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The Holy Land Experience and Long Distance Dispossession
Abstract
Built into an Orlando Bible theme park are silences and absences that recreate a sanitized Jerusalem, where Palestinians simply never were. On August 2nd of 2021, a Christian health care company bought out the Holy Land Experience, a religious theme park modeled after 1st century Jerusalem. For 20 years, the ‘living biblical museum’ afforded evangelical Christians the opportunity to travel 7000 miles away and 2000 years back in time without ever leaving central Florida. Thus far, scholarly interest in the multi sensorial experience has only focused on aspects of religious ritual and heritage, making almost no mention of the political implications the site carries in relation to settler-colonialism and Palestine, despite the Holy Land Experience’s explicit entanglement with Zionism in its last decade of operation. Drawing on existing literature, popular media accounts and visitor vlogs, I conduct a digital ethnography of the Holy Land Experience as a site and consider the settler-colonial and ahistorical effects it produces in relation to Palestine. At the Holy Land Experience, structured silences and absences are achieved through the co-presence of performances, material artifacts, and merchandise whose conflating temporal and spatial boundaries establish simultaneous Evangelical and Zionist claims to Jerusalem. Moreover, the omission of Palestine and Palestinians undergoing dispossession in Jerusalem from the material and ideological infrastructure of the Holy Land Experience inflicts a different kind of dispossession, a long distance dispossession whereby Palestinians are narratively displaced from Jerusalem’s history. If Palestinians never were, then the ongoing settler-colonial violence they experience can never be. By revealing the settler-colonial and ahistorical effects that connect the mechanically reproduced Holy Land in Orlando to Palestine, I seek to call out and undo the silences that exist around Palestine in cultural heritage and tourism studies and implicate religious theme parks in larger discussions of Zionism and settler-colonialism Sources: Asad, T., 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. JHU Press. El-Haj, N.A., 2003. Reflections on archaeology and Israeli settler-nationhood. Radical History Review, 86(1), pp.149-163. Lukens-Bull, Ronald and Mark Fafard. 2007. Next Year in Orlando: (Re)creating Israel in Christian Zionism. Journal of Religion and Society 9:1-20. Rowan, Yorke. 2004. Repacking the Pilgrimage: Visiting the Holy Land in Orlando. In Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past. Edited by Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram, 249-266. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Trouillot, M.R., 2015. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press. ​
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Israel
North America
Palestine
Sub Area
None