Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 Irish Journal of Anthropology

Volume 10 (1) 2007

Namibia: Otjozondjupa Okahandja Herero Day 2003 (source: www.klausdierks.com) Articles ‘My Wallet of Photographs’: Photography, Ethnography and Visual Hegemony in John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands

Darach Ó Direáin: a Biographical Account of an Aran Island Storyteller

Images of Irish English and the formation of Irish publics, 1600-present

Confusing Origins and Histories: The Case of Irish Travellers

Ploughing her own Furrow: Anthropological Perspectives on Farm Women in Ireland

Anthropology and Attachment

Husbanding Tradition and Marching towards Modernity: Contrasting Forms of Resistance among the Ovaherero in Pre-Independence Namibia Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Volume 10 (1), 2007 ISSN: 1393-8592 Irish Journal of Anthropology ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND

The Irish Journal of Anthropology is the organ of the Anthropological Association of Ireland. As such, it aims to promote the discipline of anthropology on the island of Ireland, north and south. It seeks to provide coverage of Irish-related matters and of issues in general anthropology and to be of interest to anthropologists inside and outside academia, as well as to colleagues in a range of other disciplines, such as Archaeology, Cultural Studies, Development Studies, Ethnology and Folk Studies, Gaeilge, Irish Studies, and Sociology.

Editor: Dr Séamas Ó Síocháin, Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]

Associate Editor: Dr Fiona Magowan, School of History and Anthropology, The Queen’s University of Belfast. [email protected]

Editorial Advisory Board: Dr Dominic Bryan, School of History and Anthropology, The Queen’s University of Belfast Dr Anthony Buckley, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, Co. Down Dr Maurna Crozier, Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, Belfast Fiona Larkan M.A., Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth Dr. John Nagle, Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast Dr Carles Salazar, University of Lleida, Spain Professor Elizabeth Tonkin, Oxford, England

Book Review Editors: Dr Chandana Mathur, Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]; Professor Máiréad Nic Craith, University of Ulster, Magee Campus. [email protected]

Irish Language Editor: Dr Steve Coleman, Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]

Business and News Editor: Anne Nolan, c/o Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]

Production Editor: Francisco Arqueros, c/o Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]

Finances: Francisco Arqueros, AAI Treasurer, c/o Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]

The Irish Journal of Anthropology appears twice a year, in May and November.

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Advertising Rates: Full Page: E100; Half Page: E60; Quarter Page: E40 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Table of Contents Volume 10 (1) 2007

Articles

5 Justin Carville ‘My Wallet of Photographs’: Photography, Ethnography and Visual Hegemony in John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands

12 Marion Ní Mhaoláin Darach Ó Direáin: a Biographical Account of an Aran Island Storyteller

18 Rob Moore Images of Irish English and the formation of Irish publics, 1600-present

30 Aoife Bhreatnach Confusing Origins and Histories: The Case of Irish Travellers

36 Olive Wardell Ploughing her own Furrow: Anthropological Perspectives on Farm Women in Ireland

41 Peter Mulholland Anthropology and Attachment

48 Ed Du Vivier Husbanding Tradition and Marching towards Modernity: Contrasting Forms of Resistance among the Ovaherero in Pre-Independence Namibia

Book Reviews

54 Hunter, Susan S. Who Cares? Aids in Africa FIONA LARKAN

55 Ullrich Kockel and Máiréad Nic Craith (eds) Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions ADRIAN PEACE

56 Andrew Finlay (ed.) Nationalism and multiculturalism: Irish identity, citizenship and the peace process COLIN COULTER

58 Tok Freeland Thompson, Ireland’s Pre-Celtic Archaeological and Anthropological Heritage VICTORIA WALTERS

59 Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, The Anthropology of Ireland JOSEPH RUANE

60 Ben Tonra, Global Citizen and European Republic: Irish Foreign Policy in Transition? JOSEPH RUANE

61 News Miscellany Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Editorial

Editorial Notes

• The focus of the present number of IJA is heavily on Ireland, indeed on the Republic of Ireland, with articles on the Aran Islands (Carville and Ní Mhaoláin), on Irish English (Moore), Irish Farm Women (Wardell), and New Age Religion in Ireland (Mulholland). We welcome, too, the first article by a participant in NUI Maynooth’s post-graduate programme in Anthropology and Development, that on Namibia (Du Vivier). The editor expresses his thanks to all who have contributed material – articles, book reviews, and news – and to the editorial team.

• Máiréad Nic Craith and Fiona Magowan are preparing a Special Number on Northern Ireland which will appear in Autumn/Winter 2008.

• Plans are under way to ensure publication of the papers from the conference just held in the National Museum of Ireland, ‘The Globe in a Glass Case: Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’. Details to follow.

• We encourage readers to submit reactions to articles and/or letters to the editor.

Errata

• Volume 9(1) 2006. The book review by Fiona Larkan, listed in the table of contents, was omitted in error from the body of that number. It is included in the present number.

• Volume 9(2) 2006, the Special Number on ‘Multiculturalism and Migration: New and Exploratory Research’ and edited by Mark Maguire, was incorrectly numbered as Volume 9(3). The Table of Contents was also inadvertently omitted. This latter may be found on the AAI web-site: www.anthropologyireland.org Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

‘My Wallet of Photographs’: Photography, Ethnography and Visual Hegemony in John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands

Justin Carville*

It is precisely because the Photograph is an anthropologically new object that it must escape, it seems to me, usual discussions of the image.

Roland Barthes

The title of this article is taken from a well-known passage exemplify ‘the essential humanity that Synge ascribed to of the playwright John Millington Synge’s 1907 Aran’ (Dalsimer: 223). The sociologist Eamonn Slater has ethnographic travelogue, The Aran Islands (Synge 1992: similarly observed in his analysis of the construction of 90). The passage has also given the title to a publication Aran heritage that Yeats’s ‘cartoonising’ of work on the that appeared in the 1970s, which includes over twenty islands aestheticized the harsh, dull realities of labour photographs by Synge of Aran along with others of (Slater: 111). In Synge’s photographs this aestheticization Dublin, Bray and Wicklow (Stephens 1971). Like his is conflated with the codes of photographic realism, ethnographic writing, Synge’s photography demonstrates producing a particular powerful means of romanticizing a degree of naivety and amateurishness (both lack any the realities of island life. clear methodology yet are an ethnography and a The critical attention given to the seemingly congruent photography of sorts). Indeed, Synge’s photographs have romantic realism of Synge’s ethnographic writing and more in common with a newly-emergent street photography by scholars such as Dalsimer tends to reduce photography, ushered in through the appearance of small the photographic image to mere textuality. Such reductive hand-held cameras modelled on Kodak’s Box-Brownie, readings overlook the complexity of the image in Western than they do to anthropological or ethnographic field- modernity and in particular within the field of work. ethnographic inquiry. Synge used photography as an The industrialisation of photography, reducing, as inscriptive device to collect ethnographic data, but not Walter Benjamin observed, to ‘one abrupt movement simply to visually document the Aran Islands.2 of the hand […] a process of many steps’ (Benjamin Photography, as the passage which lends itself to the title 1992b: 171), combined with the incorporation of of this essay demonstrates, had a significant role within technology into middle-class leisure, ushered in a new his ethnographic fieldwork, and, more significantly, in his lexicon to codify photographic reality. The low definition social relations with the Aranites. In this essay, I want to and soft, grey tones produced by the snap-shot – a term shift the discussion of Synge’s representation of the Aran synonymous with Kodak and amateur photography1 – Islands away from a discourse of romanticism and contributed to the photographic image’s apparent realism, realism to a more detailed examination of the role of as if the technical imperfection and mechanical photography as a mechanism to establish power relations inexactitude of the photograph somehow endowed it between ethnographic observer and the ethnographically with greater veracity. In Synge’s photographs, the aesthetic observed. In discussing the role of photography in codes of the snap-shot also contributed to the Synge’s ethnographic field-work, I want to draw romanticism of the Aran Islands. The artist Jack B. Yeats attention to his use of the human senses to construct the used a number of Synge’s photographs as the basis of Aran Islanders as Other. In particular I want to examine his twelve line drawings published in the 1907 edition of the significance of vision in the construction of Aran The Aran Islands, which, Adele M. Dalsimer suggests, primitivism. In taking this approach, the discussion that

*School of Creative Arts, Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dún Laoghaire Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 5-11 6 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 follows goes against the grain of much analysis of Synge’s power that are invested in that gaze. writing within the field of Irish literary criticism that In his comparison of the visual spectacle of kelp identifies his study of Aran as an attempt to produce an manufacture with the pictorialization of the colonial indigenous ethnography. Before discussing Synge’s use imaginary, Synge introduces a dimension of exoticism of photography I want to briefly discuss recent analysis to the romantic imaginary of the Aran Islands. Social and of his ethnography of the Aran Islands in Irish literary physical aspects of the labour process are reduced to the theory. painterly hues and visual spectacle of an already circulating set of colonial and, in this particular example, ‘Oriental’ imagery (Said). In the comparison of Aran labour with a Irish Modernism, Visual Culture and ‘picture from the East’, however, Synge moves beyond Ethnography the visual exoticism of the islanders to render them mute, silent spectres adrift in the romantic landscape. In his In a short passage discussing the process of kelp aesthetic and textual composition of kelp manufacture manufacture on the island on Inishmaan, Synge breaks to make it conform to a rectangular frame of colonial momentarily from his ethnographic description to make imagery, Synge privileges vision as an ethnographic a detached observation of the visual spectacle taking place method of producing knowledge of the Aran Islanders. before him: More importantly, this establishment of vision as dominant method of ethnographic representation, In Aran even manufacture is of interest. The low flame- establishes social relations of power between observer edged kiln, sending out dense clouds of creamy smoke, and observed through which Synge constructs the with a band of red and grey clothed workers moving in the primitivism of Aran culture. haze, and usually some petticoated boys and women who What is singularly striking about Synge’s account of come down with drink, forms a scene with as much variety the Aran Islands is the extent to which the oral and aural and colour as any picture from the East (Synge 1992: 34). sensory experiences are contested in his ethnographic text. Throughout his account of the Aran Islands, the oral The analogy Synge establishes between Aran and the culture that he encounters is described variously as ‘the ‘East’, could be identified, no doubt, as another example murmur of Gaelic’ (5), ‘the drone of Gaelic’ (12) and of what Joseph Lennon has recently defined as Revivalist more pejoratively ‘primitive babble’ (34). In one ‘cross-colonialism’ (Lennon: xxvi–xxviii). The concept significant passage in which Synge displays his visual of cross-colonialism within Irish literary theory proposes mastery over the landscape through a lexicon remarkably the identification of familiar experiences and similar to describing the stop-time exposure of the representations between colonies as an anti-colonial photograph, the oral impinges upon his detached strategy aimed at destabilising the dominant relations observation: ‘the silence is broken; I can hear far off, as between imperial centre and colony. Although Synge is a if over water, a faint murmur of Gaelic’ (Synge 1992: marginal figure in Lennon’s study of Celtic-Oriental 37). More significantly, perhaps, is the use of the visual comparisons, a number of studies of Irish Revivalism to establish control over the ethnographic encounter have sought to claim the Aran Islands as an example of between himself and the islanders. This does not simply post-colonial literature, incorporating strategies of literary result in the positioning of power relations between modernism to destabilize the ‘ethnographic authority’ individuals, but more problematically in the establishment (Clifford) of his text. Drawing of Homi K. Bhabha’s of a hierarchy of a primitive oral/aural culture and a theories of colonial mimicry and ambivalence (Bhabha), modern visual culture. Through his subjective responses Gregory Castle’s impressive study of the significance of in his ethnographic text, Synge establishes vision not only anthropology on Irish literary Revivalism, for example, as a privileged sense through which to observe and survey suggests that Synge’s incorporation of literary modernism the islanders, but also the power to represent, to transform into his ethnographic text signals ‘a commitment less to into symbolic form the social realities of other cultures. an ethnographic imagination than to a critique of that The ascent of vision within Western modernity as the mode of imagining’ (Castle: 30). Although Castle ‘noblest of the senses’ has ensured it a privileged status in identifies similar passages to the one reproduced above the social relations between subjects and in establishing as demonstrating Synge’s adoption of the ‘vantage point the primitivism of what it took to be visually illiterate of an ethnographic observer who captures the islanders cultures. The media analyst Marshall McLuhan, for in his sweeping, possessive gaze’, reducing the islanders example, has gone as far as proposing an almost to ‘little more than gashes of red or grey’ (111), his focus evolutionary model of the senses in his distinction on Synge’s ‘auto-biographical impulse’ (101–2) as a literary between visually literate and oral/aural non-visually literate strategy that attempts to reconstitute his relationship with cultures that he identifies as existing beyond the reach of the islanders overlooks the significance of such the alienating effects of Western visual culture (McLuhan: descriptions in establishing his visual mastery over the 44–5). In her study of the construction of primitivism ethnographically observed. In contrast to the in Western modernism Gone Primitive, Marianna interpretation of Synge’s writing in the field of Irish Torgovnick has identified the levels of cultural hierarchy literary studies, I want to suggest that what is significant established between modern and primitive societies in about Synge’s subjective observations such as that of kelp the formation of Western primitive discourse manufacture is not so much that it conveys the ‘possessive (Torgovnick: 8–9). To the tropes she identifies as forming gaze’ of the ethnographer, but rather the relations of a primitivist discourse of the ‘Western sense of self and Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 7

