This chapter is about Palestinian cultural practices of collecting traces of the past. These practices are of many kinds. Some displaced Palestinians return to their villages to sweep away the detritus covering the objects and structures in which they formerly lived. A second form of collection is retrieval of soil, fragments, or other objects for placement in the homes these people built after their expulsion from their native villages. At times such objects are displayed in their new homes in an effort to transport into the present the meaning of their former lives. Bits of soil can be used to invest current practices with the magical properties of the lost village. Naming, too, has its role in this search for vanished time. The erasure of Arabic names and their replacement by Hebrew names can be reversed. The act of naming always has magical properties attached to it, and the words used by refugees to capture the texture of their former lives always include place names.

How different is this cultural practice of collection from the narratives that emerge in state institutions such as museums, archeological sites, and other political projects associated with the Hebraization of Arab place names? Instead of “collecting like a state,” to paraphrase James Scott (1998), these Palestinian refugees seek the material culture of métis. Métis is practical, experiential, and local knowledge.