From Israel Social Science Research 9(1/2): 1-26, 1994. Performing the Past: Presentational Styles in Settlement Museum Interpretation Tamar Katriel University of Haifa Abstract Heritage museums are important vehicles for the representation and propagation of shared meanings and values in contemporary cultures. This paper examines the role of discourse in framing and interpreting the material display in the most common type of such museums in Israel, museums devoted to the preservation and celebration of pioneering settlement in the pre-state era. An examination of video-taped, routine performances of tour guides in two settlement museums has brought out interesting differences between the presentational styles of old-timer guides on the one hand, and second and third generation guides on the other. These generational differences in the guides' rhetorical construction of the museum story form the specific topic of the present paper. Old timers make direct and frequent use of a "testimonial rhetoric" in authenticating their tale and establishing their narrative authority; their main rhetorical problem is to persuade young audiences of the continued relevance of the museum story and they address it by establishing a line of continuity between past and present (e.g. through the theme of "technological progress") and by subtly manipulating pronominal usage so as to encompass the audience within the unfolding tale. Younger guides re-affirm and dramatize the continued relevance of the museum story by their very willingness to participate in its tellings and re-tellings. At the same time, they discursively negotiate their distance from it as they interpret it to contemporary audiences. Some implications of the analysis are drawn for understanding the sociocultural context of heritage museum narration. I. Performing the Past in Israeli Settlement Museums A great number of local heritage museums that tell the story of early Zionist settlement in Palestine have been established in the past decade or so in various parts of Israel.1 Most of them are located in rural areas, many in collective settlements (kibbutzim), and all of them - individually and collectively - re-assert and re-affirm the basic ideology of Labor Zionism, which was a dominant cultural and political force in the nation-building era. They emphasize, in particular, the image of the pioneer (halutz) as the New Jew, who has established his or her links to the land of Israel through engagement in agricultural labor and by participating in the establishment of a re-vitalized, communally oriented way of life. 2 Even though museums are essentially institutionalized contexts for material display, the verbal interpretations that accompany the objects in them are an important dimension of the overall construction of the museum's "story" or "message." The verbal mediation of the museum display may appear in written form - e.g. as labelings, brochures, or background sheets - or it may be given in the form of oral interpretations offered to visiting groups by tour guides and/or by audio or video-taped presentations of various kinds. In Israeli settlement museums (as elsewhere), the personally guided tour remains the most prominent occasion for publicly recounting the story of the past, and it is this context of narrative performance that will hold our attention here. In terms of the analytic distinction made by linguists and narratologists between discours, which refers to the storytelling situation, and histoire, which refers to the content of the events recounted, 3 my interest here lies in the intersection of the two. Museum encounters will thus be viewed as storytelling situations involving particular categories of tour-guides as narrators who are variously positioned in relation to the narratives they produce. Therefore, drawing on a series of recent studies concerned with the poetics of verbal performance, 4 I will pay special attention to the metacommunicative dimension of the narrative performances (meta- narration) of the tour guides I have studied. Babcock (1977) has defined it as follows: "Metacommunication in narrative performance may be described as any element of communication which calls attention to the speech event as a performance and to the relationship which obtains between the narrator and his audience vis-a-vis the narrative message. By focusing our attention on the act or process of communicating, such devices lead us away from and then back to the message by supplying a "frame," an interpretative context or alternative point of view within which the content of the story is to be understood and judged...Within the external frame of the performance, specific reference is often made to the performer, the audience, the message, the code, the channel or medium of expression, the register, etc.." (ibid.: 68). Along these lines, Fine and Speer (1984) have conducted a study of tour guides' interpretive activities in a Historic Home located in a Texas town founded in 1845 by German immigrants. Tracing the verbal dimensions of the process of "sight sacralization," which was argued by MacCannell (1989 [1976]) to be central to the production of tourist attractions, their analysis has emphasized the rhetorical devices employed by two tour guides as they ritually transform "an unimposing cottage on a quiet street into an important, sacred historical sight in the community" (Fine and Speer 1984: 76). Drawing on Jakobson's well-known model of the functions of speech (1960), Fine and Speer argue for the need to consider what we have earlier referred to as the meta-communicative dimensions of tour guide performances. They elaborate: "In addition to the taken-for-granted image of tour guides as speakers of referential discourse about sight features, the tour guides engage in expressive discourse about their own feelings and attitudes toward the sight, and conative discourse to direct the involvement of the tourists. At times tour guides perform fictive genres, such as stories, proverbs, and superstitions, that serve a poetic function. These more formal levels of discourse are frequently punctuated by phatic chit-chat as the tour guide gets to know the individual tourists. Even metalingual discourse occurs, when guides comment on their own performances, other tours they have given, ask tourists to correct or supplement remarks, or show their interest in developing a certain line of narrative" (ibid.:77). In addition, as Fine and Speer suggest, tour guide verbal performances also vary in mood and in the degree of elaboration and detail shaping the museum story on different performative occasions. In their study, this variation depended both on situational issues such as the size of the visiting group, and on the level of audience interest (as judged by the tour guide). They found no variation that could be systematically attributed to differences relating to the tour guides themselves. The women they observed conducting tours of the Lindheimer Home were similarly positioned in the community as non-native (non-German), who nevertheless shared the experience of living in Germany as military wives. The tour guide performance became for both of them "a rhetorical vehicle for expressing their love of history, their appreciation for German culture, and their desire to be accepted as community insiders" (ibid.:77). The thrust of Fine and Speer's analysis thus involves the specification of what they consider the verbal correlates of the five stages of the process of "sight sacralization" identified by MacCannell (1989[1976]: 43-48): naming, framing and elevation, enshrinement, mechanical reproduction and social reproduction. Comparable verbal phenomena can be found in the