Other’, could be added the human senses, as Synge uses Although photometric methods had been well vision to codify his modernity in opposition to the oral/ established in anthropological research by the time Synge aural culture of the Aran Islanders. Through literary began his study of the Aran Islands, his use of visualization, the adoption of detached ethnographic photographic technology as a tool of ethnographic field- gaze and the incorporation of the photographic image work lacks any such methodological approach. The in his ethnographic field-work, Synge constructs Aran photographs produced by Synge on Aran are an eclectic primitivism through the agency of sight. mix of the staged indigenous labour practices of spinning and scutching, combined with snapshots of eviction scenes and islanders strolling along the shoreline. Yet for Photography and Visual Ethnography all the amateurishness displayed in the types of photographs produced by Synge, he used photography The cultural anthropologist Christopher Pinney has in his ethnographic field-work in a surprisingly observed that the histories of anthropology and sophisticated manner. Indeed Synge’s use of photography photography appear to chart parallel paths (Pinney 1992: has similarities to the ethnographic employment of the 74). As early as June of 1839 when a Bill was presented camera in methods of participant observation to the French Chamber of Deputies granting a pension developed later in the twentieth century. However, as I to Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre for the invention that will discuss below, his use of photography is much more bore his name, it was observed that photography would problematic than even some of the more prove indispensable to the traveller, naturalist and methodologically rigorous visual research methods such archaeologist to obtain an exact copy of what they saw as photo-elicitation that have recently been contested in without having to use their own physical or intellectual modern anthropology (Pink: 82–6). labour (Duchâtel: 32). The use of photography as a Photography first appears in The Aran Islands in a mimetic tool for the collection of data in the course of passage of Synge’s text giving an account of his return field-work was thus incorporated into the newly- to Inishmaan. Instead of recording the methods used to emerging social sciences within a few years of its invention. take photographs, however, he discusses showing to Within two decades of Daguerre and William Henry Fox some of the islanders photographs that he had taken Talbot announcing their discoveries, the first discussions during a previous visit. Showing the photographs to a of the systematic use of photography in anthropology group gathered in a cottage, he notes the arrival of a began to appear in anthropological society journals. ‘beautiful young woman’ who slips in and sits beside him Although initially deployed to produce magic lantern to look at the photographs: ‘The complete absence of slides for illustrating lectures, by the second half of the shyness or self-consciousness in most of these people nineteenth century photography began to be used in a gives them a peculiar charm, and when this young and more systematic and methodological fashion. In tandem beautiful woman leaned across my knees to look nearer with colonial expansionism by the West, clearly defined, at some photograph that pleased her, I felt more than technical methods began to be employed for ever the strange simplicity of the island life’ (Synge 1992: photography’s use in ethnographic field-work. There are 60). Sinéad Mattar notes that this passage, with its two main inter-related reasons for this more regulated references to sexual intimacy, served only to enhance the production of photographic data. Firstly, the content and idealism of the narrator (Mattar: 144–5). While it is clear styles of photographic imagery being sent back from that this episode solicits a sexual response from Synge, anthropological expeditions to the scientific institutions something more significant takes place here regarding the charged with collating ethnographic data covered a wide use of photography as an ethnographic strategy. spectrum of photographic production from portraits Photography is deployed as a method of participant to landscapes, and records of indigenous material culture. observation that contributes to the ethnographic authority As a consequence, anxieties surrounding the systematic of the text, while simultaneously reinforcing the archiving of photographic material began to emerge, as primitiveness of the islanders. In their discussion of the the lack of uniformity in photographic production made use of photography within anthropological research, the comparative analysis almost impossible. In response to American visual anthropologists John and Malcolm these anxieties, uniform, photometric methods began to Collier note that the explicit use of photography in be devised for use in field-work, the most significant participant-observation, in which the fieldworker combining photography and anthropometry to produce engages the community through the taking of standardized photographic documentation that could be photographs, ‘brings to photographic orientation the easily archived for future comparative analysis. In John control and authenticity that makes photographic Lamprey’s system, for example, the photographic image exploration so valuable to anthropology’ (Collier and was transformed into an ideal Cartesian space through Collier: 23). More significantly, however, showing the use of thread and a wooden frame to produce a photographs to the community being observed allows vertical and horizontal grid of two inch squares (Spencer for a better rapport with the subjects. They note that 107). Against this grid, front and side profiles of subjects showing photographs provides subjects with the could be taken by placing the camera a fixed distance from opportunity to express their knowledge of the material the backdrop. In theory such a silent, purely visual contained within the image, allowing the ethnographer presentation of ethnographic data would enable the to integrate more fully into the community (Collier and comparative analysis of body morphology between Collier: 24). Synge uses photography in precisely this way. different races. Indeed his autobiographical reaction to his experience 8 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 of showing photographs to the islanders in this passage forcibly than in what is now a well-known episode in demonstrates just how significant the photographic Synge’s account of the Aran Islands. Describing his image was in reinforcing his ethnographic authority: ‘Last observation of the loading of pigs onto curraghs to be year when I came here everything was new, and the people rowed out to a steamer, he suddenly finds himself were a little strange with me, but now I am familiar with surrounded by a crowd of local women. Taking them and their way of life, so that their qualities strike advantage of the absence of their husbands, they break me more forcibly than before’ (Synge 1992: 60-61). into jeering and shrieking at Synge in their derision of his Showing photographs becomes part of the process of marital status. Unable to follow their rapid speech, or to integrating with the community, a process which, by make himself heard, Synge rescues himself from the bringing Synge closer to the islanders, merely reinforces confusion by drawing out his ‘wallet of photographs’ ‘the strange simplicity of island life’. The reaction to the which in an instant returns the women, as he describes it: photographs, which are examined ‘with immense delight’ to ‘their ordinary mood’. ‘For a moment I was in (Synge 1992: 61), thus simultaneously serves to reinforce confusion. I tried to speak to them, but I could not make the primitiveness of the islanders and to acknowledge myself heard, so I sat down on the slip and drew out my Synge’s own ethnographic authority. wallet of photographs. In an instant I had the whole band Throughout Synge’s ethnographic writings, clambering round me, in their ordinary mood’ (Synge photography is employed as a textual strategy to convey 1992: 90). When all semblances of order and logical the modernity of visual culture and primitiveness of communicative behaviour appear to have broken down, Aran’s oral/aural culture. Later in the passage it is the rational, geometric surface of the photographic image introduced as a universal language, a silent and democratic restores the equilibrium of social relations between Synge form of communication whose message is transparent and the women. The curious, modern, paper artefacts, to both the islanders and himself. After ‘every person in with their apparent ability to transcend cultural them had been identified – even those who only showed differences, and to transparently and objectively a hand or leg’ he shows them photographs of people communicate with the viewer, silence the oral dialogue from Co. Wicklow and ‘other scenes of inland life’ (Synge of the women to which Synge has been denied access. In 1992: 61). In a similar passage recounting his stay on the this passage, the photographic image marks the Blasket Islands, he shows photographs of the Aran separation, for Synge, between a modern visual culture Islands and Wicklow to a group in which a young woman and a primitive oral one. is ‘especially taken with two or three that had babies or Synge takes advantage of the experience of the children in their foreground’, leading Synge to comment; modernity of the mechanically reproduced ‘I could see that she had her full share of the passion for photographic image by a people whose dominant form children which is powerful in all women who are of communication has been oral. In his social relations permanently and profoundly attractive’ (Synge 1966: with the indigenous population, photography is deployed 251–2). Here photography enables Synge to ascribe a as a coercive device, a means to engage with the Aran universal humanism to the rural Irish, but in this same islanders on his own terms. Indeed his description of the passage the reading of the photographic image by one effect of the photographs on the women demonstrates of the islanders reinforces their primitiveness. Looking how he employed photography in his construction of at a photograph of Synge in the Luxembourg Gardens, the primitive culture of the Aran Islanders. This is another an old man whispers in Irish to one of the girls ‘Look at example of the conjuncture of the visual and oral in which that … in those countries they do have naked people vision is not only privileged but is ascribed power in social standing about in their skins’ (Synge 1996: 252). Synge relations between observing and observed subject. has to explain to the group that the figures are statues, Taking into consideration the types of photographic soliciting the response: ‘It’s a fine thing to be travelling in imagery likely to have been shown to the islanders, such the big world’ (Synge 1966: 252). Allan Sekula recounts as those of spinning, rope-making and scotching, we can the anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s account of see just how significant photography was in Synge’s showing a Bush woman a photograph of her son whose construction of the primitiveness of Aran identity. What appearance she does not recognize in the two dimensional more powerful means can there be of displaying to the rectangular space of the photographic image (Sekula: 85– islanders their own sense of alterity and temporal 6). It is only when photography, as the process of dislocation from the ‘inland life’, than through the aesthetic ‘mapping of three-dimensional real space’ (Sekula: 85), codes of photographic realism. Declan Kiberd claims is explained to the woman that she recognizes his that, introducing a new narcissism amongst the islanders, appearance in two-dimensional form. Sekula recounts Synge’s photographs presented the people of Aran with this anecdote to reinforce the point that photographic an image of themselves that they were seeing for the first literacy is learned, that is to say, that it is codified as a time (Kiberd 173, 184). In presenting the islanders with message. In his discussion of the Blasket Islands, the an image of themselves, Synge’s photographs had a more linguistic framing of the photograph, explaining the powerful effect of confronting them with their own unfamiliar, modern world to the primitive islander, cultural difference from the modern inland world than demonstrates the modernity of photography and Synge’s through their ‘idealized’ image (Lacan: 4). Through the authority over its place in his social relations with the rural ethnographic process of showing the photographs, the peasant. optic experience was combined with the haptic The significance of the photographic image in Synge’s experience of sifting through the wallet of photographs social relations with the islanders is demonstrated no more (Benjamin 1992a: 233). Photographs were thus not only Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 9 images to see but objects to touch and to hold. The contradictions and contestations that are at play in the islanders were confronted for the first time not with an social relations of power between ethnographic observer image of themselves, but with a reified image on the and the ethnographically observed.3 Michael’s resistance geometric surface of paper – a possession of the to being photographed in his native garb, and the islanders’ ethnographic observer over which they had no general loss of interest in the ‘novelty’ of his photographs, ownership or control of circulation and distribution. thus suggest a much deeper contestation of social What they were seeing was an image of themselves as relations than Synge’s dismissal would initially suggest. object. The modernity of photography also has its moments of crisis. Admitting his awkwardness in conversing with Conclusion the islanders on agricultural and fishing matters, Synge complains that ‘since the novelty of my photographs has Contrary to Mattar’s assertion that Michael’s resistance passed off I have some difficulty in giving them the to being photographed in his native home-spun is an entertainment they seem to expect from my company. example of the increasing modernity of life on Aran Today I showed them some simple gymnastic tricks, (Mattar: 143), I want to conclude by arguing that this which gave them great amusement’ (Synge 1992: 80). The example of what Mary Louis Pratt terms the ‘contact modernity of the photographic image would appear to zone’ (Pratt: 6) between ethnographic observer and the have exhausted its usefulness as an ethnographic method ethnographically observed reveals the struggle of social of participant-observation, but it suggests too that the power relations involved in the production of the visual had begun to lose its power in the social relations photographic portrait. Synge did produce a portrait of between observing and observed subject. Indeed Synge’s Michael in his indigenous clothing, although it is not clear dispute with his guide Michael over the latter’s insistence if this was as a result of the experience recounted in his to be photographed in his ‘Sunday clothes from Galway, book. Despite his successful visualization of Michael’s instead of his native homespun’ because he believes the ‘primitivism’ through photography, however, Synge’s indigenous clothes ‘connect him with the primitive life account of the resistance of his young guide demonstrates of the island’ (Synge 1992: 85), demonstrates that the the extent to which the photographic portrait is produced islanders were becoming increasingly aware of the through the social relations of photographer and subject. production of their identity through the photographic Within photographic historiography of anthropology, image. Of course Synge manages to use Michael’s it has become the norm to analyse the photographic resistance to conform to the primitive image he wants portrait through the theoretical framework of the social to produce of him, by reminding the reader once again power model. Advanced largely by John Tagg’s seminal of the imaginative geography of Aran as spatially and essays of the late 1970s and early 80s (see Tagg), the social temporally distanced from the rest of the modern world: power model has come to dominate historical accounts ‘With his keen temperament, he [Michael] may go far if of the use of photography in anthropology.4 Drawing he can step out into the world’ (Synge 1992: 85). heavily on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the social and Synge’s dismissal of Michael’s resistance to his medical sciences, and on Louis Althusser’s location of primitivisation through the aesthetic codes of ideology within institutions that put in place modes of photographic realism by reiterating his spatial and organisation of social relations, Tagg links photography temporal dislocation from modern life, deflects the to the broader ‘micro-physics of power’ (Foucault 1977: tensions and contradictions between ethnographic 213) of emerging state institutions. Arguing that the observer and observed that emerge in his social relations power exercised by these institutions ‘generated a new with the islanders. Through the introduction of kind of knowledge of the very subjects they produced: photography into his social encounters, Synge unwittingly a knowledge which, in turn, engendered new effects of provides spaces of resistance and opposition to the power’ (Tagg: 63), Tagg suggests that the photographic relations of power between himself and the islanders. portrait is a monological form of communication. It is Although Synge uses vision to establish his own sense of through the monological power of the photographic modernity in opposition to oral/aural culture of the portrait that ‘subjected to a scrutinizing gaze, forced to islanders, and ascribes photography agency as an emit signs, yet cut off from the command of meaning’, ethnographic method in establishing relations of power, that the subject was ‘represented as, and wishfully it is also clear that he deploys photography, along with rendered, incapable of speaking, acting or organising for fiddle-playing, conjuring tricks and gymnastics, as a themselves’ (Tagg: 11). In effect, the photographic portrait strategy of social acceptance. What emerges here is a constitutes a site/sight of ideology through which social peculiar paradox in the use of photography as an relations of power are negotiated, contested and most ethnographic method of participant observation. On the frequently established in favour of the subject in control one hand photography is employed to establish the of the means of representation. ethnographer’s modernity and position of power over The social power model of photographic history, the ethnographically observed, and on the other it is would, no doubt, interpret Synge’s visualization of Aran required to make the ethnographic observer socially primitivism through the portrait of Michael as an example acceptable to the indigenous culture. This paradox reveals of photography’s power to render the subject of scrutiny not so much a reversal of power relations in which the voiceless. The body that has become the focus of the islanders have power in the social acceptance of Synge photographer’s lens would appear to have ceased as through his various ‘performances’, but rather the subject as it is turned into mute object by the power of 10 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 the photographic image. In the account of Michael’s in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. resistance to being represented in his primitive garb, however, the voice of the subject seeps into a history of the social relations of the photographic portrait, References suggesting that the power relations between ethnographic observer and the ethnographically observed are more Althusser, Louis 1971. ‘Ideology and Ideological State contested than acknowledged in the totalizing model of Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).’ Lenin social power often employed in historical accounts of and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. anthropological uses of photography. London: New Left Books. 127–186. Synge’s use of photography, haphazard and Barthes, Roland 1980. Camera Lucida: Reflections of amateurish as it may be, demonstrates the complexity of Photography. London: Fontana. the image in ethnographic research. As Roland Barthes Benjamin, Walter 1992a. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of suggests in the quote reproduced at the top of this essay, Mechanical Reproduction’ [1939], in Illuminations. photography requires a level of analysis beyond the Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. London: dominant methods employed to discuss visual imagery. Fontana. 211–44. Synge’s photographs may be an example of what Pinney Benjamin, Walter 1992b. ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ has described as ‘salvage photography’, following the [1939], in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah salvage paradigm of anthropology (Pinney 1997: 45). Arendt. London: Fontana. 152–96. However, in order to examine the significance of the Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: photographic image in Synge’s use of the visual in his Routledge. social relations with the Aranites, it is important to move Brady, Erika 2002. ‘Save, Save the Lore!’ in The beyond a reductive reading of the photograph as a Anthropology of the Media: A Reader. Ed. Kelly Askew repository of ethnographic data. What is required is a and Richard R. Wilk. Oxford: Blackwell. 56-72. careful consideration of the role of photography as an Castle, Gregory 2001. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. ethnographic strategy both to elicit information from the Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. observed subject and as a textual strategy to reinforce Clifford, James 1988. ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, in the visual hegemony of the ethnographer. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 21–54. Notes Collier, John and Malcolm Collier 1996. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. revised

