes it. In fact, it retells it
in order to criticize it (“the soldiers/who protect/… and
saves”). This is a resisting performance, where the visitor is
indicating that the actor – namely, the agentic protagonist
behind the triumphant 1967 War is God – and not the Zionist-
military hybrid. Those who are addressed as holding a wrong view
could be the site’s management, who advocate militaristic
commemoration and narrate the story of modern, military power, or
the visitors, the majority of whom participate in a normative
fashion in the commemoration ritual that the site offers. My
impression, which is tangible, is that the entry is directed at
the co-present entries that populate the page on which it is
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inscribed. These entries are mostly normative, and the sense I
get is that the YOU’RE WRONG! entry is intertextual (or perhaps
more accurately, intra-textual, in that it addresses texts
inscribed within the same ecology), and it relates to texts in
its immediate vicinity.
JEWS ARE AWESOME: Open and specified addressivities at
the American Jewish History Museum
The Jewish History museum in Philadelphia is also rich with
handwritten textual artifacts, including historic originals, and
reproductions and representations. Within this inscriptive
ecology, audiences are invited to interact and participate by way
of writing, which is to say by adding further inscriptions and
texts to the museum’s public exhibition. The travel notebook that
is offered to museum visitors is located in a box, near three
illustrative artifacts that travelers typically took with them on
their trips: a hand mirror, a Hebrew Siddur, and a couple of
pencils. As an ethnologic context, the pencils are functional as
writing utensils that are used by visitors to write entries
(indeed, most visitors use these pens, but a few adult visitors
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use their personal pens), the Siddur frames the notebook as a
literate and Jewish artifact, and the mirror, I believe,
symbolically frames the notebook as a reflexive (i.e. mirroring)
surface.
The notebook entries hold three distinct addressivity
structures. About a third of the entries, recognizably accord
with the museum’s invitation (WHAT ELSE WILL YOU PACK?), and are
read as replies or responses. These entries imaginatively and
playfully partake in the telling of the museum’s narrative of
Jewish history and mobility. My observations, and the texts’
orthography (and occasional spelling mistakes) suggest that most
are written by young visitors. Unless specified otherwise, all
the entries from this book are written in English.
I would pack some
water and beans [smiley]
I would pack weapons just
in case something happens.
I would bring food too.
32
Joseph was here
I hate travelling. I sleep
thinking koyoties [sic]will east me.
HELP
Almost all people who
went to the west wrote
diaries.
Alyssa, Aug. 2012
(also a Jew)
These entries, which are usually unsigned, are addressed at
the museum and intently contribute to the dialogue between
heritage visitors and institutions. The notebook diary is seen
and employed as a playful and participatory platform, and the
entries’ addressivity is implicit and is a consequence of the
fact that they are offered/uttered as replies. The two entries
that are signed (the second and the fourth entries) are
particularly interesting in terms of performing Jewish heritage
33
and claiming identity in situ. I will relate to the second entry
later, and will now focus on the signature, which is almost a
post-script: (also a Jew). Alyssa’s entry is reflexive, because she
does not in fact directly reply to the museum invite, but rather
reflects on it: like museums labels, the entry states a relevant
historic fact that pertains to the exhibit, namely the medium of
the notebook diary, and to the role it plays in travel. The
entry’s signature indicates something about how the museum’s
target publics are perceived by visitors. The words “also a Jew”
serve as qualifiers that legitimize the visitor’s participation in
Jewish travel-writing, and simultaneously claim the same: they
too are Jews, and hence they too can legitimately participate in
imagining historic Jewish travel. The signature, even if
parenthesized, importantly references Jewish identity. The word
“also” resonates with the notion of the collection, where the
undersigned visitor recognizes and publically identifies herself
as Jewish, hence fitting into the assembly (a collection of
signatures that index ‘Jewish’ identity).