tour guide performances I have documented in the Israeli museums in my study. Rather than replicating their study, however, in what follows I attempt to extend it in such a way as to consider some issues that are tangential to their empirical case and analytic concerns, but which are highlighted by the particular context of Israeli settlement museums and require greater analytic elaboration to be properly understood. In particular, considering the discourse of settlement museums as located within a more encompassing cultural politics of identity and legitimization - an analytic move Fine and Speer did not undertake - I propose to examine the narrative roles different tour guides can assume vis-a-vis their audiences, and the ways these affect the rhetorical shaping of museum interpretation. Given the particular data base I draw on in developing my account, which is derived from fieldwork I have conducted in two pioneering (kibbutz) settlement museums between 1989 and 1993, a central differentiating criterion for considering the performative dimensions of museum storytelling involves generational affiliation.5 Specifically, I will attend to the interpretive styles of first generation guides (now in their 70s and 80s) for whom telling the museum story involves a strong autobiographical component, and to the interpretive styles of second and third generation guides (now in their 20s to 50s), whose relationship to the museum story is a mediated one. Thus, as I hope to show, the guide's generationally based narrative position vis-a-vis the content of museum messages at the level of histoire affects the kinds of claims for narrative authority he or she makes at the level of discours, and the meta-communicative devices he or she employs in so doing. My analysis, therefore, incorporates the conceptual distinction between histoire and discours yet moves beyond it by focusing on the discursive implications of their interplay in the context of settlement museum interpretation. These museums, like other contexts for the preservation and representation of the past, are given cultural recognition as entitled to tell a particular story by virtue of their institutional role. This cultural warrant endows individual tour guides with what Shuman (1986) has termed "storytelling rights", which involve two major claims: the claim to authenticity - true stories narrated in conjunction with authentic objects (at the level of histoire). This is a more general feature of the living history enterprise, as pointed out by Handler and Saxton: "Authenticity is a dominant value of living history, and we speak of the quest for authenticity to suggest the fervor with which it is pursued" (1988: 242).6 The second claim is the claim to ideological relevance, which justifies the role played by the institutionalized narrative act of re-iterating a particular version of the past in a particular sociocultural context (at the level of discours). The very notion of relevance as it relates to the museum enterprise is essentially problematic: Clearly, historical museums house items (objects, stories) that have lost their use-value, or immediate relevance to contemporary life (cf. Thompson 1979). Indeed, the very inclusion of an item as part of a museum display signals its removal from the ebb and flow of present events and enhances its distancing from the sociocultural and material context surrounding the museum. In fact, in everday parlance, saying that something should be placed in a museum is a statement of value on the one hand and of irrelevance on the other. The "museumification" of the Zionist past in settlement museums, therefore, is not only an assertion of the value placed on it - ideological or nostalgic, as the case may be. It also compels the re- construction of a line of connection between past times and present concerns and sensibilities as part of the museum's interpretive project. As we shall see, the rhetorical burdens carried by tour guides of the first and following generations are quite distinct as they relate to the claims to authenticity and relevance, and this difference affects their performances in interesting ways. Thus, old-timer guides draw their narrative authority from their active participation or close familiarity with the events invoked and the objects represented in the museum. Applying the literary-critical teminology developed by Booth (1961:149-165), we could say that old-timer guides often assume the role of participant-narrator - participating in the tale as either narrator-protagonists or as narrator-witnesses. Visitors often respond to this construction of the narrator role on the old-timers' part by noting that they become "almost part of the museum." While they successfully employ a variety of authenticating devices to establish their narrative authority, the particular "rhetorical problematic" the old-timers face is associated with the need to convey a persuasive message concerning the continued relevance of the values, events and accomplishments of the past to members of the younger generations. As I observed them in action, or heard them recount experiences of guided tours I had not attended (reports freely volunteered, and often prefaced by "It's a pity you weren't here..."), I realized that to the old-timer guides every successful tour was not only a job well done but a re-affirmation of the relevance of the past, even a vindication of their personal histories and life trajectories. Younger guides, of course, cannot employ the testimonial rhetoric so effectively used by the old-timers even though they often personalize their accounts in a variety of ways. Their main "rhetorical problematic" as inheritors rather than makers of the history represented in the museum lies in their need to find alternative ways of constructing their narrative authority. At the same time, in their very willingness to participate in the myth-making enterprise that is at the heart of museum storytelling, by employing a marked idiom of identification, the younger guides actually embody and symbolize the museum's claim for the continued relevance its story holds for present and future generations. "...The kitchen, you see, the dishware. Look at these dishware, do you see such dishes today? Anyone ever ate from such a dish? Why do you think they ate in such dishes?" -"Because there was no porcelain then." -"There was, there was, but it was simply expensive. This one is simply not breakable, so they used these dishes. Note the cups, there weren't enough of them, there were never enough cups so they would take turns..... II. Having Stories To Tell: Old Timers' Testimonial Rhetoric7 For old timer guides, museum interpretation is not primarily a matter of professional engagement, and it is more than a matter of an ideological-pedagogical mission. Most fundamentally, they speak from the standpoint of people who "have a story to tell," a cultural position which in this case goes even beyond old folks' familiar desire to share one's life story with members of the younger generations. As it became clear to me during my fieldwork, the position of "having stories to tell" carries distinctive localized meanings in the sociocultural world in which I had situated my inquiry. The significance of being identified (by oneself and others) as someone with "a lot of stories to tell" was brought home to me as I accompanied B., an old-timer guide in his eighties, to the Friday afternoon gatherings known as "the Parliament of Yif'at," which brought together old-timers and younger men for weekly sessions of storytelling, gossiping and political debates held in a specially designated part of the local stable. During the three months or so of my participation in