1 and expanded edition. Albuquerque: University of The term snapshot was first introduced into the lexicon of New Mexico Press. photography in 1860 by the astronomer and physicist Sir John Herschel. It wasn’t until after the development of Kodak’s Box Crary, Jonathan 1993. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision Brownie in 1888, however, that the term began to take on popular and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, currency. For a populist account of early snap-shot photography Massachusetts: MIT. see Ford and Steinorth. The history of amateur photography is Dalsimer, Adele M. 1993. ‘The Irish Peasant Had All His a complex one which requires some brief clarification. The first Heart: J. M. Synge in the Country Shop’, in Visualizing amateur photographers of the mid-nineteenth century came Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition. Ed. largely from the landed gentry, the upper-middle classes and in Adele M. Dalsimer. London: Faber & Faber. 201– Ireland from the Big House. This group were largely responsible 30. for directing the scientific, technological and aesthetic Duchâtel, Tanneguay 1981. ‘Bill Presented to the Chamber development of photography for nearly four decades. Later in of Deputies’ [1839], in Photography in Print: Writings from the century, and in particular in the aftermath of the introduction 1816 to the Present. Ed. Vicki Goldberg. Albuquerque: of cheap, hand-held cameras such as Kodak’s Box Brownie, the University of New Mexico Press. 31–5. cultural hegemony of amateur photography began to transform. Ford, Colin and Karl Steinorth 1988. You Press the Button As the lower middle-classes began to take up photography to – We Do the Rest: The Birth of Snapshot Photography. record the every-day activities of social life and to pursue it as a London: Dirk Nishen. hobby, ‘amateur’ was used as a pejorative term to describe a Foucault, Michel 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of dabbler or dilettante. the Prison. Trans. Allan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane. 2 On the use of inscriptive technologies within ethnographic Foucault, Michel 1980. ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/ fieldwork see Brady (56–72). Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–

3 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. London: Harvester I would like to thank the reviewer of this essay for drawing Wheatsheaf. 109–33. attention to this potential contradiction in the social relations Kiberd, Declan 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of between Synge and islanders and for suggesting its further exploration. the Modern Nation. London: Vintage. Lacan, Jacques 2004. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of 4 Tagg’s essays appeared in journals such as Screen, Screen the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Theory’, Education and Ten.8. In 1988 they were published collectively in Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink, Heloise Fink in The Burden of Representation. The other literature in this and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton. 3–9. area is voluminous and forms the basis for much of the research Lennon, Joseph 2004. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and into the use of photography within the social and human sciences Intellectual History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 11

McLuhan, Marshall 2005. ‘Inside the Five Sense Sensorium’[1961], in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. Oxford: Berg. 43– 52. Mattar, Sinéad Garrigan 2004. Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pink, Sarah 2007. Doing Visual Ethnography. 2nd Ed., London: Sage. Pinney, Christopher 1992. ‘The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography’, in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920. Ed. Elizabeth Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press. 74–95. Pinney, Christopher 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Said, Edward 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Sekula, Allan 1982. ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’, in Thinking Photography. Ed. Victor Burgin. London: MacMillan, 84–109. Slater, Eamonn 2004. ‘Constructing an Exotic ‘Stroll’ Through Irish Heritage: The Aran Islands Heritage Centre’, in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity. Ed. Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin. Clevedon: Channel View. 104-121. Spencer, Frank 1992. ‘Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920. Ed. Elizabeth Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press. 99–107. Stephens, Lily M. 1971. My Wallet of Photographs. Dublin: Dolmen Press. Synge, John Millington 1992. The Aran Islands [1907]. Ed. Tim Robinson. London: Penguin. Synge, John Millington 1966. Collected Works VII: Prose. Ed. Alan Price. London: Oxford University Press. Tagg, John 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies, Histories and Institutions. London: MacMillan. Torgovnick, Marianna 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Darach Ó Direáin: A Biographical Account of an Aran Island Storyteller