Another third of the overall entries in the notebook relate
to the museum and its exhibitions in general (not specifically
34
concerned with Jewish travel). What a beautiful and educational museum,
and This is very impressive! are typical entries of this genre. These
are most common entries in visitor books, which are appropriated
by visitors as channels of communication with the museum’s
inaccessible personnel. They implicitly address the museum, and
usually tell of the positive experience of visiting it. Because
this group of entries includes all the entries that address the
museum, it also includes oppositional performances, which address
the museum, yet critically so. Oppositional entries are
infrequent in visitor books, but are highly telling in terms of
the dialogic space that they establish, the kind of criticism
that they perform, and the identity claims that they make. An
opinionated, Hebrew written entry expresses dissatisfaction with
the museum’s explanations:
I would have been happy if there was [sic.] also/explanations in Hebrew./Particularly
because this is a Jewish museum. [smiley]
35
This entry is voicing a substantial critique of an element in the
museum’s display, by reflexively raising a question as to the
museum’s appropriateness to Jewish heritage. It contents have
little to do with the westward travel of Jews in the 19th
century, and focus instead on drawing a tight correspondence
between Hebrew and the meaning of the site as a Jewish heritage
site in the eyes of Israeli visitors. Its author voices the “’one
nation, one language’ principle, by which Hebrew is seen as a
language that only (Jewish) Israelis speak” (Author, 2007, p.
101). The entry’s own language indexically supports its
expressive content. “Language ideologies,” Susan Gall (2005, p.
24) argues, “are never only about language. They posit close
relations between linguistic practices and other social
activities and have semiotic properties that provide insights
into the workings of ideologies more generally” (p. 24). The
Hebrew written entry manifests a linguistic ideology, tying the
code (Hebrew) to the adjective “Jewish,” raising questions
pertaining to whether a museum of Jewish history is a Jewish
museum, and what exactly amounts to and qualifies a museum as a
‘Jewish museum’. The visitor addresses the spaces of the
36
notebook, and through them the site’s Jewish character and
nature. In doing so, that is in writing in Hebrew, the entry
itself (performatively) contributes to the shaping of the site’s
spaces and semiotics as a Jewish-scape. The code/language serves
here as an address, excluding visitors who cannot read Hebrew. In
fact, the code is excluding also a few of the museum’s
management. This raises a question as to this utterance’s
addressees, which, by the code in which the entry is written and
by its contents, are Israelis. It might also be that the author
is a frustrated visitor who could not read the museum’s labels
and explanations, and uses the notebook’s space to pay the museum
back in the same currency: a code that might not be understood.
Another entry that has the museum as its implicit addressee,
and that also acknowledges its spaces as Jewish, is voiced from
an Other’s voice; a voice of an outsider. The entry is self-
referenced as being written by a non-Jewish visitor: This exhibition
feels real. I’m not a Jew, but I’m loving the history.4 The visitor writing this
entry reveals her or his identity in terms of (non-)membership in4 This entry is echoed by a similar and positive comment posted online by an anonymous Google reviewer (in 2011) who wrote that “I’m part Jewish and this museum was great.” at https://www.google.com/search?q=jewish+history+museum+philadelphia&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#lrd=lrd
37
a relevant group (in terms of Sack’s (1992) notion of social
membership categorization, following Garfinkel’s (1967)
ethnomethological line of thought). By endowing this text with a
somewhat apologetic tone, the entry reestablishes that, at least
from the eyes of non-Jewish visitors, the imagined audiences and
publics that the American Jewish History Museum addresses are
Jewish. An Alternative reading suggests that self-referencing the
visitor’s non-Jewish identity is not an apologetic move, but
serves to enhance the praise the entry performs, by indicating
that despite possessing an ‘outsider’s’ identity, the visitor
finds the exhibition to be “real” and expresses genuine affection
to the exhibition narrative. In any case, in this entry as well
the museum is addressed implicitly, and relevant identities
categories are explicitly and reflexively referenced and
performed in situ.