these gatherings (in the spring of 1990), my presence as someone interested in the "folklore" of the valley was rather indifferently received. It was generally accepted as sensible that I would "attach" myself to B., who had brought me over (promising I'll see moustaches of a magnitude I'd never seen before). B. was often both affectionately addressed and respectfully alluded to by other parliament participants as someone who "has lots of stories to tell," an image that accompanied him in the museum as well. In the course of my visits, however, I was also often advised to talk to this person or that, who "has great stories to tell" about the first days of the village of Nahalal, or the dealings with the Arabs, or the War of Independence, as the case might be. The statement that "x has stories to tell" was often accompanied by an appreciative statement as to x's involvement in all manner of important affairs in the past, often memorable agricultural endeavors or issues related to security matters. It became quite clear to me that in this sociocultural context, "having stories to tell" amounts to a claim of involvement in communally significant deeds and events of the past. This narrative positioning shapes the old timers' storytelling in particular ways, which cut across undeniable individual variations and individual agendas in narrative deployment, points of difference that will not be considered in the present study. Thus, the "parliament" and the museum - however different they are in all manner of ways - are both institutionalized storytelling contexts for narrating the past. In both, the "little stories" inserted into the flow of talk had a certain oppositional flavor to them. They were presented as the history not found in books, the everyday moments behind the great events of the past, which represent a largely orally circulating alternative to, or at least a complementary perspective on, official history - the past viewed "from below," as it were. "You won't find these stories in the history books," I was told again and again, as I was urged to approach one person or another, who could tell me "the real history", the story of the people who did the work, not those who "ran to have their pictures taken every five minutes like all those politicians," as I was once told by an old-timer in a jeering tone. In this overall context of alternative, folk-historical inscription, the people who "have stories to tell" are presented as the true makers of history, and their present repertoire of tales is a measure of and a testimony to their past deeds whether it is told around the "parliament" table or as part of the museum story (one time I heard B. respond to a story told by a parliament member, saying: "This is a great story, I'll take it to the museum"). Old-timer guides thus position themselves as people who "have stories to tell," as doers become speakers, as narrators whose contribution goes beyond a sympathetic sponsorship of the museum's tale, and for whom the museum encounter becomes another arena in which the significance and value of their life and life's work can be repeatedly re-affirmed through their shaping of the museum text. The performances of old-timer guides are thus replete with self- references. The use of first person narration, or testimonial rhetoric, may f self-inclusion in a wider group of people through the use of the first person plural. All of these strategies find their legitimacy in the museum context. Thus, in constructing their roles as narrator- participants, they may purposefully blur the protagonist and witness roles for dramatic effect, which may open them up to accusations of fabulation (often referred to as "folklorizing"), but is usually condoned as a matter of narrative license. In the words of one of the older guide-interpreters: "Older people certainly recount their own experiences, what they lived through, and even if it was not their personal story, they insert themselves into it, out of a sense of truth, definitely a sense of truth - if it didn't happen to them it happened to a friend of theirs, they were simply partners to all these experiences, even if it didn't happen to them specifically..." 8 And much as the older folks respected and encouraged younger people's willingness to become part of the museum enterprise, they did not hesitate to point out the special narrative seduction of old timers' stories, which were a projection of lived experience, not of book-knowledge. In an interview, B. said that the main criterion for selecting a new guide of the younger generation should be whether he can tell the museum story with inner conviction, but then added: "People who lived through the period have a special quality because they experienced all of this on their own flesh, and someone who hasn't experienced this in agriculture, in a first settlement, going out to the shower, to the restrooms, the laundry and making do - if you just read about these things, only from reading, I don't know, I don't think that a person who reads and studies and then passes it on like a parrot, I don't like it, what can I do? I don't have a good feeling when I guide, let's say, at some Crusader castle...I didn't live in those times, just heard about it from someone who knows the material, but I just recite it, and I don't feel good about it, what can I do?" 9 The kind of autobiographical segments, or at least first person narrative segments, typically inserted into the guides' renditions of the museum story are illuminating. In considering them, we will pay special attention to the employment of pronominal usage in these examples. As Babcock, following Jakobson, has pointed out, pronominal usage can be quite revealing for an understanding of the working of language in its interactional context: "Pronouns are 'purely relational units' that encode the relationship obtaining between sender and receiver and as such may be used.....to shift one's attention from the narrated event to the speech event and vice-versa" (Babcock 1977:67). The following four segments thus exemplify ways in which the museum tale becomes explicitly anchored in personal experience through the re-iteration of the first person singular and the verbal construction of a narrator -participant role. In the first two segments the narrator assumes the protagonist role, the central figure in his or her story; in the second two segments the narrator assumes the witness role, a secondary figure in the story he or she is telling. Both positions serve to reinforce the speakers' narrative authority: (1) [pointing to a picture on the wall] "Here am I, and here there's another person, and here's a goat with whom I had friendly relations. I gave her a name. She was like my firend. I called her "Chumtche." Why? Because she was a bit blonde, a bit of a brownie. She was very clever, she was an extraordinary goat...." [the story runs on in the first person singular for several minutes].10 (2) "The guys come from the field, hungry, ready to devour me, and what can I offer them? I have some rice cereal and lentil soup. And I ask the "ekonom" 11 and he was - and that's authentic, I'm telling you a thing that really was - he was the nephew of Ben- Gurion, I'm telling him: 'Srulik, and what shall I do tomorrow?..." 12 (3)"In one house, in the yard of one house, I went in and saw something that at first appeared strange. I saw two girls sitting outside working with the sieve, and two girls sitting in the house doing the same work. I tell them in Arabic, greet them and so on, and ask: 'Why are the two girls sitting outside?'" 