Marion Ní Mhaoláin*

Introduction attempted to build a clearer picture of the narrator involved in the collection. In order to demonstrate clearly This paper explores the process of compiling written and the biographical information that has come to light during oral accounts into a cohesive biographical description of the research, and in an attempt to relate this process of a storyteller from the Aran Islands, Co. Galway, Ireland. biographical construction to the broader process of The process of assembling these various accounts into a identity production, the following section explores the single definite biography poses interesting questions various written and oral accounts pertaining to the regarding biographical and textual construction. storyteller in the order that they were revealed to the Following an examination of information drawn from researcher. three main sources – records in the national folklore archive, official state records and interviews with local people in Árainn1 – is a discussion about the implications Darach Ó Direáin: an ethnographic of academic authority in relation to ethnographic investigation research. Of central importance to this discussion is the way that my own position as both a researcher and a local (a) Written sources Aran Islander affects the outcome of the research.2 In his article ‘Bláithín agus an Béaloideas’ Bo Almqvist The storyteller in question was a man named Darach mentions the existence and the importance of such a Ó Direáin from the village of Eoghanacht in Árainn. The collection of folklore and determines that the storyteller eminent scholar Robin Flower (1881–1946) collected of the collection is the same person who is mentioned in folklore from Ó Direáin and the unpublished collection the following two archival sources: The first is a quote is preserved, as part of Robin Flower’s Nachlass, in the taken from the diaries of Séamus Ó Duilearga in August Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore, University College 1932: ‘on the quay at Kilmurvey met «The Fairy Cobbler» Dublin. Robin Flower was Deputy Keeper of Darach Ó Direáin, who has a large no. of tales and willing Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1929 to 1944. to record.’ The second quote is by Máire Ní Néill, who A renowned scholar and poet, Flower is more generally worked for the Irish Folklore Commission from1935 associated with the Great Blasket Island in Co. Kerry, to 1949: where he collected generous amounts of folklore and local history from such well-known individuals as Peig Random Notes made in Aran 1944 […] during the months Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain. It was during a visit of July, August and September, 1944. Máire Ní Néill, Oifigí to the Aran Islands in the early nineteen thirties that Flower an Choimisiúin. My informants were: […] (3) Dara Ó collected material from local storyteller Darach Ó Direáin. Direáin, c. 68, Eoghanacht. By way of being a sgéaluí. Robin The material collected from Ó Direáin – hereafter Flower recorded from him. Visitors often brought to him. referred to as the Flower and Ó Direáin Collection3 – consists Speaks slowly and distinctly. Farmer and fisherman. of three hundred pages (fifty-six components) of stories in Irish as well as a small number of prayers. Research Using these sources as well as notes from the Flower and suggests that Robin Flower did not use a recording device Ó Direáin Collection, Almqvist deduces that the storyteller while collecting in Árainn but, rather, recorded the material from whom Robin Flower collected the material was, by hand as the storyteller narrated. indeed, Darach Ó Direáin and he contends that it was Whilst transcribing and editing the Flower and Ó Direáin collected in either 1932 or 1933. Collection for my ongoing PhD, research has led to some The Flower and Ó Direáin Collection, itself, reveals the interesting questions regarding the identity of the following information regarding the identity of the storyteller. In what follows, I illustrate the various storyteller and the year in which the material was collected. fragments of information that have emerged as I The first of three notes within the collection reads: ‘these