The last third of the entries inscribed in the travel
notebook make more general and ‘open’ use of these situated,
public surfaces, in order to leave cursive traces of their
writers’ visit in situ. Many of these entries express visitors’
ways of ‘being doing heritage audience’ (Garfinkel, 1967), as it
38
is expected in a Jewish heritage site. A few visitors singed
their name and immediately near it wrote the phrase, I was here
(as did Joseph, in the second entry above). This is the essence
of the indexical marking of a visit, and as such it is the
ultimate visitor book currently (Author, forthcoming). Yet since
many of the personal and family names are recognizably Jewish
(Rosen, Cohen, Lustig, Sternberg, Goldberg), they amount to more than a
signature/presencing practice; they publically and collectively
manifest Jewish identity. On other occasions, the texts’ language
accomplishes the same indexically, as with the critical Hebrew
entry above, and also when visitors choose to sign their names in
Hebrew, or write key expressions in Hebrew (on the semiotics of
this type of codeswitching, see Author, forthcoming). Hebrew
language emerges – both here and at the Ammunition Hill visitor
book – as a powerful indexical marker, that is frequently
employed by visitors. Like accent in spoken utterances, knowing
to perform in Hebrew, even if only one’s personal name, suffices
in establishing identity and affiliation, both privately, i.e.
the visitor’s, and publically, i.e. the inscribed surfaces of the
notebook. The choice of code emerges as an integral part of
39
utterances’ addressivities, performing the public to which the
visitors see themselves belonging, addressing and sometimes also
excluding.
A few other entries in this group claim Jewish identity and
perform Jewish presence explicitly. This entry is spread over an
entire page: JEWS ARE AWESOME [smiley], and in the following page,
another large entry succinctly states: I G-d♥ . Both entries have
an open addressivity structure, and evince visitors’ recognition
of and relation to the site’s heritage agenda. Both are
performing Jewishness, but are doing so differently. In writing
on the performance of national identity, Edensor (2002, p. 70)
observes in heritage sites “competing ideas about what particular
sites symbolize may generate contrasting performances” (p. 70).
The first entry claims ‘Jewishness’ explicitly, by both naming
and praising the identity category that its author finds relevant
in the act of signing. By the term ‘naming’ I refer to explicit
referencing of an identity category that is seen as relevant to
or fitting into a given context. I note that in both interviews
with management and in public descriptions, the American Jewish
History Museum does not see Jewish visitors as its main audience;
40
rather, the museum stresses the universal and common experience
and difficulties of travel and immigration, and religious and
racial intolerance, as these are illustrated by Jewish history and
experience in the US. The museum seeks to educate and familiarize
audiences with the history and experience of American Jews, and
with their history. But visitors are free to interpret the
museum’s narrative and perform their own narrative as they wish.
Over and above naming, the entry performs a highly positive
evaluation of the category of ‘being Jewish’. This social act could
be fruitfully addressed by Du Bois’ (2007) stance theory, because
expressing evaluation is a ‘stance act’. It suggests, according
to Du Bois (2007), not only a perspective on the topic at hand
(good, bad, wonderful, etc.), but also always raises issues of
responsibility and positionality – which is to say who can take which
stance with regards to what matter, and since stance is public
(perceivable, interpretable and available for others’ inspection)
stanctaking positions the participant interactionally and
socially (Du Bois, 2007; see also Englebretson, 2007).
JEWS ARE AWESOME [smiley] also attests to that, over and above
the highly desirable evaluation of the category of ‘being
41
Jewish’, the activity of inscribing it in this way is a category-
bound activity (Sacks, 1992). It is, in other words, what Jew
visitors should do when visiting a Jewish site, and it is
publically recognized as such. The discursive surfaces that the
notebook offers become sites for claiming identity and stages for
performance of admiration and celebration of Jewishness; arguably
Jewish fandom performances.