13 (4) "And I remember that in my tent there lived a guy from Germany...He was called Shmuel A. and my husband was called Shmuel B....Now this guy, the German, he had a girlfriend from Syria. He couldn't speak one word that was not German, and she doesn't know a word of German or Hebrew. I speak some Yiddish so I say to him: 'How do you manage with her?' And he says: 'With the hands, we speak with our hands.'"14 Whereas the first person singular brings out the testimonial flavor of the narrator's tale (whether he/she assumes the role of protagonist or witness), the first person plural functions as a special kind of shifter, providing a pronominal bridge between the story (at the level of histoire) and the audience (at the level of discours) through the persona of the narrator who has a foot in each of these two levels of discourse (Cf. Silverstein 1976). Thus, in the following two segments, the first person plural used by the old-timer guide manifests this shifting pronominal quality as it slips between reference to the legendary pioneers who founded the early settlements, the contemporary kibbutz community whose enterprising spirit is evidenced by its continued desire for self-improvement, and the narratively engaged participants in the museum encounter: (5) "We want to make progress all the time. I told you, the farmer had to cover a lot of ground, he has lots of land, it's all a matter of scale...We need to improve our tools, we can't plough as we used to any more, we're already working with completely different tools, not a sickle any more, not a scythe any more - here are the sickles, you see? - We're already using a reaping machine. We will talk about this threshing machine that's used for threshing the corn..." 15 The first "we" ("we want to make progress all the time") in this example is part of a general ideological assertion that represents the essential enterprising spirit of the community of Jewish settlers (past and present), who constantly developed and promoted new agricultural methods and tools in their pursuit of efficiency and progress. The speaker then shifts to the historical present often used in museum discourse and here the "we" clearly refers to the early pioneers only ("We need to improve our tools, we can't plough as we used to anymore, we're already working with different tools, etc..) The last "we" in the above excerpt shifts attention to the situational level of the encounter itself, referring to the guide and audience present ("We will talk about the threshing machine..."). A similar pattern of pronominal shifting can be observed in the following excerpt: (6) "The great and rare collection of tools you'll see inside is a collection of tools that are not in use anymore. For over forty years, because we've made so much progress that these tools seem to us outdated. They are not in use. You'll see how we make progress, that's why we have brought you here to show you and all the people of Israel who visit us in great numbers, including adults and old timers, all of them come here to see how we started to build our beautiful land of Israel. How we began to settle this land, how we dried the swamps. All this you can see by looking at our slides..." 16 In this example, the narrator exploits the meta-communicative role of pronominal usage, moving with her listeners between the narrated events ("we dried the swamps" in reference to the pioneers; "we collected the tools" in reference to the museum-makers) and the storytelling situation (audience-inclusive use of "these tools seem to us outdated"; "our land of Israel"). This shift is accomplished through the special elasticity of the first person plural, which in this case is anchored in the narrator's role as a participant in or witness to past events, positioned at the very intersection of histoire and discours. Pronominal usage in this case serves a subtle but important meta- narrative function. Utilizing the referential versatility of "we" in this particular performative situation, the narrator encompasses within a shared discursive space the early pioneers who made history through their settlement efforts, their contemporary offspring who, in their turn, made history in and by establishing the museum, and the museum visitors - in the above cases, grade school children and non- kibbutz adults - who are invited to participate vicariously in this double-layered history-making endeavor. As noted earlier, the stories told by old-timer guides enjoy a great deal of credibility among museum audiences, who are often willing to ignore factual inaccuracies in view of the spirit of authenticity that permeates them. Autobiographical insertions of all kinds serve further to authenticate old-timers' tales, providing a testimonial backdrop to the public story's unfolding. Old timers, however - authentic relics that they are - are sometimes perceived by younger guides as being overly-zealous in their storytelling urge, and too overtly ideological and pathos-filled in their narrative style, to the point of losing touch with young audiences. Moreover, their understandable tendency to mythologize the pioneering past and denigrate the present in a nostalgic vein is argued to create an additional barrier for their audience's identification. Indeed, by assuming the role of narrator-protagonists, the old timers' underscore their proximity to the events recounted at the level of histoire yet at the same time magnify the sense of a "generation gap" (at the level of discours) in addressing young audiences. The mechanism of pronominal usage I have delineated is only one way in which audiences are discursively lured into the museum story across this gap. Another major discursive strategy for handling the irrelevance of the museum story for the life circumstances of contemporary audiences involves the use of the "progress" and "contrast" topoi, which serve to shape the museum story in such a way as to make it relevant to the audience's present situation through the construction of either a continuous or discontinuous story-line. The museum story is thus framed as basically a tale of continuous technological progress and accomplishment, according to which the Zionists' enterprising spirit has brought them from the wooden ploughs of the past to the airconditioned tractors of the present, from the swampy, malaria-stricken valley of the 1920s to the flourishing fields of today. In this tale of progress, the past displayed in the museum is relevant to the present not because it reflects it, or is commensurate with it, but because it authenticates it through the weaving of a territorially anchored tale of beginnings, a story of "making place." In re-iterating again and again that "here it all began," the old-timer guides provide a compelling sense of shared roots, inviting visitors to participate as appreciative audience in the discursive, museum-based act of "re-making" that place. III. Negotiating Narrative Distance: Younger Guides' Interpretations In discussing the process of shifting the task of interpretation onto the shoulders of the younger guides in the museum, one of the old timers made the following comments: "We already want to pass on the task of guiding tours [hadracha] to the younger people. And some of the [young] guides I've seen here - although I haven't been able to follow a guided tour in its entirety - I definitely see a breath of fresh air - they bring many examples I don't bring; for example, they make comparisons very nicely, comparing work as it is today or life as it is today, to how it was in the past. They do it very nicely."17 This comment highlights the special texture and value of the museum interpretations conducted by younger guides in terms of their ability to relate to young audiences and to render the story of a past they have not experienced relevant to contemporary