Maintaining whiteness in archaeology: Hegemonic reproduction in academic versus state archaeological institutions in 21st century Israel

Abstract

Archaeology has long been recognized for its 19th century origins in, and 20th century contributions to, imperial and settler colonialisms, as well as its complicity in modern nationalism. By implication, therefore, archaeology has been adopted as a vehicle of modernity and western supremacy and the archaeological gaze has typically been a White one. In pre-state Palestine and in 20th-century Israel, management and academic echelons in archaeology were staffed by European-trained professionals, most of them Jewish Ashkenazi men. While in academia this hegemony has successfully reproduced itself through socialization and by means of a rigid curriculum, ensuring that senior positions at all research universities in Israel are still largely held by members of the founding group, state institutions have become more diverse, especially in the lower echelons of service. We argue that continued dependence on the Anglo-European definitions of science and archaeological value, along with the neoliberal turn in universities, determine academic curricula and career paths. These cement the dominance of Ashkenazim in Israeli academia and track non-Ashkenazim to non-academic positions as excavators and regulators, where mobility can be achieved through loyalty to the state apparatus and to the economic logic of ‘development’. This mobility, however, has had little effect on the racialized and gendered distribution of cultural capital in the archaeological community.