Palestinian Peasants: Material Culture and History

 Prof. Yuval Gadot

Dr. Amos Nadan

This seminar is part of the interdisciplinary lab titled “Peasants in the Past: Society and Economy of a Local village” operating within The Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies. It is a joint study group of students and academic staff who aim to research and publish together.

The year-long seminar (two semesters, a bi-weekly meeting) welcomes students who wish to be exposed to novel and interdisciplinary research into peasant societies in the Southern Levant and also in more distant places.

While past research tended to lean on external sources when analyzing village societies, our seminar emphasizes a bottom-up approach. We turn to a variety of primary sources such as archive documents, other written sources, photographs, and evidence of material culture in order to investigate the social, economic and political structure of a village. In the 2019-2020 academic year the seminar will focus on technological changes and the ways in which these affected peasant societies in the last few hundred years who lived in the hills around Jerusalem. We will also explore case studies from previous eras, as well as those from other cultures such as the Far East, Africa and Middle Ages Europe.