The structure of the latter entry (I G-d♥ ), which is very
reminiscent of Ammunition Hill’s “I IDF!♥ ”, combines three
different codes into a coherent, succinct, and multimodal text:
English (I, for individualism), graphics (a heart shape,
referencing love), and Hebrew (used for the holly name. The
writer uses the Hebrew abbreviation ה' (the letter He with
apostrophe stands for the word Ha-shem), which is commonly used
in both written and spoken language in references to God. The
term literally means “the name”, but since in other visitor books
the expression ‘G-d’ is common, I preferred it over the literal
meaning. The entry, with its multimodal character and Hebrew
letter, evinces a carry-over of new media literacy and genres
unto traditional writing practices, and chic (‘young’) manner of
42
performing religious affiliation and identity. It too performs a
Jewish visit/a Jewish space, but it does so not through
admiration but through referencing religious devotion. Such
entries both perform Jewish identity in situ, and mark the
inscriptive spaces of the notebook as a Jewish-scape. For many
visitors who inscribe in the travel-diary, Jewish identities
emerge as a relevant cultural category, which is then performed
publically.
Lastly, in an encircled, unsigned and undated entry, a
visitor fluently writes: God bless the Jews of/America … and around/the
entire world./Pray for the safety & security/of Israel./[smiley]. Immediately
beneath this entry, a short entry is added (with a different
writing device): Pray for all. Besides the text, the latter entry
also consists of a vertical, two-edged arrow that is draw between
the entries, indexically establishing correspondence between the
texts above the arrow and beneath it. Both entries are ‘open’ and
do not address Jewish travel or the museum. The first and more
elaborate entry voices an ethnonational position, which is common
in the Ammunition Hill museum, whereby God and the State of
Israel are the elements that define Jewish identity and
43
ethnicity. After mentioning American Jewry and Jews worldwide,
the entry then moves to express commitment in relation to Israel
(by way of prayer). Though not explicitly critical, this entry
adds on to the museum’s exhibition something that is lacking,
namely the evocation of Israel – biblical land and political
state – as the ultimate destiny (and desire) of Jews travel and
prayer. The shorter and intertextual entry that was added
beneath, addresses and refutes the ethnic/ethnonational gist. The
utterance Pray for all, makes it case precisely by omitting the
category mentioned in the earlier entry: the marker “Jews”. This
utterance suggests a broader – perhaps cosmopolitan – view, where
ideals (here those ideals that concern safety and security) are
inclusively offered to all, rather than exclusively reserved to a
particular public. This is a reflexive and polyphonic dialogue,
that is performed in the public sphere that the museum’s
discursive surfaces offer, and where Jewish identity and desire
are negotiated. (In this regard the term “all” in this utterance,
resonates with the same word in the utterance discussed earlier:
“Almost all people who/went to the west wrote/diaries.” In both cases the term
“all” can be interpreted as forming a larger and inclusive
44
identity category, against one which is perceived as being more
limited).
Discussion and Conclusions
The communicative media I explore, broadly labeled ‘visitor
books’, embody visitors’ situated and public heritage act(ions).
These cursive canvases are a metonym of visitors’ interactions
with the museum; they are how visitors are able to comment on,
contribute to, and participate in the museum’s heritage
exhibition/narrative. For the display ideology associated with
heritage, the mechanism of (hand)writing is ideal: it allows the
visitor book to serve as a mnemonic device that collectively
manifests visitors’ being at the site, experiencing it, and
partaking in it, i.e. becoming part of the heritage that the site
celebrates or commemorates. In this sense, writing in situ is
very different that writing in off-site public platforms (such as
TripAdvisor).
Since all museums are performative and convey narratives,
they have imagined audiences as their addressees. More so in
heritage museums, which, by the definition, have particular publics
45
who they both address and conjure. Further, since visitor books –
and other semiotic, interactive and participatory media – are an
organic part the exhibition, they share the projected audiences
that the museums address. And museum goers usually recognize
this. Hence, addressivity emerges as a characteristic of museums’
rich communicative ecology, as well as a highly productive
analytical tool for understanding how the two-way, audience-
museum communication transpires meaningfully, and how it
established spaces, identities, and publics. Addressivities, and
the questions surrounding them, pervade these environments and
are inevitable: Who are the visitors writing to? Who do they
recognize as the museum’s imagined addressees or audiences? What
are visitors writing about (this directly relates to the former
question, because genre concerns addressivity as much as it does
coded contents)? Are visitors’ contributions performative – and
if they are, what collective identities do they claim and
exclude?
