What's in a Name

One spring day in the 1980s, my family and I woke up to the sight of bulldozers, accompanied by Israeli policemen, ascending the hill called Jabal Sikh in Kafr Kanna. At the time, I was a pupil in elementary school, and the hill could be seen clearly from the school. My teacher explained to the class that the Jewish National Fund workers were leveling the hill and planting pine and cypress trees that would provide shade for us in the play areas that would be erected between the trees. Years passed, playgrounds were not erected, and the hill was partly settled by immigrants from the former Soviet Union and given a biblical name: Mount Yonah. My friends and I continue to call the hill by the name we heard from the elders of Kafr Kanna. Examining the geographical names used by the Palestinian minority living in Israel, What's in a Name is a book about the names we give to places: their pronunciation in local dialects, their history, the motifs and themes underlying their bestowal, and the cultural messages they communicate. Based on a rich repertoire of original fieldwork in Arabic, Amer Dahamshe analyzes the Arabic names of villages and towns as well as natural formations such as rivers, hills, and meadows in the Galilee. In doing so, Dahamshe charts the past and present of the cultural geography of Palestinian society as a "memory-scape" that reveals the true historical map of Israel and brings to life its human habitation across the generations. A poetic study of the ideological and cultural construction of how names create meaning, What's in a Name shows how names can reflect multiculturalism and a tradition of tolerance in spite of ongoing processes of erasure.