*Department of Anthropology and Department of Modern Irish, NUI Maynooth Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 12-17 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 13 tales recorded by R.F. in Aranmore, Co. Galway. 1932 Wardlaw, provide material to the various or 1933. S.Ó.D.’ The initials ‘R.F.’ presumably stand for abovementioned collectors? And if this was the case, Robin Flower and ‘S.Ó.D’ for Séamus Ó Duilearga, the from which of the two did Robin Flower collect? Could then director of the Irish Folklore Comission. The second it be determined with certainty, for instance, that a reference, which appears to be in Flower’s hand, reads: ‘MacDara Ó Dioráin’ (and not the presupposed ‘Dara(ch) ‘Folklore from Aran Islands 1933. Mss. Unpublished.’ Ó Direáin’) was not responsible for the Flower and Ó Direáin Finally, the third note, also in Flower’s hand, states: ‘Scéalta Collection? Surely, official channels would provide answers as Árainn, Dara Ó Direáin 1933.’4 to such questions. Considered together, then, the first of these notes The Registry of Births and Deaths, Dublin was the next reveals an uncertainty regarding the year in which the port of call and it revealed a single entry, in the form of material was collected, while the second and third a birth certificate, for the various versions of the name reference have the specific year of 1933.5 Darach Ó Direáin: ‘McDarra Dirrane, Oatquarter.9 Born: An analysis of the stories within the collection yielded 08 July 1876. Father: Edward Dirrane. Mother: Barbara further interesting information regarding the storyteller’s Dirrane (formerly O’Brien).’10 identity. At the end of one of the stories, the narrator Armed with this ‘official’ information, it was identifies himself in a traditional formulaic ending in presumably safe to assume that the various archival which he refers to himself as ‘Darach Ó Direáin’ and cites sources examined all referred to the same person – i.e. his home as the village of ‘Eoghanacht’. the individual whose birth was officially recorded in the Apart from the material collected by Robin Flower Registry of Births – albeit with variants of the same name, and the sources mentioned by Bo Almqvist, the Delargy and with an age difference of 10 years. Seeking only to Centre for Irish Folklore contains other unpublished confirm this fact, and in an attempt to verify and cross material relating to Ó Direáin, including the following reference the year of Ó Direáin’s death with the other references: (1)‘ ‘‘The Voyage of Fionn Ma-Cuhil’’ as told archival sources, the baptismal, marriage and death by The Fairy Cobbler. Storyteller: Darach Ó Direáin, records at Cill Ronáin Parochial House in Árainn were Eoghanacht’ [Séamus Ó Duilearga];6 and (2) ‘MacDara consulted and revealed the following two entries: Ó Dioráin (65) Eoghanacht a thug an scéal seo dhom Eanair 12adh 1931 (…)’ [Seosamh Ó Flannagáin].7 (1) ‘MacDara Ó Direáin (70). Died Dec 1949’ [i.e. born It is evident, then, that some of the above-mentioned c.1879]; sources contain conflicting information regarding the (2) ‘Darach Ó Direáin (72). Died January 1950’ [i.e. name and the age of the storyteller. According to Máire born c.1878].11 Ní Néill, for example, her source Dara Ó Direáin was c.68 years of age in 1944, which indicates that he would The result of these findings led to a new ‘truth’ – there have been born in c.1876. According to Seosamh Ó were, according to these records, two individuals with Flannagáin, on the other hand, the storyteller MacDara versions of the same Christian name and with the same Ó Dioráin was 65 years of age in 1931, which would surname from the same time period. The question now have his year of birth as 1866, leaving an age difference became which of the two was the storyteller from whom of 10 years between the two sources.8 Considering that the various folklore collectors recorded? A reference from one source referred to the storyteller as ‘Dara Ó Direáin’ Aran Island poet, Máirtín Ó Direáin (no relation to the and the other as ‘MacDara Ó Dioráin’, and with quite a storyteller) would provide a lead. In his poem Do Dharach substantial age difference between the two, it was Ó Direáin, the poet offers the following biographical conceivable that the previously examined sources may information alongside the title: ‘Do Dharach Ó Direáin have being referring to two separate people – one ‘Dara’ (Seanchaí as Eoghanacht, Árainn, a d’éag Eanáir 1950)’12 and the other ‘MacDara’. The surname Ó Direáin/Ó (Ó hAnluain 1980:66). Finally, we had a source that related Dioráin/Derrane/Dirrane is a particularily common a name to an occupation, to a place of residence and to name in Árainn so that there is quite a strong possibility a date of death. Interviews with local people would, with of two individuals bearing the same first and last name. any luck, provide answers to the remaining questions. Jacqueline Wardlaw’s Liosta Focal as na hOileáin Árann (1987) contains a comprehensive list – inter alia – of the (b) Oral sources various storytellers who contributed to the Irish Folklore With these conflicting written sources and two somewhat Collection at University College Dublin. In relation to vague photographs13 in hand, I proceeded to interview Dara(ch)/MacDara Ó Direáin, Wardlaw has two a number of local people who had personal recollections separate entries: (1) ‘Ó Direáin, Dara. (Dara Nedda of Ó Direáin or who were related in some way to the Phaddy) Eoghanacht, Árainn’; (2) ‘Ó Direáin, MacDara. storyteller. Eoghanacht, Árainn’. In response to my open-ended question, ‘By what This information would suggest that there were two name was Ó Direáin best known?’, each of the eight storytellers with similar names, both from Árainn, who respondents (including Ó Direáin’s daughter, who is now provided material for the Irish Folklore Collection. Upon in her mid-eighties) referred to the man as either ‘Dara further inspection, however, the manuscript reference Neide Pheaidí’ or ‘Dara Ó Direáin’. Not one knew him numbers accompanying the two names corrrespond to as ‘MacDara’, although one man assured me that ‘Dara’ the above mentioned material collected by Ó Duilearga, and ‘MacDara’ as well as other local names such as Ní Néill and Ó Flannagáin. The question remains then, ‘Mackey’ are all versions of the same name. Only one of did two separate storytellers, as presumably accepted by those interviewed had heard of the title ‘The Fairy 14 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Cobbler’. Interestingly, not one of the interviewees knew official written documentation to Ó Direáin, the of another individual by the name of «MacDara Ó storyteller, proved possible due to connections between Direáin», so although there is a record of his death I have, person, kin and locality – characteristics intrinsic to local as yet, been unable to discover any information regarding naming practices in Árainn and other Irish-speaking this individual.14 Many attested to his great skill as a cobbler communities. This local naming practice connects and all knew him as an accomplished storyteller; some individuals to their families, and at times to their villages, saying that the stories were handed down through the and avoids any confusion that may result from the use generations while others said he composed his own. of their ‘official names’ alone. It is often the case, as noted Amongst other items of information to emerge was his by Lele, that more than one person will have the same ability to swim; a fact confirmed by Máirtín Ó Direáin first and last name in this community and other referents (Ó hAnluain 2002: 62). When presented with the two are therefore required in order to distinguish one person photographs, all those interviewed agreed that they from another similarly named individual. A name such depicted the same man, who was known locally as Dara as ‘Dara Neide Pheaidí’ indicates that Dara is a son or a Neide Pheaidí; several offered comments such as, ‘Yes descendant of Neid, who was a son or a descendant of he was a small man’, ‘He’s coming back from so and so’s Peaidí.17 house in that photograph’ and other corroborative The majority of written sources examined in the case information that only persons with such local knowledge of Ó Direáin refer to the man as either ‘Dara’ or ‘Darach’. could infer. One interview resulted in a grand-nephew It would appear that the personal name ‘MacDara’ was of Ó Direáin producing a clear black and white headshot used in a more official sense, as in the case of the Registry of his grand-uncle – finally, a face to the name(s). of Births and by the local schoolteacher/folklore Local information, then, provided connections collector Seosamh Ó Flannagáin.18 An entry for the same between the official and local names; verification that the Ó Direáin in the Register of Eoghanacht National School man known by Dara Ó Direáin/Dara Neide Pheaidí was for the years 1888 and 1889, for example, also appears indeed a storyteller; and a visual representation in the form as ‘McDarra Derrane’. Both of these ‘official’ references of a photograph. In short, the storyteller was given a provide additional information apart from the first and name, a face and fragments of a life history. Space does last name; the address is given as Eoghanacht in both not permit an analysis of the various other sources that instances and the parents’ names cited as Edward Dirrane make reference to Ó Direáin, but suffice it to say that they and Barbara O’Brien. It was through this supplementary all appear to refer to the person who is known locally as information that a reliable link was formed between the Dara Neide Pheaidí.15 officially named Darach Ó Direáin and the locally named Dara Neide Pheaidí. Rather than presuming that all forms of a person’s name unproblematically reference the same What’s in a name? individual, then, it is important to realise that a particular name represents a certain aspect of a social person.19 In As we have seen, archival references, anecdotal accounts this regard, ‘The Fairy Cobbler’ represents the storyteller; and ethnographic findings all contribute to the MacDara Ó Direáin/Dioráin/Dirrane the official or construction of a biographical description of Ó Direáin. state personae; and Dara Neide Pheaidí the son (of Neid), Depending on the source, the man is referred to as ‘Dara’, father, farmer, fisherman, cobbler and any other local ‘Darach’ or ‘MacDara’; ‘Ó Direáin’ or ‘Ó Dioráin’; category that may be attributed to him. The merging of ‘McDarra Derrane’; ‘The Fairy Cobbler’; or ‘Dara Neide these various names in the written and oral sources Pheaidí’. Despite the fact that the storyteller had referred pertaining to Ó Direáin represents the everyday merging to himself at the end of one story as ‘Darach16 Ó Direáin of the various ‘aspects’ of any social person and highlights from Eoghanacht’, it was important to place this the situationality of identity. individual in relation to the many other names that emerged from the various sources, especially when other typical identifying factors such as age and date of death Constructing a Biography: Creating an were incongruent. What is usually the first point of Identity reference in both describing a person and situating them in their social world – i.e. their proper name and surname Let us now consider the position of the researcher in the – can, in some instances, lead to confusion and possible process of biographical and identity construction. In this misunderstandings. section, I begin with a discussion on academic authority In a forthcoming article entitled ‘Local names, identity, in relation to the process of textual construction. Implicit social intimacy and the state in Ireland’ Veerendra Lele in this discussion is the ‘academic’ role of the current discusses the local naming practice of an Irish-speaking researcher. I then explore the process of textual community in the west of Ireland. Distinguishing between construction in relation to the process of identity the use and application of ‘official names’ and ‘local construction, with specific reference to the case of names’, Lele examines the dynamics of state power and Darach Ó Direáin. Central to the latter discussion is the knowledge in relation to local social identity and notes ‘local’ positionality of the researcher. ‘[t]here is some dissonance between the local name person The project at hand involves assembling the various and the official name person – the two are not coterminous.’ sources relating to Ó Direáin into a written biographical (Lele, my emphasis) account. Presenting the life of Ó Direáin in such a way The task of connecting local oral information and creates what Bourdieu refers to as a ‘biographical illusion’ Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 15 wherein life is ‘organized as a history, and unfolds storytellers embodied a perceived ‘essence of authenticity’ according to a chronological order, with a beginning, an thereby providing an essential ingredient in the cultural origin (both in the sense of a starting point and of a nationalist movement. Darach Ó Direáin then, ‘by way principle, a raison d’etre, a primal force), and a termination, of being a scéaluí’, played an important role in national which is also a goal’ (Bourdieu: 300). Such order and identity construction. The focus of this paper, however, organisation is, of course, considered necessary for is the construction of Darach Ó Direáin’s own identity in reasons of legibility and understanding; without some relation to the various abovementioned written and oral form of logical direction, biographies and life histories sources. would merely consist of a conglomeration of seemingly Heeding the advice of Briggs, Clifford and others, we disparate and, often disputed, facts. Bourdieu suggests must examine the contexts in which the multiple written that in the process of constructing a life-story biographers and oral accounts relating to Ó Direáin – including this become aware of their role as ‘professional interpreters’ one – were collected. Each of the examined sources, of related biographical events. It is important too, he within the realm of its own frame of reference, offers notes, that biographers acknowledge the extent of their valuable fragments of information regarding the own involvement in the construction process – a process individual. The process of extracting these fragments of that inevitably results in a coherent account that describes a information from their institutional and intertextual structured series of events, i.e., a life history. framings to compose a single coherent biography is In his article ‘Metadiscursive Practices and Scholarly central to this paper. The written references to Ó Direáin Authority in Folklorists’ Charles Briggs examines the by the folklore collectors of the 1930s, for example, were metadiscursive practices and intertextual power relations composed with folklore archive regulations in mind. of folklore research, and explores the way in which Likewise, the requirements of the Birth and Death records textual authority is created and implemented in such are basic facts such as name, date of birth or death, and disciplines as folklore and anthropology. Elsewhere parents’ names. The context of the many other written describing metadiscursive practices as ‘how discourse is sources cannot be fully explored here but they all, produced, circulated, received, and infused with authority’ understandably, give details required by the discipline or (Bauman and Briggs: 484), Briggs explores the institution to which the collecting agents were attached. intertextual links between oral and written tales, such as They are, in other words, already framed and those collected by the Grimm Brothers, and discusses entextualised by the time the current researcher, intent on the central role of the editors in concealing such producing a biographical account, happens upon them. connections. The same is true of the fieldworker’s It is my own role and position of responsibility within interview scenario wherein the voice of the respondent this process that I now briefly address. Speaking to the is portrayed as a genuine, uninfluenced voice with little, last generation who have personal recollections of Ó if any, reference to the framing processes involved in a Direáin, as neighbour, friend, farmer or storyteller is, typical interview situation. In other words, the interview indeed, a valuable resource of information but it also is portrayed as somehow ‘capturing’ the voice of the poses questions regarding the authority over which interviewee without mention of the various factors that aspects of an identity surface and those which will never contribute to the creation of this voice, such as the come to light. presence of a tape recorder, power relations, gender roles The ethnographic interview situation has, as noted etc. ‘Fieldworkers set up the situation and shape its above, an inevitable impact on the outcome of research. contents; scholars control the selection of what to Such determining factors might include: interview transcribe (and translate), which performances to include guidance; the presence or absence of a recording device; in scholarly texts, how to present them, how they are to gender, social class, racial differences between researcher be interpreted, and which audiences to address’(Briggs: and interviewee, to name but a few. In the case of the 406). project of biographical research, however, there are yet Briggs, therefore, recommends that we reveal rather further deciding factors. These include the accuracy of than conceal these practices and intertetexual links so as particular interviewees’ recollections as well as their to demonstrate how the scholarly authority of folklorists willingness to divulge certain information. This willingness and other experts is, indeed, a product of social relations, or reluctance to disclose information may depend on the usually in situations of inequality, between folklore interviewees’ relationships to the persons they are researcher and their sources. Similarily, James Clifford describing, i.e., Darach Ó Direáin, as well as their calls for an increased awareness of the process of relationships or levels of familiarity with the researcher. constructing an authoritative ethnography, and Central to this process of information gathering, then, is emphasises the collaborataive role of the informant in my dual role as local and researcher – a position that can the ethnographic experience. at times complement and at other times impede the Taking the practices of textual construction a step information acquired during research. Having certain further then, let us consider the implications of such local knowledge myself may well prompt pertinent biographical accounts on identity construction. The role questions to the research topic. Conversely though, I am of folklore in Germany, Ireland and elsewhere in relation at times excluded from being offered certain information to nation building is an important issue and is discussed precisely due to this local status. The fact that I might be at length by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin. The role of the related to an individual being discussed or, at the very least, individual storyteller in the creation of this national identity have my own personal social context through which to is also significant; in the guise of ‘tradition bearers’, interpret information may prevent me from accessing 16 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 local peoples’ views and information on certain issues. information emerges. New documentary sources will be There is a fine line between the role of local researcher uncovered and new interviews conducted and a coherent (‘isn’t it great to have one of our own doing this’) and edited account will eventually materialise in accordance inquisitive local (‘who does she think she is?!’). Realising, with, among other factors, the affiliation of the of course, that I am separated from those I interview by researcher. This account, then, is an interim report on an factors such as age, generation, profession, and in most ongoing project. cases, gender, I wish only to point to the fact that the An awareness of the editorial role of the researcher unifying factor of locality brings an added dimension of in the creation of such a textual account is pertinent to opportunity, hindrance and responsibility to the research any research project. Anthony P. Cohen’s ‘Self-Conscious at hand. Anthropology’ makes important observations on the Multiple voices are thus responsible for the creation relevance of selfhood (of both researcher and local of a textual representation of Darach Ó Direáin; and this participants) to ethnography. Distinguishing between ‘self representation, according to the laws of textual authority, knowledge’ and ‘social knowledge’, Cohen questions the will eventually contribute to an ascribed identity of Darach absence of the former in current anthropological research Ó Direáin. The role of the researcher in compiling these and suggests that ‘we might begin to exploit the intrusive various sources into a cohesive narrative becomes one self as an ethnographic resource rather than suffer it as a of responsibility to the person being described. In the methodological hindrance’ (Cohen: 226). The ‘intrusive case of the ‘subject’ of a biography being deceased, there self ’ is often, of course, both a resource and a hindrance, is an even greater responsibity on the biographer, as, once as this brief account shows. Referring to earlier research a life-story is committed to print, a certain textual authority which he conducted in the Shetland island of Whalsey, prevails. Cohen revisits his description of a local man named ‘Henry’ – a description that emerged from personal communication with the man himself and also from local Conclusion people’s opinions of him – and surmises, ‘(h)e would not recognise himself in other people’s versions of him’ Having considered, investigated and cross-referenced the (Cohen: 222). various abovementioned sources, I can offer the One wonders if the same would be true of Darach following tentative biographical account of the storyteller Ó Direáin (Dara Neide Pheaidí). involved in this collection. Dara(ch) Ó Direáin, known locally as Dara Neide Pheaidí, was from the village of Eoghanacht in Árainn, Acknowledgments Co. Galway. He was born in c.1878 and died in January 1950 at around the age of 72. He was a farmer, This article is partly based on papers delivered at the Gaelic fisherman, cobbler and storyteller. The son of Neid Identities Conference, UCD (June 2006) and at the Orality Pheaidí Ó Direáin and Barbara Ní Bhriain, Darach was and Literacy Conference, NUIG (June 2006). I would like the eldest of five children. He married Cáit Mhicil Mhaitiú to thank my research supervisors Dr. Steve Coleman, (née Mullin) from the village of Creig an Chéirín, Árainn Department of Anthropology and Dr. Brian Ó Catháin, and, according to local sources, had six children – Departmant of Modern Irish at NUI Maynooth for their Éamonn, Kate, Nan, Bid, Baba and Mary – of whom consistent advice and support. My sincerest thanks also only Éamonn and Kate survive. to Dr. Veerendra Lele and Dr. Rob Moore for their Ó Direáin was a renowned storyteller from whom invaluable comments and observations on earlier drafts such notable scholars as Séamus Ó Duilearga, Máire Ní of this paper. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Néill and Robin Flower collected; many of his stories the Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore in granting me access are, as yet, unpublished. One notable exception is the tale to Robin Flower’s Nachlass; to the Irish Research Council ‘An Eascon Nimhe’ (‘The Poisonous Eel’) which was for the Humanities and Social Sciences for funding my collected by Seosamh Ó Flannagáin in 1931 and which Doctoral Research; and to the National Institute for appears in the journal Béaloideas. Describing him as ‘a Regional and Spatial Analysis for their ongoing academic seanchaí, a man of stories and a type of philosopher’1 the support. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to various poet, Máirtín Ó Direáin, wrote a poem in his memory in people in Árainn for sharing information, thoughts and which he petitions the storyteller to speak to him from memories with me. beyond the grave but accepts, in the concluding line, that: ‘Tá an fód, mo léan, i do bhéal go beacht’21 (Ó hAnluain 2002: 63). Notes A biographical account such as the one offered here will inevitably omit various contributions, deductions, 1 Throughout this paper, the term Árainn is used to refer to the assumptions and conclusions involved in the process of largest of the three Aran Islands in Co.Galway. construction. It is hoped, however, that this account can contribute to an awareness of the complexities involved 2 Use of the first person singular at various stages of this paper is, in constructing, assembling and editing the «facts» that therefore, intentional as it demonstrates an awareness of the constitute the representation of a biographical individual. researcher’s positionality in the construction process. Further facts will, no doubt, surface regarding this 3 In the absence of an official title for this collection, the title The individual and the account will develop as additional Flower and Ó Direáin Collection suffices here, in so far as it illustrates Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 17 a co-authorship of the material. References 4 ‘Stories from Árainn, Dara Ó Direáin 1933.’ Almqvist, B. 1988. ‘Bláithín agus an Béaloideas’, in de 5 Brian Ó Catháin (2004) discusses Robin Flower’s visit to Árainn Mórdha, M. (ed.), Bláithín: Flower. An Sagart: An in relation to the Robert Flaherty film Oidhche Sheanchais and Daingean, 97–116. concludes that the year in which Robin Flower visited the island Bauman, R. and C. Briggs 1999. ‘ ‘‘The Foundation of was indeed 1933. All Future Researches’’: Franz Boas, George Hunt, 6 Irish Folklore Collection. Vol. 79: 93 and 105. Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity’, American Quarterly, 51(3), 479–528. 7 ‘MacDara Ó Dioráin (65) Eoghanacht, recounted this story to Bourdieu, P. 2000 [1986]. ‘The Biographical Illusion’, in th me, January 12 , 1931 (…)’. Irish Folklore Collection. Vol. 73: P. du Gay, J. Evans, and P. Redman, (eds) Identity: A 243. Reader. London: Sage Publications. 8 None of the other abovementioned sources refer to the Briggs, C.L. 1993. ‘Metadiscursive Practices and Scholarly storyteller’s age. Authority in Folkloristics’, The Journal of American Folklore, 106(422), 387–434. 9 I was informed by local people in Árainn that Neid (Edward) Dirrane was originally from the village of Fearann an Choirce Clifford, J. 1998. ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, in (Oatquarter) but subsequently moved to the village of Clifford, J. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Eoghanacht where Darach was born. Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 10 I was unable to locate a death certificate for either name. Cohen, A.P. 1992. ‘Self-Conscious Anthropology’, in J. 11 Neither of these probable years of birth (i.e. 1879 and 1878) Okely, and H. Callaway (eds), Anthropology and corresponds with the birth certificate of McDarra Dirrane (08 July Autobiography. London: Routledge. 1876). Haddon, A.C. and C.R. Browne 1891–1893. ‘The