life. It reveals a growing awareness of the difficulty inherent in the museum's rhetorical mission of communicating the past to younger audiences (who make up the bulk of these museums' patronage) not in the sense of establishing the authenticity of the display or the truthfulness of the stories, but in the sense of persuading them of its relevance. Telling and re-telling the museum story, the younger guides re-insert it into the contemporary scene, re-infuse it with life, and negotiate their distance from it along a continuum of identification-detachment. Thus, even though the narrative performances of the old timers form one of the bases for the interpretive styles developed by the younger guides, the latter make no attempt to emulate the old folks' styles in giving shape to their own performances. Rather, as they narrate the museum story, they continuously negotiate their story- telling rights, and their claim to relevance, through the use of a variety of discursive strategies, some of which will be discussed below. Notably, another important strand of influence on the overall style of museum interpretation found among the younger guides can be traced to the instructional role of "teacher-guide" as it has evolved in Israeli culture of pedagogical tourism (e.g. school trips or trips organized by the Society for the Preservation of Nature), and is predicated on the charismatic role of the youth movement counselor (madrich) of older days (cf. Katz 1984). Quite a number of the younger guides had had earlier experience in informal education settings, and a couple of them divided their work between such settings and the museum at the time of the research. So that while the training of guides is mainly conducted on site, by having them accompany a variety of museum tours given by more experienced guides, their ability to develop a style of their own is predicated on their prior familiarity with the teacher-guide as a cultural role, as well as on forming an attitude towards the museum guide role as shaped and enacted by the old timers. As many of the guides I have spoken to testified, their very choice to work in the museum had to do with their sense of identification with its story and with its pedagogical agenda. Notably, a person's ability to identify with the museum story was also cited as the prime criterion for the selection of new museum personnel. However, identifying with a story and the values it articulates is very different from personifying it, from serving as a metonymic extension of it, so to speak. Indeed, the practice of donning a pioneers' Russian shirt (called rubashka), which was introduced by younger generation guides in Ein Shemer (and has been partially adopted by younger guides in Yif'at), dramatizes the semi-playful gestures of identification that mark their performances of the past. They appear before their audiences as make-believe participants in the past they storify, supposedly "joined" by the similarly clad museum dolls which they "introduce" as part of their interpretation. Their performances bring the museum story to life, enhancing audience identification through a fictionalized presentation of self, playfully framing the museum's claim to authenticity. The "realness" of the objects as relics of the past is thus counteracted by the sense of fabulation attending the guides' dramatizations even while their interest-value and identification potential is enhanced.18 This double-edged quality of the dialectic of identification- within-distance shapes the younger guides' presentational style in other ways as well. Thus, while their very participation in the museum enterprise, and their occasional use of autobiographical insertions modeled on the old timers' style are clearly designed to invite identification, their performances often convey their own and their audience's sense of distance from the stories they tell. In creating a "negotiated distance" from the museum story, the younger guides employ a variety of narrative and meta-narrative devices. The rhetorical devices that have emerged as most relevant to the identification-within-distance dialectic as it is played out in the performances of the younger museum guides relates to the uses they make of autobiographical insertions and shared texts in mediating and authenticating their narratives. While some of the younger guides' autobiographical insertions are actual personal experience stories relating to their childhood on the kibbutz, many of them are not first-person testimonials, but rather overtly mediated versions of the old-timers' tales. They may take the form of second-order reminiscences such as reports based on stories the narrator had heard from a family member who belonged to the pioneering generation. In recounting these occasions, they assume the role of narrator-witnesses, never that of narrator narrator- protagonists. Their positioning as narrator-witnesses is not that of secondary participants in the events narrated, but of privileged audiences of the old timers' tales. The following two stories exemplify this kind of mediating strategy. The first tells about the "primus" - i.e., the third person who was made to live in a family tent or room because of a lack of proper accomodations, the arrangements made by the co-habiting pioneers to alleviate the awkwardness of the situation (e.g. placing a broom upside down outside the door or entrance as a no-entry sign), as well as the blunders they experienced in trying to preserve a measure of privacy for the conjugal couple: "My grandfather tells a lot of stories...My grandfather tells the story that one day he came back from work, I don't know what exactly was going on in his head, he went into his tent, and the broom is outside, and he went inside. Without going into details, after a while he fell asleep, probably he was tired from all the work and things like that. He fell asleep, finally at 3 a.m. he wakes up in panic, looks at the watch, 3 a.m., of course it's the middle of the night. He looks at the broom - the "primus"! He gets up in all speed, turns the broom upside down, and begins to run, looking for the "primus". He comes up to the "primus" - the "primus" is sitting in the kitchen, the only place he could still sit, where it was still a bit warm. He can't sit outside all night, can he?...He didn't talk to my grandfather some ten or twelve years after that. So what must we always remember to do? Turn the broom upside down." 19 The grandfather figure here serves as a narrative anchor for a story other versions of which I have heard on other occasions. This personalizing strategy clearly enhances the speaker's narrative authority by highlighting his - albeit mediated - proximity to the museum tale through the "original" figure of his grandfather, the story's protagonist. Notably, this personalizing strategy counteracts the overall distancing effect of this genre of tales, which focus on the "quaintness" of the ways of the past as seen from a contemporary perspective. The closing of the story, which humorously asserts its pedagogical value through a claim of mock-relevance, demonstrates the mobilization of a playful attitude in enacting the complex dialectic of identification and detachment that characterizes the younger guides' performative styles. Another example of such vicarious reminiscing, which makes use of the narrator-witness role, is the following: "There's a mosquito called Anopheles, and when that mosquito stings the person becomes very ill with a disease called malaria. My father was ill with malaria. He had very high fever. He had such high fever there was no place on the thermometer for it. His head was aching, he was sweating, and after that he was very cold and he suffered a lot. And anybody who sees a person suffer like that, they'd understand why they were using these nets. You see these nets? They would put such a net and protect themselves from the mosquitoes, so the mosquitoes couldn't come in...That's how it was in the past, not how it is now. Here, you see, they were so poor, these were all the clothes they had. And in the summer, when it was very very hot, and it was impossible to live inside the cabin, and it was so hot they would throw water on the floor, and lay down like this on the floor with only their underwear on, and that was their cooling system. Imagine!" 