What's in a Name

Name: What's in a Name
Price: 69.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9780253075185

Stories Behind Arabic-Palestinian Place-Names in Israel

Amer Dahamshe, Leigh Chipman

$69.99

Paperback

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Indiana University Press
03 March 2026

Historical & comparative linguistics; Middle Eastern history; Historical geography; Human geography

Series: Olamot Series in Humanities and Social Sciences

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 Sīkh in Kafr Kannā. 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 Kannā (Cana of Galilei).

What's in a Name examines the geographical names used by the Palestinian minority living in Israel: their pronunciation in local dialects; their narratives, stories, and history; the motifs and themes underlying their bestowal; how they are perceived; 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 Arab-Palestinian society in Israel. In doing so, Dahamshe provides different cultural explanations for the bestowal of these names, their origin as explained in the local stories of the Palestinian people, and their popular, communal, and autobiographical memories across 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.

By: Amer Dahamshe
Translated by: Leigh Chipman
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780253075185
ISBN 10: 0253075181
Series: Olamot Series in Humanities and Social Sciences
Pages: 238
Publication Date: 03 March 2026
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1. The Study of Palestinian Placenames: Between Theory and Ideology 2. Arab Historical Memories and Linguistic Shades of Other Languages 3. The Narrative of the Land and Natural Landscape in Palestinian Names 4. Distinction between Names of Inhavited Locations and Names of Natural Features: The Recreation of Social Class, Gender and Village Prestige 5. Arab-Palestinian Toponymy—from Arabism to Hebraicization Notes Bibliography Index

Dr. Amer Dahamshe received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently teaches in the Hebrew department at the Arab Academic College of Education in Israel–Haifa and is a research fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. His first book, A Local Habitation and a Name: A New Literary and Cultural Reading of the Arabic Geographical Names of the Land, was published in Hebrew 2017, and he co-edited (with Yossef Schwartz) Place-names and spatial identity in Israel-Palestine Majority-Minority Relation, Oblivion and Memory.