Museum visitor books are a performative site for meaning making between the museum and its visitors. Chaim Noy applies an ethnographic lens to the entries within visitor books to explore the central role visitors’ inscriptions play in ethnonational heritage and commemoration.
The book is in three parts. Part 1 provides the background to the study. It establishes the museum's importance as an artefact of Israel's ethnonational commemoration through the memorialization and moralization of a Jordanian-Israeli battle over Jerusalem. The author focuses on the profusion of handwritten texts, their reproductions, and representations as a ‘cursive-scape’ within which the visitor book is located. Within this textual landscape, the visitor book reconstructs and reinforces the language ideology around Israel's victory in the battle and, more broadly, a Jewish national identity around a military agenda. Through the ritual of filling in the visitor book, participants reconstruct their identities and the genre of commemoration and nation building.
Part 2 establishes the conventions of commemorative literacy and provides a contextualized analysis of visitors’ entries. It begins with an exploration of the multilayered gendered, cultural, and social performances behind the entries in visitor books. Prior to producing their entry, participants take previous entries into consideration. Participants then contemplate the placement of their entry and the content and multimodal form that the entry may take. The behind-the-scenes discussion is followed by an in-depth analysis of the communicative and stylistic elements that characterize the entries. The emphasis here is on addressivity, deictic usage, and framing. The indexicality of addressivity and the orientation through personal, spatial, and temporal deictics create a temporal and causal connection between the past events and the commemorative present. The inscription and address structure serve as contextualizing cues of situated meaning and performance, thus furthering the commemorative narrative through selective emphasis on historical events. The framing of the entries influence how they are read and further entries are produced. Within the commemorative frame, entries can be read as re-affirming the collective memory and ethnonational identification. Entries may also be read as a performance contesting the official commemorative narrative through a reframing of agency and evaluation of events.
In Part 3, the author takes a reflexive stance to the research process and provides empirical and methodological conclusions. In summary, this study demonstrates that the visitor book serves as a public stage of ethnonational remembrance on which a textual performance occurs at an intersection of the commemoration community, collective articulation, and aesthetic articulations. The visitor book embodies cultural production: through the reproduction of culturally evaluated historical narratives, it shapes collective memories and reconstructs collective identities in the present. Entries in visitor books are thus treated as ethnographic artefacts of cultural identity construction. Through the analysis of visitors’ entries, this study explores how ideologies of commemoration and nationalism are both constructed and contested.
The volume is an interesting example of interdisciplinary research involving tourism studies, commemorative memory and identity construction, and the ethnography of texts and writing. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.