22 In this example, again, while the personalizing strategy enhances identification, distance is created through the explicit assertion of contrast between past and present, through a call to try and imagine a now barely imaginable situation. The narrator calls on the founding generation's narrative authority, but rather than assuming the standpoint of the pioneers, he assumes the stance of the audience who are finding it difficult to imagine the past. Positioning himself at the receiving end of his father's story, and acknowledging the audience's positioning at the receiving end of his own tale, he actually models the role of receptive audience member for his listeners. His tale is simultaneously a story and a meta-story - what he says (at the level of histoire) and the saying (at the level of discours) combine to make up the museum message. These mediated personal stories are typical in their use of the first person singular, which is also found in old timers' narrations. Old timers' use of the first person plural, the idiom of "we" discussed in the previous section, is, however, absent from the younger guides' discourse. The younger guides use the first person pronoun in order to establish their personal credibility as narrators, not in order to weave a narrative web of identification around themselves and their audiences as described earlier. The link they establish with their audience flows from a dramatized sense of a shared present, which involves negotiating the distance of both narrators and audience members from the past they attempt to bring to life in the museum encounter. The use of the third person, which casts the pioneers as "they" as against "us", is the most typical pronominal reference in the younger guides' performances. This distancing usage is further reinforced by a strategy I will refer to as "textual mediation." In its minimal form, it finds its expression in evidentiary statements indicating sources such as "It says in the book of Ein Shemer.."21 A more elaborated form of textual mediation involves a strategy of direct citation: on several occasions I have observed guides dramatically pull out fragments of paper with excerpts from old timers' diaries or communal journals, which they have found in the kibbutz archive. Their narration thus gains a double-layered quality, structured as a narrative within a narrative, which contains a "narrative narrator" in addition to the narrator guide (cf. Chatman 1978; Bar-Yitshak, in press). These personalized, dramatized accounts of past events thus served to bring the museum story closer to the audience and to authenticate it through the use of an "original" text. At the same time, by focusing on factual items that sound outlandish in contemporary terms, and/or by maintaining linguistic fidelity to the idiom of the past in the language of the "narrative narrator" cited as part of the performance, this reading aloud also accentuated the distance between past and present, between the voice of the narrator-guide and the voice of the story's protagonist. Take the following example of such a reading, which relates to the pioneers' long-abandoned practice of naming a newborn child by communal consensus rather than by parental choice: "A woman, in the year 1929, writes in her diary - I am reading an excerpt from a diary that I photocopied in the archive; I photocopy a lot of excerpts, cross out the name so as not to invade people's privacy--note, I am standing in front of the children's corner. The topic is children - to understand how they thought in the past. I need to understand: "When I was about to give birth to Yael [her daughter], it was clear to me as it was to everybody else that I am not allowed to give her whatever name I like. The child belonged to the kibbutz, and it has to determine the name, that was the custom. They brought me two alternatives to the hospital from the kibbutz, Yael or Tamar. They did not force a decision on me [lo kafu alaj har kegigit], God forbid, but rather, as you see, they let me me make my own choice, which shows that we enjoy a spirit of liberalism in everything we do.." 22 In the foregoing example, as in the next, a long-abandoned, common practice of the pioneering days is brought to the visitors' attention in the form of authentic little stories that concretize the past. Here the lively description of a past practice is recounted in an attitude of humorous detachment, the narrator-guide using the narrative-narrator's voice to position himself outside the story frame, as someone trying to understand the strange ways of his predecessors. In the following example, the common practice of putting up a third person (a primus) in the tent of a conjugal couple is also narrated, similarly using a strategy of textual mediation. Highlighting the personal cost that attended this arrangement, the person cited here, the narrative narraor, prefigures the disapproval contemporary audiences (and guides) express vis-a-vis this practice, creating a sense of shared attitudinal ground even while generating a sense fo distance from the past: "I want to read to you an excerpt from the journal mibefnim (From Inside): 'We began to build the tents. It was decided that every tent will house three persons. Apart from us, there were a few more couples in the camp, and every couple had to receive a single person to their tent...B. and I received two primusim, Y. and P...Even at a later period, when there were additional newcomers and we could give up on one "primus", three of us continued to live together and we were called the big family. We lived like this for two years.' And the last excerpt I'll read to you, it belongs here, and it is a cry of protest by the same girl who wrote the excerpt we just read: 'What did they do to me?..The sacred duty to absorb new immigrants, the most sacred duty in the land of Israel, is accompanied with the desecration of my love. Yes, there is no other word - desecration (chilul). Is this great sacrifice really demanded of me?"23 The strategy of textual mediation, of narrative within narrative, demonstrated here is thus one way in which younger guides negotiate their own and their audience's distance from the museum story: on the one hand, the past is exoticized and distanced in terms of the particular social practices singled out for narrative elaboration; on the other hand, the attitudes expressed by either the narrator-guide or the narrative narrator he/she cites are intelligible to contemporary audiences, even if not fully shared by them. In this respect, the "textual mediation" strategy is very different from another narrative strategy employed by younger guides, which involves the invocation of autobiographical fragments, mainly childhood memories triggered by the museum as a context for material display - its pictorially depicted scenes, objects, sounds and smells, all of which invoke personal scenes and powerful feelings of rootedness on the part of the narrator. This narrative strategy in fact echoes the experiences of adult visitors for whom the museum visit is a nostalgic