Tawfiq Canaan, the Collector of Amulets

This article examines the collecting practices of Palestinian physician and researcher Tawfiq Canaan.Drawing on his extensive and multilayered archive, the article explores how Canaan's roles as medical practitioner, ethnographer, and collector shaped his engagement with local healing traditions.His handwritten notes and classifications reflect a hybrid epistemology shaped by both Western science and religiousmedical cosmologies.Central to this analysis are the varied ways Canaan acquired amulets: as payment for medical services, through purchases, and as gifts.These modes reveal a network of relationships and knowledge exchanges.Many amulets came from rural women who negotiated their value, sometimes replicating rather than relinquishing original pieces to preserve their power.Gifted amulets reflected Canaan's integration into scholarly, familial, and spiritual networksrepresenting diverse social and sectarian backgrounds -grounding amulets in localized practices of healing, ritual, and pilgrimage.Through Canaan's archive, this article traces how amulets protected not only bodies but animals, homes, and places -offering insight into broader dynamics of cultural preservation, gendered labor, and the afterlives of Palestinian folk knowledge under colonial modernity.