12 Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway’, ‘For Darach Ó Direáin (A storyteller from Eoghanacht, Árainn in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Series 3, Vol. 2, who died January 1950).’ 768–830, plus plates. 13 Two published photographs of Ó Direáin (Ó Duibhginn, Lele, V.P. ‘Local names, identity, social intimacy and the 1970) depict him walking along a road with his back to the camera. state in Ireland’ (Under Review 2007, Cultural The caption refers to him as ‘Darach Ó Direáin’ with a reference Anthropology). to Máirtín Ó Direáin’s poem. Mullen, P. 1936. Hero Breed. Faber and Faber: London. 14 The search is ongoing for this individual but, for the purpose Mullen, P. 1938. Irish Tales. Faber and Faber: London. of this paper, the important point is the identity of Ó Direáin - Ó hAnluain, E. (ed.) 1980. Máirtín Ó Direáin: Dánta 1939– the storyteller. 1979. An Clóchomhar: Baile Átha Cliath. Ó hAnluain, E. (ed.) 2002. Ón Ulán Ramhar Siar: Máirtín 15 For other references to Ó Direáin see Mullen, 1936; Mullen, Ó Direáin ag Caint ar Chúlra Saoil Cuid Dá Dánta. An 1938; Mná Fiontracha, 2003. Clóchomhar: Baile Átha Cliath. 16 The version of Ó Direáin’s name used in this paper is in keeping Ó Catháin, B. 2004. ‘Oidhche Sheanchais le Robert J. Flaherty: with this particular reference. An Chéad Scannán Gaeilge dá nDearnadh’, in R. Ó hUiginn, and L. Mac Cóil (eds) Bliainiris 2004. Carbad: 17 Some names might also include a reference to the name bearer’s village (Seáinín Tom Sheáin Phádraig an tSrutháin) and others Ráth Cairn, 151–235. will include personal descriptive adjectives (Síle Teaim Mhóir). Ó Crualaoich, G. 2005. ‘Reading the Bean Feasa’, Folklore, 116, 37–50. 18 Haddon and Browne’s Ethnography of the Aran Islands (1891- Ó Duibhginn, S. (ed.) 1970. An Muircheartach: In Ómós Dó. 1893), for example, lists the Christian name ‘McDara’ as occuring Clódhanna Teoranta: Baile Átha Cliath. eight times (throughout the three islands) at the time of their Ó Flannagáin, S. 1939. ‘Sean-Sgéalta ó Árainn’, Béaloideas, study. There is no listing for the name ‘Dara’ even though ‘Dara 9, 66–85. Neide Pheaidí’ was born c. 1878. Either he was not recorded at all Ó Giolláin, D. 2000. Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, for this study or the name Dara was officially recorded as McDara. Modernity, Identity. Cork: Cork University Press. 19 Derived, with gratitude, from personal communication with Wardlaw, J. 1987. ‘Liosta Focal as na hOileáin Árann’. Veerendra Lele. (Unpublished Masters Thesis, University College Galway, Galway.) 20 ‘Seanchaí, fear scéal agus cineál fealsamh a bhí in Darach Ó Direáin’ (Ó hAnluain 2002: 62). 21 ‘Since, to my great sorrow, the sod sits trimly in your mouth’ (Translation from Ó Crualaoich, 2005: 48) 18 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Images of Irish English in the formation of Irish publics, 1600– present

Robert E. Moore

Introduction took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at In every linguistic community, certain variations in speech that time can be seized upon as reliable indicators – emblems – of of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand (XII Judges a speaker’s geographic provenance, and/or membership 6).1 in social categories defined in terms of ethnicity, nationality, class, or status (e.g., occupation, gender). By the 19th century the word had developed the more Though many of the linguistic features that ordinary general senses in English of ‘the mode of speech speakers would point to as telltale signs of ‘accent’ have distinctive of a profession, class, etc.’, and even ‘a custom, to do with pronunciation (phonology), other features, habit, mode of dress, or the like, which distinguishes a e.g., of vocabulary, syntax, etc., can function in the same particular class or set of persons’ (OED). The term is way. useful because it brings facts about differences of Usually, some features of language and not others are language together with facts about other semiotic codes selected and (re-)evaluated as having this emblematic, (e.g., clothing); it also brings together a set of issues of identifying value. Usually, these now-stereotyped features disguise and involuntary self-revelation through speech of language – extracted, as it were, from discourse – that will recur in the material discussed below. circulate in communities of speakers along with other This brief essay attempts to identify some of the information about the social identities associated with materials that are of relevance in assessing and also them: ‘the kind of people who say ‘‘X’’ ’ (instead of ‘Y’) historicizing the ‘social life’ of linguistic and cultural are also ‘the kind of people’ who dress in a certain way, shibboleths of Irish English. Ireland today is a eat certain foods, engage in certain kinds of ‘typical’ postcolonial consumer society undergoing dramatic activities, and so on – so a wide range of behavioural, sociodemographic and economic transformation by sartorial, and other displays can be treated as if they were immersion in global flows of capital and (im)migrant ‘accented’. labor from within the EU and beyond. Explicit characterisations of speech ‘accent’ circulate An examination of material from literature, broadcast in society in texts of various kinds, often texts that contain media, and the internet – only a few samples of which quotations of utterance-tokens that exemplify ‘accented’ appear here – suggests that the vigorous traffic in speech. Let us call these emblematic features of utterance ‘accented’ figurations of personhood in Ireland today in shibboleths, employing a Hebrew word whose etymology fact continues a very long popular literary tradition in orients us to contemporary ironies: the Bible reports that which the ‘defective’ Hiberno-English speech of Irish an Ephraimite, fleeing the battlefield in disguise, was met characters is a central element of humour and satire. The at the river Jordan by Gileadites: (linguistic) shibboleths themselves, and the textual forms in which they circulate, have both remained remarkably (1)Then said they unto him, stable, it turns out, over the past 400 years, even as their ‘Say now ‘‘Shibboleth’’ ’: targets, content, and addressees – and the attitudes and he said evoked by them – have changed dramatically. Today, for ‘Sibboleth’: example, satirical renderings of ‘accented English’ in for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they Ireland are often deployed in popular media to represent

Robert Moore holds a PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics from the University of Chicago; during 2006–2007 he was Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at NUI Maynooth. Comments welcome: [email protected].

Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 18-29 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 19 newly salient differences of class, race, and status: the Indeed, any analysis of the status of the English English used by recent immigrants, children and the language in Ireland must take account of two facts barely elderly, the ‘Celtic Tiger’ nouveaux riches, and the (Irish) discussed by linguists: first, the fact that English has never urban poor feature prominently in the most recent been standardised in Ireland, a fact that a few material.2 commentators acknowledge, but which plays no central The development of a fairly stable set of linguistic role in their analyses; and second, the fact that in Ireland stereotypes of Irish English – e.g., the conventions of the accent culture – propagating itself through literature, the ‘brogue’ – is of course intimately bound up with mass-media, and face-to-face interaction – supports a colonialism, but it is not an exclusively English project popular enthusiasm (bordering on obsession) for of discursive domination and symbolic violence regional, class, and other accents, an enthusiasm that (Croghan 1985). Irish authors from Thomas Sheridan manifests itself in explicit discussion about accents, with to Roddy Doyle have contributed in significant ways to imitations and other performances of distinctively the developing and elaborating a distinctively Irish image ‘accented’ speech an inescapable fact of daily life on the of English (Cronin 2007). Irish audiences and readerships, streets and in the mass-media. This fact, if it is mentioned meanwhile, appear to have been avid consumers of this at all, has certainly never played a central role in modern material, and active participants in its construction over sociolinguistic accounts of Hiberno-English. This essay the whole period.3 argues that these the two facts are related to each other, Indeed, many of the nonstandard ‘dialect’ respellings and seeks to assemble some of the materials relevant to devised in the 17th and 18th century to signal divergent accounting for them together within a single framework. pronunciations of English are widespread in the print The kinds of textual practices to be described here, and broadcast media as of 2007. Any complete history moreover, are not restricted to the English language in of the stigmatisation of Irish English, moreover, would Ireland. ‘One of the first things that struck me’, writes need to begin with Stanihurst’s description of the English Coleman of his arrival in the neo-Gaeltacht community being spoken in Wexford in the 1570s (Crowley 2000), of Rath Cairn (Co Meath) in the early 1990s, ‘was the and include 17th century texts written in Irish and ‘openly manner in which people imitated others in passing’, satirical of the English used by Irish speakers’ (Kallen, producing swatches of Gaelic speech that evoked the 1997: 5), notably the anonymous Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis identities of specific, known (and often deceased) (Williams 1981). community members by deploying characteristic features By contrast, the (socio-) linguistic reality of Irish of idiolect – a practice he calls personation: English (also known as Hiberno-English) has only recently attracted the attention of observers trained in linguistics, These minimal quotations, usually only a single word or most of whom have concentrated their efforts on first- a short phrase, are sometimes framed with phrases like order facts of phonology and syntax (Filppula 1999, mar a déarfadh X (as X would say). Miniature performances, Harris 1985b, 1993, Hickey 2002, 2006, Kallen 1997, they simultaneously summon up an image of a third Odlin 1997, and refs. therein).4 person and focus attention on the linguistic form of the quoted word or phrase (Coleman 2004: 391).