journey into long-forgotten regions of their past, an opportunity to cultivate and re-affirm an experientially and sensually based "sense of home." These autobiographical insertions are quite different from those of the old-timers: they occur in the flow of the guides' interpretive talk as casually flowing reminiscences of a very personal childhood world rather than the pathos filled, semi-stylized anecdotes of participation in communally oriented endeavors. The younger guides often cited a well-known line by one of Israel's foremost national poets, Shaul Tshernichovsky, which says that a person is formed as "a pattern of his homeland's landscape" [ha'adam hu tavnit nof moladeto]. Applying it to themselves they subtly appropriated the museum's message through a rhetoric of place and roots, but without partaking of the ideological fervor and pathos of the founders. Countering charges of ideological indifference levelled against the offspring of the pioneers, they suggest an alternative form of participation in the communal story: the Zionist dream as "naturalized," lived experience, not as ideological assertion. While often left implicit, this position was sometimes explicitly stated in autobiographical segments inserted into the museum story: "A homeland is first of all the physical environment on which the emotional experience and the historical experience are built, and so on. Cultural heritage, homeland. But first of all, if we speak of physical environment, we're talking about the land, the landscape you know, which everybody is attached to...I want to tell you about two experiences related to this...After the war [Six Day war] we went from Jenin to Kabatieh [in the West Bank], and after Jenin I suddenly had this strange feeling, I was suddenly moving back in time through a time tunnel - buch, buch, buch, buch - the sound of the drills in the orange grove....A day after the Six Day war was over, we went up to the Golan Heights and I spent the night in the [Syrian] town of Kuneitra. It was very cold and suddenly we heard the voices of the jackels. I had almost forgotten about them, but in my childhood I used to go to sleep with those sounds every night...And suddenly there was this strange feeling of going back to your childhood, a kind of trembling, this issue of the sounds. What is a homeland? It's the smells and the sounds..."24 Contrasting this profound sense of belonging, of being part of the landscape, with his own father's experience, the narrator continues: "One of the most difficult problems a person can have is the sense of alienation. People came to the land and on the one hand they felt that this is our country. My father told me that when he came to Jerusalem for the first time he felt as if he'd been here already. Jerusalem was real to him...but there was another part of it he couldn't connect with - the touch, the smell, the contact with the land, this needed to be reconstructed anew. Toynbee, the Canadian historian (who didn't like us) once said that the cunning Jews, who were expelled from their land, packed it up in a little book and took it with them. But you can't pack up smells, and the Bible indeed brought Jews back to the land and gave them a sense of home, but somewhere there remained a feeling of alientation." 25 Interestingly, the problematic of negotiating narrative distance we have so far discussed in relation to the younger guide's rhetorical task (considered at the level of discours) becomes here part of the actual story of the past (at the level of histoire). In a way reminiscent of, and quite different from, the narrative positioning of old-timer guides, the narrator here, too, positions himself at the juncture of discours and histoire, not as an authenticating gesture, but as a radically reflexive move, which forces into view the negotiated, constructed nature of both the story-telling occasion and the historical tale at its center. By casting himself as the native, the one role his pioneering father could never assume, the narrator re-negotiates his positioning vis-a-vis the museum story. For younger guides and younger audiences, participating in this story is no longer simply a matter of bridging generational distances through gestures of identification with the old-timers' myths of "making place" and "making history" (Katriel & Shenhar 1990). In a very real sense, it is a matter of reclaiming their own part in it - not as agents but as part of the scene (Burke 1945), a claim of belonging and affiliation that is all- too-often clouded by the ideological pathos that dominates the old timers' discourse. Participating in the re-telling of the museum story, embodying the very possibility of its continuing relevance, the younger guides' presentations can nevertheless radically interrogate this story, bringing up pointed questions only their generation has begun to ask: What is it to be part of this land and its stories? Ploughing its fields? Singing its praises? Dreaming its smells? Longing for its lost sounds and voices? And by introducing the possibility of this interrogative mood, they reflexively invite the basic question: What is it to be telling these particular museum stories at this time, at this place? IV. Concluding Remarks Even though settlement museums have become such a prominent feature of the domestic cultural tourism and pedagogical scene in Israel, they have not yet drawn the scholarly attention they deserve. Not that such attention would dispel the self-doubts and self-questionings which accompany the museum enterprise as it makes its uncertain way across generational lines, but it can shed some light on the dynamics of this process and on the implications it may have for our understanding of Israeli society more generally. This paper has attempted to highlight the role of these museums as newly established arenas for the production of partiuclar kinds of social discourses. Framed within the museum walls as the discourse of yesteryear, settlement museum interpretation allows for the articulation of an overtly ideological form of discourse that is otherwise rarely encountered in contemporary Israel. The re- emergence of this intensified version of socialist Zionist discourse is in itself worthy of attention. Clearly, however, the intensely ideological assertions found in settlement museums are shaped by the situation of their enclosure within the museum walls. They neither directly reflect nor affect the sociocultural reality in which they are embedded. The guides' ideological assertions remain largely self-contained, myth-making gestures harking back to glorified days of beginning, to the point of ignoring contemporary concerns and that are clearly relevant to the museum story, such as the continued problematic of Arab-Jewish relations, the analogies made between the pioneering settlements of the 1920s and 1930s and contemporary West Bank settlements, and so on. One can ask to what extent the cultural strategy of preserving and re-cycling an ideological idiom whose present validity is questionable is effective. The impressive proliferation of settlement museums suggests that it is. My analysis has shown, however, that a closer look at museum practices yields a more complex and interesting picture. Attention to the dynamics of museum presentation can illuminate some of the issues involved. In this paper, I have chosen to address these issues by focusing on an analysis of selected aspects of the verbal construction of the museum "message" as it appears in the narrative performances of different generations of tour guides, contrasting, in particular, the rhetorical stance of old-timers vis-a-vis the rhetorical position of younger guides. My starting point was a