The Palestinian Heritage: Official, Elite and Popular.

Professor Heacock presented the different types of Palestinian cultural heritage which form a triangle that is: official, elite and popular. Official heritage is projected in the Palestinian  Authority architecture, monuments and poetry (photographic example: the plaza and tomb of the martyr Abu Ammar); elite heritage plunges one or two generations into the past to search for an authentically Palestinian, not simply globalized picture and project such as,  “the way we were” (photographic example: the Birzeit 2010 exhibition ) and “Ramallah, the fairest of them all?”); and the third unconsciously and effortlessly presents secular, age-old and yet living forms of ritual (photographic example: the Rantisi mechanized olive press (al-ma’sara) in old Ramallah). Through their various temporal perspectives (distant past, recent past and the present) all three testify in various ways to the continued presence of the occupation.