Punk and the Concept of 'Community' in Ireland
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OUT OF THE BOX: PUNK AND THE CONCEPT OF 'COMMUNITY' IN IRELAND Andrea García González Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies. 2016. Vol. 1, no1. pp. 39-52. ‘Tell you another thing I hate, that word "communities". Whenever anybody in Northern Ireland says "community", what they're really saying is "side"’ (Good Vibrations, 2012). The concept of community has played and still plays an important role in the study of the Irish culture. In this article, I will first trace and question the use of this concept and the meanings given to it. I will do this specifically from an anthropological perspective. Secondly, I will illustrate the need to critically examine this concept through analyzing the experiences of people involved in the punk scene in Northern Ireland. The following ethnography, undertaken during four months of the year 2014, draws on the claim made by some scholars about the necessity for a ‘sceptical investigation’ of the concept of community (Amit and Rapport 2002: 14). It will extend that criticism to what has been called the ‘two communities’ model that has been predominant in the analysis of Northern Irish society. By exploring the development of a punk scene in Belfast, I aim to challenge the assumptions made by some scholars about the homogeneity within a community, the unquestioned belonging of its members, the concept of community as a safe place, and the dualistic view of a society where people supposedly confront the 'other' group. I will also explore the particularities of the punk rock scene in Northern Ireland as a meeting space, and the contradictions and diversity within it. From the 1970s, punks called for the right to be ‘out of the box’, rejecting that identity model which ‘pressurizes individuals to conform to a particular group culture’ (Nic Craith 2002: 180). In carrying out this ethnography, I interviewed three people1 (whose names have been anonymized) connected to the punk scene in Belfast, each one from a different generation: Bernie, who has been involved from the late 1970s; David, who joined punk and metal bands in the 1990s; and Martin, a younger member currently committed to the running of The Centre - a place where punk and non-punk people meet for concerts and other activities. In addition, participant observation was undertaken while volunteering in The Centre. Videos and documentaries made in the last thirty years about punk in Belfast have been used as supporting 1 Unfortunately, I was not able to interview any woman during the time of my fieldwork. Although fewer in number than men, women have been present in the punk scene in Northern Ireland. Some of their voices are part of the videos analysed in this article. The intersection of gender with the challenges posed by the punk scene in this society remains an underexamined area of study. documents. ‘Community’ as a questioned study method The anthropological approach to the concept of community in Ireland finds its roots in the classic work of Arensberg and Kimball, who conducted field research on the western coast of Ireland in the 1930s. Their work established the ‘community’ as a study method, a ‘sample or unit of observation for the study of a culture or society’ (Arensberg 1961: 241), the locus where the culture is performed. In their first study, they looked for a representative community in rural Ireland, and examined kinship and social structure using the theoretical model of structural-functionalism (Wilson and Donnan 2006: 17-19). Their book Family and Community in Ireland, first published in 1968, was the main reference point for ethnographies carried out in Ireland up to the 1980s and remains a starting point for some researchers (e.g. Byrne and O’Mahony 2012; idem. 2013; French 2013). Thus, Arensberg and Kimball’s method influenced ethnographies throughout the island of Ireland. During the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Ireland, anthropologists studied rural ‘communities’ with the same atemporal approach of the early structural-functionalist studies, but their work incorporated an analysis of the division of Northern Irish society (Wilson and Donnan 2006: 27-29). In those years, the division was exacerbated by what has been known as ‘the Troubles’, which refers to the armed conflict starting in 1969 when widespread political violence began (Bryan 2003: 251-252)2. In the ethnographies of Harris (1972), Leyton (1974), Larsen (1982), Buckley (1982) and Bufwak (1982), the ‘community’ is divided in two units of analysis - two groups of the ‘same house’ (as the title of Larsen’s 1982 study suggests) - to attempt to understand the levels of tolerance and hostility between them. This approach to the society is dichotomized in what has been labelled as the ‘tribal conflict’ or ‘two communities’ model. Here, analysis is based on two ‘disputing clans’, which correspond with two populations identified by religion, ethnicity, national identities and political ideologies: Protestant, British, unionist and loyalist, on the one