recognition of the differences in the rhetorical tasks the old timers and the younger guides face as they come to interpret the museum story in terms of their claims to narrative authority on the one hand, and the claim to its continued relevance on the other. Taken together, these claims ground the museum enterprise as a culturally legitimate and valued venture. As I have tried to show, these basic rhetorical stances are reflected in the tour guides' presentational modes - in the narrative strategies used to assert the guides' entitlement to tell the museum story, in the pronominal usage employed to encompass audiences within the museum tale, in the negotiation of narrative distance, and in the interrogation of forms of identification with the museum's "message." While old timers' testimonial rhetoric clearly reinforces the official, canonical version of the museum story, the younger guides' experientially based identification with its objects, sounds and smells may, paradoxically, put it into question. This interrogation of the museum story does not stem from a critique of Zionist ideology and practice, but from its wholehearted embrace. Indeed, in pointing out the fundamental success of the Zionist enterprise in the lived experience of the younger generations (as did the last guide cited above), the revival of the old-timers' Zionist ideological fervor is put into question. Why preach Zionism to the new generations of sabras, the fruit of this earth? The answer repeatedly given to this question comes in the form of reference to the danger of immigration - the museum experience is expected to enhance young visitors' sense of roots and commitment to place, reducing their willingness to leave the country. One wonders if this intensive rhetoric may not run the risk of engendering a sense of estrangement, even cynicism, among young audiences rather than a sense of heightened commitment. Museum interpretation is therefore a matter of ongoing negotiations. The younger guides willingly partake in the narrative reproduction of the museum story, but constantly negotiate their distance from the story and its meanings. Strategically constructing the kind of presentational style they wish to employ, they appropriate the museum story in such a way as to make it their own, in their own ways. Thus, investigating museums as sociocultural institutions that house particular types of discursive practices takes us beyond a consideration of particular stories about a particular past to a consideration of narrative acts of telling about that past in this or that particular way. Such inquiry brings out the negotiated nature of the museum enterprise, which finds its expression in situated presentations of the museum tale. In this paper I have focused on ways in which different narrator-roles shape the texture of museum interpretations. Clearly, the rhetorical shaping of the museum story in addressing different categories of audiences - adults/children, Arabs/Jews, old-timers/newcomers, religious/secular, to name the major distinctions I have drawn - deserves special attention, too. Indeed, the full story of these institutionalized storytelling arenas, their ideological import and the cultural politics that shapes them, is yet to be told. Notes 1 There are over 50 settlement museums of various kinds now in operation, and many more in various stages of establishment (Inbar & Schiller 1990). According to Y. Feldman, chairman of the Council for Historical Preservation, there were 2 million visitors in these museums in 1990 (some 60-70% of them are children). In personal conversation several months later he confirmed that the figure remained the same for 1991 despite the Gulf War. My data is based on over 30 hours of audio and 30 hours of video-taped tour guide performances in The Museum for Pioneering Settlement in Yif'at and The Old Courtyard in Ein Shemer. 2 The image of the halutz, or pioneer, is a center piece of Israeli nation-building ethos. For a discussion of its changing forms of representation in school curriculum, cf. Firer, R. (1984). 3 Cf. Benveniste, E. (1971) and Shuman, A. (1986). 4 Bauman, R. & C. Briggs (1990) for a recent review. 5 Cf. Talmon-Garber (1970) for an early discussion of some ideological implications of generational affiliation of kibbutz members. 6 The notion of authenticity in this context (as in others) is quite complex. Cf. MacCannell's (1989[1976]) discussion of the notion of "staged authenticity." 7 There were only three old-timers regularly working in the Yif'at museum and none in Ein Shemer during the course of this study. Their interpretive styles had, however, become models to be reckoned with. In comparison, the data relating to the younger guides derives from the peformances of 10 guides from both museums. 8 Y., interview, 16.10.91 9 B., interview, 11.10.91 10 B., guided tour, 8.11.91 (my underlining). 11 The "ekonom" was the person who was responsible for the kitchen provisions. 12 S., guided tour, 5.11. 91 (my underlining). 13 B., guided tour, 8.11. 91 (my underlining). 14 S., guided tour, 5.11.91 (my underlining). 15 S., guided tour, 5. 12. 89 (my underlining). 16 S., guided tour, 9. 10. 91 17 Y., interview, 16.10. 91. 18 Another way of playfully dramatizing the museum story is to invite the audience (children) to simulate the pioneers through the donning of period costume and thereby identify with the museum setting and story. This strategy is effectively used in Yif'at by tour guides of all generations. 19 G., guided tour, 31.10.91 20 N., guided tour, 6.8.91 21 Y., guided tour, 21.10.91 22 R., guided tour, 2.8.91 23 G., guided tour, 31.10.91 24 I., guided tour, 6.12.89 25 ibid. References Babcock, B. (1977) "The Story in the Story: Metanarration in Folk Narrative." In Bauman, R. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospects Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, pp. 61-80. Bar-Yitzhak, H. (in press) "Narration and the Components of Communication in the Jewish Folk Legend." Fabula. Bauman, R. & C. Briggs (1990) "Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life," Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59-88. Benveniste, E. (1971) Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press. Booth, W. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Burke, K. (1950) A Rhetoric of Motives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall. Fine, E. & J. Speer (1985) "Tour Guide Performances as Sight Sacralization," Annals of Tourism Research 12:73-95. Firer, R. (1984) The Agents of Zionist Education. Tel-Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad/Sifriyat Hapoalim (in Hebrew). Handler, R. & W. Saxton (1988) "Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in 'Living History'." Cultural Anthropology :242-260. Inbar, Y. & E. Schiller, eds. (1990) Museums in Israel. Jerusalem: Ariel Publishing House (in Hebrew). Jakobson, R. (1960) "Linguistics and Poetics." In T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 350-377. MacCannell, D. (1989[76]) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. N.Y.: Schocken Books. Shuman, A. (1986) Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, M. (1976) "Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description." In Basso, K., and H. Selby, eds. Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, pp. Talmon-Garber (1970) The Kibbutz: Sociological Studies. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press (in Hebrew). Thompson, M. (1979) Rubbish Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Acknowledgement A research grant from the Basic Research Foundation administered by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities is gratefully acknowledged.