Ethnographic reading of visitor books allows recognizing the
polyphony within visitors’ heritage utterances. Often, visitors
address those who can physically access the media, namely other
46
visitors, on the one hand, and the museum’s management, on the
other hand. And the most common entry, the one which embodies the
ritual of signing visitor books and doing participation, is the
entry addressing the museum implicitly. Yet these surfaces are
open, and whoever are the potential addressees of on text or
another, written on these surfaces, there is a built-in condition
of over-hearing: in a Goffmanesque (1981) vein, we can say that
sometimes the museum is the ratified addressee and other visitors
are merely ‘over-hearers’, and at other times vice versa. There
are, however, other audiences and publics who visitors address.
At Ammunition Hill, the more ‘hardcore’ heritage visitors appeal
not to other visitors or to the site’s management, but to the
soldiers: to those who are alive, or to those who died, or to
their bereaved families. At the Jewish History museum in
Philadelphia, a few visitors’ playfully reply to the museum’s
invite to imagine Jewish travel, others address the museum in
general, and others state their presence in situ and show various
claims for Jewish identity. In both museums oppositional and
critical utterances are voiced, even if infrequently: in the
former, these utterances criticize the site’s ethnonational
47
secular narrative, stressing god as the true agent, and not
military-Zionist might. In the latter, a discontented (and
perhaps frustrated) visitor highlights the exhibitions’ language,
promoting a linguistic ideology that ties Hebrew with Jewish
identity and heritage, and offers (Jewish) Israelis as a special
group of ratified audiences, who need to be addressed in their –
distinct – language. Another implicitly critical utterance also
brings the Israel to the foreground, thus noting the fact that
the powerful relations between Israel and North American Jewelry
are omitted from the museum’s exhibition.
Further variations in genre of visitor book utterances
emerge from how address is elaborated. I paid attention to
explicit and implicit designs: the former is when ratified
addressees are singled out specifically, and the latter is
evinced when they are not, and the utterance is either ambiguous
or builds on its readers’ physical access to the book. This
touches on indexical markers, because the receivers must be in
immediate physical proximity to the message in order to receive
it (and writers know this).
48
To the utterances’ communicative richness and polyphony we
can add the communicative structure of the visitor books
themselves. These media have a ‘one-to-many’ (rather than a ‘one-
to-one’) communication structure, and so the utterances therein
are publically ‘broadcasted’. More accurately, because museums
have a number of potential audiences which they host and address,
visitor books address not ‘one-to-many’ but ‘one-to-multiple’
publics. For this reason, visitors can specify particular
audiences who they see as the ratified addressees of their
utterances, and complementarily who they situate as their un-
ratified audiences and their ‘over-hearers’. Akin to Derrida’s
(1987) open post card (cited in the epigraph), visitor books offer
open texts, yet reversely: the books are immobile, and those are
the visitors who are travelling. Visitors can and do produce
texts that are not openly available, and the managements at both
museums receive emails and faxes containing both compliments and
criticism.
The communicative richness which attending to addressivity
help recognize, suggests that museal spaces, while not personal,
cannot be simplistically termed ‘public’. It suggests that there
49
is a play, accentuated in heritage museums, between public spaces
and publics. The metonymic spaces of these institutional surfaces
suggest that museums are semiotically and communicatively rich,
and that their quazi- and multiple-public spaces are negotiated
through and through. These negotiations take place between the
visitors themselves, and between the visitors and the
establishments they visit, and are calibrated through
addressivity acts, i.e. doing and undoing ratified audiences and
ratified narratives.
50
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