Palestinian Rural History Project
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The Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP) is an ethnographic fieldwork and oral history preservation initiative with a focus on Palestinian rural history and heritage since the Late Ottoman period (–1917), through the British Mandate period (1918–1948) and beyond. The PRHP is the largest rural-history archive of Palestinian rural history and possesses the widest spatial coverage of the southern Levant. It is curated by Roy Marom.[1]
Palestinian historian Beshara Doumani, stressed the importance of oral history to "writing Palestinians into history,"[2] while Israeli historian Kobi Peled noted that most Palestinian oral history projects "focus on the Nakba - including its causes and consequences."[3] According to its mission statement, the Palestinian Rural History aims – in contrast – to document Palestine's historical geography, genealogies, toponymy, archaeology, agricultural practices, traditions and lore.[4]
The PRHP's subsidiary initiative, Golan/Jawlan Oral History Corpus documents the region's rural society, historical geography, and memories of displacement, aiming to preserve local knowledge often absent from traditional archives. The initiative records oral testimonies covering landholding, material culture, and social relations to document communities.[5]
By October 2022, the project has documented 700 Palestinian villages, comprising about 65% of the historically inhabited sites in Israel/Palestine.[6] By 2026, the project's corpus has grown to over 2,500 oral-history interviews, covering 1,100 Arab inhabited sites. The corpus included 85% of all Palestinian villages. 43 percent of the Syrian villages in Golan Heights before 1967, and with a selection of sites in northern Jordan and the Hauran.[1]
In addition to the Palestinian Rural History Project, other notable Palestinian oral history projects are the American University of Beirut's Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA),[7][8][9] and the Palestinian Oral History Map, Columbia University's Oral History Project in New York, Duke University's Palestinian Oral History Project,[10] Palestine Remembered, and Zochrot.
References
[edit]- 1 2 Marom, Roy (2026-08-09), The Palestinian Rural History Project: Official Gazetteer of Documented Localities (2026) (in Arabic), Zenodo, doi:10.5281/ZENODO.21856102, retrieved 2026-08-09
- ↑ Doumani, Beshara B. (1992-01-01). "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History". Journal of Palestine Studies. 21 (2): 5–28. doi:10.2307/2537216. ISSN 0377-919X. JSTOR 2537216.
- ↑ PELED, KOBI (2014). "Palestinian Oral History as a Source for Understanding the Past: Insights and Lessons from an Oral History Project among Palestinians in Israel". Middle Eastern Studies. 50 (3): 412–425. doi:10.1080/00263206.2013.871705. ISSN 0026-3206. JSTOR 24583550. S2CID 145142006.
- ↑ Marom, Roy (2022). "The Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP): Mission Statement". doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.31021.77285 – via ResearchGate.
- ↑ Marom, Roy (2026). Palestinian Rural History Project: Golan/Jawlan Oral History Corpus (PRHP-GJ): Corpus Description and Methodology (Report). 1.0. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22003353.
- ↑ Marom, Roy (2023-01-01). "Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP): Gazetteer of Documented Villages".
- ↑ "Narrating Palestine: The Palestinian Oral History Archive Project". Institute for Palestine Studies. Retrieved 2023-05-12.
- ↑ SLEIMAN, HANA; CHEBARO, KAOUKAB (2018). "Narrating Palestine: The Palestinian Oral History Archive Project". Journal of Palestine Studies. 47 (2 (186)): 63–76. doi:10.1525/jps.2018.47.2.63. ISSN 0377-919X. JSTOR 26407673.
- ↑ Shehabeddine, Nabila. "LibGuides: Al-Nakba: 1948 Palestinian Exodus: Oral History". aub.edu.lb.libguides.com. Retrieved 2023-05-12.
- ↑ "Palestinian Oral History Project, 2017-2020 - Archives & Manuscripts at Duke University Libraries". David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Retrieved 2023-05-12.