hand, and Catholic, Irish, nationalist and republican, on the other (Wilson and Donnan 2006: 27-30). The critique towards the community-based model in the Republic and the analysis of the ‘two communities’ in Northern Ireland has addressed similar elements: the generalization, the lack of history, and the lack of diversity. If Arensberg and Kimball tried to find a representative community 2 From that year until the signature of the peace agreement in 1998, 3,488 people were killed (calculation based on the Sutton database –Sutton 2002-) and 42,304 people injured (calculation based on Melaugh et al. 2014) in the territory of Northern Ireland, whose population is less than two million. for the analysis of the Irish countryside, the ethnographies in Northern Ireland cited above have been criticized for extrapolating their research of relatively peaceful rural villages to the whole society (Jenkins 1992; McFarlane 1986; Wilson and Donnan 2006). Furthermore, their research has been characterized as unable to 'see the wood for the trees’, narrowly focused on local levels of division in Northern Ireland and failing to consider factors from the wider environment, such as political and economic interests, and the distribution of power in society as a whole (Donnan and McFarlene 1986: 32-33). The community-based model has also been referred to as too static, just as the analysis of the sectarian boundaries in rural areas has been described as fixing the fluidity of everyday life (McFarlane 1986), and as regarding Northern Irish societies as unchanging (Wilson and Donnan 2006: 28). Anthropologists such as Leyton (1974) analyze the values and symbols of each of the ‘two communities’, Catholic and Protestant, conceptualizing the ‘community’ as if it was a natural entity, which individuals belong to from birth and continue to do so throughout their lives. These anthropologists do not analyze what meanings people give to the community, and its boundary, which is essential to the understanding of the community in people’s experience (Cohen 1985: 12-13). Thus, their use of the concept of community is also homogenizing. Arensberg and Kimball’s methods and theory were criticized for not taking into account the ‘behavioural variations and disparate social structural formations throughout the island’ (Wilson and Donnan 2006: 23). The anthropological model of the ‘two communities’ in Northern Ireland similarly eliminates the diversity within each social group, and entails the danger of essentializing the conflict between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Protestants’, disregarding the different meanings placed upon the 'community' by its members, the lived experience of everyday life, the contradictions within and the influences of political forces in its fixed maintenance. The danger of fixing a political creation The concept of community has been used broadly, not only in the academic arena, but also in popular and political discourse, as well as in policy and legislation in Northern Ireland. In designating not just a ‘set of locally based social relationships’, but also a ‘sense of belonging which connects it closely to identity’ (Bryan 2006: 606), ‘community’ is a term which, if used as an analytical value, may prove problematic in academic approaches to the study of Irish culture. Each ‘imagined community’ needs a narrative to maintain the sense of belonging of its members. It can be the narrative developed in educational institutions, as Hobsbawn (1983), for example, indicates in the invention of tradition of the nascent French nation-state. Imagined social cohesion may also derive itself from an official narrative of novels and newspapers, as Anderson (1983) analyzes when referring to the construction of the concept of ‘the nation.’ In this sense, following the ‘two communities’ model without questioning what it excludes and reinforces might be validating that imagined entity and related political discourse. The anthropologist Dominic Bryan (in the short film ‘What is a community?’ 2014) draws attention to the fact that the ‘two communities’ are political creations, manipulated by politicians to give a sense of belonging to people. He emphasizes the necessity of understanding the role that the idea of community plays ‘in processes of political control at both macro and micro level in Northern Ireland’ (Bryan 2006). The ‘tribal conflict’ model dominated anthropological research on Northern Ireland up to the 1990s (Wilson and Donnan, 2006: 22), with some critiques rising from the decade before and important changes at the end of the century.3 Mainly after the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998, diverse anthropologists have questioned the concept of ‘community’ itself, suggesting the necessity of a critical analysis (Bryan 2006). Their analyses have broken with the idea of the ‘homogenous senses of belonging and affiliation’ to the community (Shirlow 2003), showing instead the mechanisms of control that are developed within particular ‘communities’ and the instrumental use of the concept by forces of power (see Jarman 2004; Curtis 2008).