Thank you for dying for our country [Texte imprimé] : commemorative texts and performances in Jerusalem / Chaim Noy

"Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site (Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed"-- Provided by publisher

"Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society"-- Provided by publisher

Bibliogr. p. [243]-262

Machine generated contents note: -- Prologue -- Itinerary -- Part 1. SIGNING IN -- 1. Tourists' Traces -- Performing tourism -- Languaging tourism and heritage -- The ethnography of texts -- A medium's history -- Visiting visitor books -- 2. The Ammunition Hill Museum: Authenticity, Bunkers and Language Ideology -- In the museum -- Generals' autographs and soldiers' love letters -- Postscript I -- Part 2. THANK YOU FOR DYING FOR OUR COUNTRY -- 3. The Ammunition Hill Visitor Book: Inside-Out and Outside-In -- Commemorative affordances from within -- Figures of the 2005-2006 visitor book -- Commemoration community -- Collective articulation -- Aesthetic articulation -- Material articulation -- 4. "I WAS HERE!!!": Indexicality and Voice -- Commemoration literacies and writing and reading rituals -- Signing -- A matrix of signatures -- Signers' identities, signers' anonymity -- Open addressivity structures -- 5. Articulating Commemoration -- Mediating commemoration -- Contesting performances -- Theological non-Zionist challenges -- Hyper-Zionist ethnonational challenges -- 6. "Write I was impressed and not I enjoyed": Co-Writing Commemoration -- Playful utterances -- Words, drawings, and visual narratives -- 7. Gender and Familial Performances -- "Fought like Lions": Institutional representations of men -- "IDF Soldiers - I'm mad about you" -- Families' commemoration performances -- Contesting masculinities -- Part 3. SIGNING OUT -- 8. "Like a magazine loaded with bullets": The VIP Visitor Book -- Managing autographs: The pragmatics of signing -- Autographs' capital and the reconstitution of hegemony -- "For Kacha the untiring!": Elite networking -- "The Temple Mount is in Our Hands" -- International VIPs: Jews, Generals and three Jordanian Officers -- 9. Ethnography² -- Undoing the ethnographic -- Dasein or being (looked at) there -- Collecting practices -- The story toes tell: (Dis)embodied (re)presentation -- Performance ethnography and the occurrence of the academic text -- 10. Conclusions -- Postscript II -- Transcription conventions -- References