Accent culture In a recent review of the linguistic and sociolinguistic literature, Jeffrey Kallen notes that the study of Irish The fundamental topic here is what one might call accent English – ‘by far the oldest of the overseas (or ‘extra- culture: indeed, Irish English is itself most commonly territorial’) Englishes’ – has ‘been limited and, for the most identified by its speakers not as a ‘dialect’ of English, but part, fragmentary and disconnected’ (Kallen 1997: 1), a as ‘an accent’; linguists, as we will see shortly, seem unable state of affairs that he attributes to ‘the low prestige to arrive at a consensus definition of what Irish English accorded many varieties of IrE (especially those which is. showed strong transfer effects from the Irish language), A fundamental concern of this essay is one that is barely the greater attention given to Irish as a medium for the explored in the linguistic literature on Hiberno-English: expression of Irish national culture, and the fluidity of the development in Ireland of a sociolinguistic regime the linguistic situation in 19th and late 18th century Ireland’ of ‘accent culture’ in the absence of State projects aimed (ibid.). But just as important as these ‘social factors’, he at standardizing English as the national language (Steward suggests, may be other issues having to do with the 1968, Havranek 1964). For Ireland the two obvious problematic ontological status of Irish English itself as comparison cases are England, where Agha (2003) has a linguistic variety: described the emergence between 1760 and 1900 of a Standard register (Received Pronunciation or RP), and [T]he relatively small amount of scholarly investigation the United States, where a culture of ‘monoglot Standard’ of IrE stems not only from social factors, but from an American English described by Silverstein (1985) has uncertainty in how to approach thelanguage: as an emerged and propagated itself in public and corporate extreme example of a post-creole variety, as a traditional domains. In both of these countries, hegemonic Standard rural dialect of English – perhaps extended simply from varieties of English (with support from the State and BrE (including Scots and Scottish English), as a series of other institutions) have shaped the development of urban vernaculars with various connections to traditional ‘accent cultures’ under Standardisation that are quite rural dialects, or as something else again (Kallen 1997: 3). different from the one we observe in Ireland. 20 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Clearly, the inherited categories – dialect, creole, ‘urban and ‘peasant’) speech that served as the constitutive Others vernacular’ – have proven inadequate to the task of of the modern Standard languages of European nation- describing Irish English. Thus, the objective of this essay states. The passage, moreover, suggests that Irish English is to propose an alternate set of terms and concepts (e.g., has been under-studied not because of the inadequacy shibboleth, register, entextualisation, language ideology) of inherited models of sociolinguistic variation but rather that are linked to a different analytic framework (for which because of inherent deficiencies in the language itself, see Silverstein 2003, Agha 2007). namely ‘its lack of a symbolic or unifying function in Kallen likewise cites Croghan’s observation that ‘to society’. propose that Irish is the true national language of Ireland The argument of this paper is that distinctively Irish would win one a deviancy tag of some kind in many circles forms of English continue to have many and richly varied in Ireland, but the proposal that Hiberno-English is the ‘symbolic functions in society’, sometimes even ‘unifying’ real national language would be generally greeted with ones, but that the theoretical and methodological incomprehension: some, including those who would not apparatus of modern linguistics and sociolinguistics – give any support to the national claim for Irish, might whether in Labovian variationist idioms or creolist/ suspect a lack of patriotism’ (quoted in Kallen 1997: 19). universalist ones – has not enabled researchers to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) is for obvious political the relevant data. The fact that these frameworks were reasons inappropriate as a source for positively specified developed out of research on sociolinguistic variation norms of any would-be Standard Irish English – indeed, under regimes of hegemonic standardisation (e.g., in the emergence of Ireland as a postcolonial nation, as is England, Europe, and the US) – by linguists who well known, was marked at various points in history by themselves are speakers of modern Standard languages a strenuous rejection of the English language as a whole – may have something to do with this. (see Crowley 2005: 128–163). The Republic of Ireland today is an apparently prosperous EU island nation in which English is the dominant language, the common Stage Irish, 1600–1850 language, the language into which the new immigrants must ‘integrate’, but in which English has never been In Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, Joep Leerssen (1996) argues standardized.5 It is a society in which distinctively ‘Irish’ that the figure of the stage Irishman was ‘caught in the forms of English – recognized (in various forms) around pre-determined set of personality traits that current the world – have been allowed to flourish and multiply, opinion and a long-standing discourse tradition have but never under a sociolinguistic regime organized around fixed on him’, a figure ‘fixed as a «type» from a very early a hegemonic Standard codified and supported by the date’ (Leerssen 1996: 78). In fact the stage Irishman may State as a distinctively Irish national standard language. have been less static than Leerssen suggests (see O’Neill Irish English has no equivalent to RP, no institution policing 2007); in any case, it is the relative stability of textual English usage in the manner of the Academie Francaise, no conventions that concerns us here. unquestioned aribiters of ‘correct’ Irish English usage, For the playwright, Leerssen points out, the Stage and no single type of ‘exemplary speaker’ (cf. Manning Irishman was a ‘two-edged instrument’: on the one hand 2004 on Welsh). With the attentions and energies of elites ‘a handy addition to the art, a ready-made cheville, a consumed by Irish, English has been allowed to develop labor-saving device’ (78); on the other hand, because ‘his and exfoliate – in many communities at the apparent clownishness precludes him from taking a constructive expense of Irish – but has been mainly left to its own part in the plot development, he … must be treated with devices, as it were. Accordingly, this paper identifies some some deftness in order to ‘fit’ into the play, between the of those ‘devices’ in their historical context. other characters’ (78). The literary device of the Stage Kallen sums up by saying that Irishman, then, was an important vehicle for the commodification of Irish identity and language in English while not everyone would enthusiastically endorse Irish public performance, even as it was a ‘commodity’ in its as the ‘national language’, no one views a markedly Irish own right: a stock character suitable for use in set-pieces form of English as an alternative candidate. Though dialect that must be ‘fitted into’ the plot, as readymades. study does not necessarily require that the language ‘The first specimen of the ‘brogue’’, says Hogan – and to be studied is associated with a sense of nationhood, it the first attestation of the word brogue denoting an Irish may nevertheless be suggested that the relative lack of ‘accent’ – comes from Skelton’s play Speke Parrot [ca. study of IrE owes something to its lack of a symbolic or 1525], in which a parrot ‘who imitates various languages unifying function in society (Kallen 1997: 19). and dialects, including that of the Irish water-carriers’ says:

