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A Palestinian Archive of Healing and Protection: The Legacies of Tawfiq Canaan (journée d’étude)

Portrait de Tawfiq Canaan
Portrait de Tawfiq Canaan entre 1905 et 1920, Jérusalem Source: G. Krikorian, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsca-18896], http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.18896

Argumentaire

Dr. Tawfiq Canaan (1882-1964) was a Palestinian physician, scholar, and collector best known during his lifetime for his public health advocacy and pioneering research in bacteriology. Today, Canaan is mostly remembered for his elegant writing on Palestinian folklore and ‘superstition’. Canaan collected objects and recorded narratives that document Palestinian entanglements with and expectations from preternatural beings, objects, animals, and plants in a landscape offering gifts and presenting demands upon different bodies and communities. This Palestine was being eclipsed by modern encroachments to which Canaan was simultaneously a keen participant, advocate, and challenger.

Dr. Canaan’s unique collection of several hundred talismanic objects survived the burning and looting of his Jerusalem house, library, and clinic that accompanied the Nakba in 1948. Along with Canaan’s writings this collection, housed today at the Birzeit University Museum, provides a unique lens for tracing Palestinian landscapes and material histories prior to the violence of displacement and dispossession. By critically attending to Canaan’s work and collection, this workshop will investigate novel understandings of the healing and apotropaic technologies present in his archive while exploring the significance of such objects towards imagining Palestinian pasts, presents, and futures.

Programme

12h00-12h10 : Introduction par Finbarr Barry Flood (Silsila, New York University)

12h10-12h30 : James Grehan (Portland State University), « What Did Peasants Want? Hints from the Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan »

12h30-12h50 : Salim Tamari (Birzeit University), « Canaan’s Saints and Sanctuaries and the Limits of Communal Boundaries in the Shrine of Simon the Just »

12h50-13h10 : Rana Barakat (Birzeit University), « Tawfiq Canaan and Ethnographic Collections: How to Unsettle The Museum »

13h10-13h30 : Khaled Malas (New York University), « Osseous Efficacies: Reading ovine scapulae in the Tawfik Canaan Collection »

13h30-13h40 : conclusion par Beshara Doumani (Brown University)

13h40-15h00 : discussion et questions


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Jean-Charles Coulon (8 décembre 2023). A Palestinian Archive of Healing and Protection: The Legacies of Tawfiq Canaan (journée d’étude). Le monde des djinns. Consulté le 15 mai 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/127jl


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