Many of the key ironies of the study of Irish English are (2) ‘Moryshe myne owne shelf’, identified – non-ironically – in this passage. It is of course the costermonger sayth; perfectly possible to carry out dialect studies of languages ‘Fate, fate, fate, ye Irysh waterlag’. (Hogan 1927: 56, fn 1). that have never undergone standardisation, as studies of Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and other In this passage already two of the most salient shibboleths languages show (e.g., Silverstein 1974, Heath 1978). It is of Irish English appear in place: instead of the normative a historical fact, however, that dialectology emerged in s-sound we find sh; where we would expect a wh-- sound Europe as the documentation (often in ‘salvage’ mode) we get something else, rendered here orthographically of precisely those non-standardised forms of (e.g., rural as . Both have been described for the phonology of Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 21 contemporary Irish English (e.g., by Hickey 2005). [Leerssen 1996: 116]); its main character O’Blunder ‘is In Captain Thomas Stukeley of 1596/1605, Irish abundantly furnished with ‘typically Irish’ characterisation: characters speak heavily ‘accented’ English, occasionally a brogue, bulls, a shillelagh, a predilection for stealing kisses interspersing words and phrases of Irish (O’Neill 2007: from handsome servant girls, a tendency to burst into 118–142). Probably the most famous of all ‘Stage Irish’ song’ (116). characters is Shakespeare’s Captain Macmorris from Charles Macklin’s The True-Born Irishman – produced Henry V (simply identified as ‘Irish’ in the 1623 folio), to great success in Dublin in 1761, but a complete failure who is often presented using for ‘tis, for is, when it was staged in London in 1767 – was ‘produced for Christ, and so on; he also uses for by explicitly as an attempt to correct the popular view of and for my, both mainstays of popular Irish characters as traditionally represented on the stage’ representations of Irish English up to the present day, (Leerssen 1996: 113). The contrast between ‘instinctive, and widely noted as actually occurring features of Irish native honesty’ and ‘the acquired fripperies of fashion’ English usage. Macmorris’s emblematic utterance comes (120) is embodied here in the contrast between two Irish in dialogue with the Welshman Fluellen: characters, this time a husband and wife, Mr and Mrs O’Dogherty (Leerssen 1996: 112–21; Morash 2002: 52– (3) II Henry V, act 3, scene ii (1599) 3). As Hogan points out, this was a play ‘written to amuse FLUELLEN Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, a Dublin audience with the follies of those of their under your correction, compatriots who aped English manners and speech’ there is not many of your nation— (Hogan 1927: 60). After they move to London, Mrs O’Dogherty, in one of her many attempts to shed the MACM Of my nation! What ish my nation? stigmatised Irish identity and take on an English one, Ish a villain, and a bastard, changes her name to Diggerty. Her husband complains and a knave, and a rascal? What ish that she is in ‘such a phrenzy of admiration for every thing my nation? Who talks of in London’ that she has ‘brought over a new language my nation? for her’ (Leerssen p 121). In a climactic scene, her husband addresses her: See O’Neill (2007: 143–77) for further discussion. Shakespeare’s handling of Captain Macmorris’s speech (4) I hope I shall never have any more of your London shows that the shibboleths of ‘accent’ found in literary English; none of your this here’s, your that there’s, your representations occur not in an all-or-nothing fashion – winegars, your weals, your vindors, your toastesses, and despite our intuitions about ‘accent’ – but rather by your stone postesses; but let me have our good, plain, old degrees of saturation, even in such purposely stereotypic Irish English, which I insist is better than all the English representations as this one, which contains, along with English that ever coquets and coxcombs brought into this three tokens of for is, three tokens spelled as if land (cited at Leerssen 1996: 121). pronounced normatively (bastard, rascal, talks; see Agha 2003: 255–57 for a close parallel in Dickens’s rendering Intriguingly, the final sentence in which Mr O’Dogherty of Uriah Heep’s Cockney speech, with its shibboleths of praises ‘plain, old’ Irish English is presented in a lexical ‘h-dropping’). register (coquets and coxcombs) that probably meets or Leerssen (1996) charts the ‘twofold accommodation exceeds the informal ‘‘standards’’ for normative Stage- of the Irish presence (as a character taking part in a English English, and certainly contains no shibboleths of fictional contrivance, and as an Irish character in front Stage-Irish pronunciation or syntax. The play, of course, of an English audience)’ in the 17th and 18th centuries has a happy ending: Mrs O’Dogherty apologizes, sheds (1996: 7), identifying three phases in its development. First, her English affectations, and they live happily ever after in the 17th century, the Irish characters often later turn – of course the O’Doghertys were well-off enough to out to be Englishmen in masquerade; what’s represented establish a household in London in the first place. is not ‘’an Irishman’ but rather a[n English] character’s idea The difficulty for the analyses proposed by both Bliss … of what an Irishman is like’ (ibid.); then, by the end of and Leerssen has to do with the limits of literary the 18th century, ‘Irishmen of unmitigated convention, and the nature of the interface between loathesomeness are represented, whilst at the same time literary representations and sociolinguistic realities. Bliss a claim to realism is raised (ibid.). Finally in the mid-18th minimizes the degree to which the language given to Stage century comes a dramatic shift to ‘a more appreciative Irish characters was governed by literary and theatrical treatment’ (79): ‘no longer a craven, heartless, dissembling conventions, preferring to see it as a naturalistic enemy, he becomes a noble, sentimental, forthright hero, representations of speech patterns that were current in whose loyalty to England is only rendered more striking Irish English at the time the plays were written: ‘the by his Irish accent and other markers of non-Englishness’ majority of the extracts [from plays], far from consisting – a development ‘influenced to no small degree by Irish of any kind of ‘Stage Irish’, seem to represent original rather than English playwrights’ (Leerssen 1996: 80). observation and ingenious notation within the limits By the mid-18th century, a new figure dubbed by imposed by the absence of a phonetic alphabet’ (174). Leerssen the ‘counter-Stage-Irishman’ had emerged, e.g., Leerssen’s argument is more complicated; he insists in Thomas Sheridan’s The Brave Irishman (first performed that the emergence of the counter-Stage-Irishman was a when Sheridan was a student in Trinity College in 1737 purely ‘literary’ phenomenon, but then also claims that 22 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 the figure of the Counter-Stage-Irishman, once it had complicated work that manages both to be a critical emerged in the theatre, had more or less direct political ‘deconstruction’ of the idea that the Irish are given to and other ‘extra-theatrical’ impacts and influences making bulls and other verbal blunders, and a collection (Leerssen 1996: 149). of ‘excellent’ examples of same, gleaned by its author Both Bliss and Leerssen seek evidence for their claims over several years of collecting activity. in the details of Irish stage characters’ uses of English. In its opening pages, Edgeworth’s Essay shifts its tone The argument of this paper is that all such reflexive dramatically, from a proto-self-help book for the socially typifications (Agha 2003, 2007) of ‘accented’ Hiberno- anxious in English society to a parody of an English – whether they occur on the stage, in joke books, Enlightenment science of language: ‘Many bulls, in newspapers, popular media, or face-to-face represented to be born and bred in Ireland, are of foreign interaction – are governed by sets of conventions, extraction; and many more, supposed to be unrivalled knowledge of which is circulated through all of these in their kind, may be matched in all their capital points [by institutional and social domains. Representations of Irish other examples drawn from high literary sources]’ (6; speech as ‘defective’ or non-normative are themselves emphasis in original). governed by norms and conventions. To identify these To this end, Edgeworth presents a series of putatively conventions, one must first identify the stigmatised sound ‘Irish’ bulls together with earlier examples taken from segments – shibboleths like sh for s, f for wh-, etc. – and non-Irish sources, including classical antiquity; one example then identify how these stigmatised sounds are placed into is given below, a putatively Irish bull paired with a report a discourse context(s) through the deployment of by Francis Bacon (summarised here): conventions of entextualisation (Silverstein and Urban 1996, Briggs and Bauman 1990). One can then begin to (5) a. [Paddy Blake’s bull] (Edgeworth p. 6) trace how the shibboleths, and the texts in which they are embedded, circulate in society. These patterns of When Paddy heard an Englishman speaking of the fine circulation thus form the historical background of the echo at the lake of Killarney, which repeats the sound forty ‘culture of ‘accent’’ in contemporary Ireland. I turn now times, he very promptly observed to a second important conventionalised form through ‘Faith that’s nothing at all to the echo in my father’s which samples of Irishness-in-English were produced garden, in the county of Galway: if you say to it and circulated – the so-called ‘Irish bull’. ‘How do you do, Paddy Blake?’ it will answer, ‘Pretty well, I thank you, Sir’’ Irish bulls b. [Bacon’s bull: the echo at Port-Charenton near Paris: Bulls, according to Earls, ‘were, over a period of more ‘call Satan, and the echo will not deliver back the devil’s than two centuries, one of the chief verbal signals by which name, but will say, ‘Va t’en’’ [‘Go away!’]’ (Edgeworth the Irish were identified by speakers of standard English’ 2006: 7] (Earls 1988: 3). In his comprehensive essay on the subject, Earls offers a brief three-point definition of the Irish bull: The technique of pairing a putative Irish bull with a parallel drawn from another, preferably earlier, source is (1) It is a brief spoken utterance rarely extending beyond a employed throughout Edgeworth’s Essay. Counterposed sentence in length; (2) it involves a comic contradiction to the ‘echo’ bulls, Edgeworth presents another pair of between two of its component parts of which the speaker bulls, both of which involve that literate form of is unaware but which is perceived by the person who has eavesdropping that occurs whenever one reads over recorded the anecdote and by his readers; (3) since the late another’s shoulder. Here we are dealing with a violation seventeenth century it has been consistently associated with of the etiquette of privacy in public. The first and Irish people speaking in English and most prominently ostensibly ‘Irish’ one is taken from the immensely popular with social groups included within the category ‘the lower joke book Joe Miller’s Jests (first published in 1739 [Earls Irish’ (Earls 1988: 1). 1988: 13]):

Earls shows that, while the term ‘bull’ had been current (6) a. [Bull from Joe Miller’s Jests [1739] (Edgeworth 2006 in England from the 1630s, ‘throughout most of the [1802]: 7)] [seventeenth] century the Irish were not associated with An English gentleman was writing a letter in a coffee- the uttering of bulls’, which ‘had two distinctive lines of house, and perceiving that an Irishman stationed transmission, occurring on the stage and in joke books’ behind him was taking that liberty which Hephaestion (ibid., 5). Indeed, while from the late 16th century ‘the Irish used with his friend Alexander, … concluded writing were depicted as making use of a comic non-standard his letter in these words: speech, and were the target of jokes aimed at their verbal ‘I would say more, but a damned tall Irishman peculiarities and occasional blunders, nothing resembling is reading over my shoulder every word I the Irish bull is to be found on the stage before 1702/ write’. ‘You lie, you scoundrel!’ 1704’ (ibid.). said the self-convicted Hibernian. Without any doubt the most important single contribution to the genre was Maria Edgeworth’s Essay b. [Bull from The Remarkable Sayings of Eastern Nations on Irish Bulls (Edgeworth 2006 [1802]), a dizzyingly (1694)] Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 23

Read literally, Edgeworth is merely pointing out that, while ‘unquestionably excellent’, this bull can be found also in a Those who see things in a philosophical light must have book called The Remarkable Sayings of Eastern Nations observed more frequently than others, that there is in this [1694; see fn 14 at p. 125], therefore it is not uniquely nor world, a continual recurrence or rotation of ideas, events, even originally Irish. Of course, the anecdote also features and blunders. With his utmost ingenuity, or his utmost an Irishman who is not only Irish but knows how to read, stupidity, a man, in modern days, cannot continue to and who (‘involuntarily’) reveals that fact when he responds produce a system for which there is no prototype in viva voce to the sentence in the Englishman’s letter. The ‘tall antiquity, or to commit a blunder for which there is no Irishman’ is a looming presence in a book written precedent (Edgeworth 2006 [1802]: 41). immediately after, and perhaps during, the events of 1798. But no sooner has this proposition been advanced than Following this, in a second dramatic non sequitur, the text makes another startling turn, to an argument that Edgeworth shifts suddenly into a ‘forensic’ mode: the English and the Irish have fundamentally – inherently – different relationships to language in general, and to It is really edifying to observe how those things that have the English language in particular: long been objects of popular admiration shrink and fade when exposed to the light of strict examination. An The Irish nation, from the highest to the lowest, in daily experienced critic proposed that a work be written to inquire conversation about the ordinary affairs of life, employ a into the pretences of modern writers to original invention, superfluity of wit and metaphor which would be to trace their thefts, and to restore the property to the astonishing and unintelligible to a majority of the ancient owners … [W]e are proud to assist in ascertaining respectable body of English yeomen. Even the cutters of the rightful property even of bulls and blunders; though turf and drawers of whiskey are orators; even the cottiers without pretending, like some literary blood-hounds, to and gossoons speak in trope and figure (ibid., p. 70). follow up a plagiarism, wherever common sagacity is at a fault (11–12). Edgeworth’s text is deeply self-contradictory. An Essay on Irish Bulls somehow manages decisively to refute claims Edgeworth’s debunking project in the Essay involves about the Irishness of Irish bulls without ever resolving tracing the provenances of texts that really are like the deeper ontological question about whether bulls of anecdotal reports of ostensibly unique, but typically ‘Irish’, whatever kind have any existence apart from the ‘ear’ of utterances, and as such her own text addresses more the beholder. ‘While other comic genres in the Irish general problem of the circulation of such commodified tradition … are deliberately shaped by the performer’, ‘samples’ of language. Restoring stolen verbal property writes Earls, ‘the bull is the creation of the hearer’ that to its ‘rightful owners’ is the mission of a peculiarly represents ‘a kind of anti-folklore which is the creation forensic literary criticism. of the collector rather than of the performer’ (Earls 1988: It’s never quite clear whether bulls are constituted by a 18–19). The author of the Essay on Irish Bulls (whom Earls (stereotypically Irish) ‘confusion of ideas’, or by syntactic takes to be Maria’s father Richard Lovell Edgeworth) errors (solecisms), or by phonological interference and ‘accent’ (reflexively typified as shibboleths), or some attempted to clear the Irish from the charge of making bulls combination of these. Since they are uttered unintentionally by arguing that these are to be found in all countries and by the speaker, it is the hearer or overhearer who that those of other nations have been [mis-]attributed to constitutes them as bulls, and perhaps records them. the Irish. Simultaneously, if somewhat contradictorily, he Edgeworth’s account hovers between two arguments: suggested that Irish bulls are to be explained by reference the argument that bulls have no existence as such outside to specifically Irish circumstances and verbal habits (Earls the construal of a hearer or overhearer, and the argument 1988: 13). that, while bulls do exist, they are by no means the exclusive property of the Irish. The two, obviously, are By these (and most other) criteria, Edgeworth’s Essay on irreconcilable. In some passages she seems to suggest the Irish Bulls, in its entirety, should itself qualify as an instance former, while in others she explicitly lampoons the of the textual form it ostensibly submits to analysis: the English practice of ‘collecting’ the speech errors of their Essay on Irish Bulls is itself a bull. ‘Hibernian neighbours’ – the very practice that makes Irish bulls experienced a ‘remarkable revival’ of possible her own text. popularity during the 1970s, according to Earls, ‘and were But the ‘forensic’ project of detecting literary and other a significant component in the flood of anti-Irish jokes appropriations and borrowings, and ‘restoring’ which became so widespread in England’ during the borrowed texts to their ‘rightful owners’, may be an Troubles (Earls 1988: 15–16). He provides several unfinishable task. The reason seems to be that the larger examples, including the following from 1985, which uses ‘modern’ conditions under which discourse circulates in pseudo-dialect spelling to elicit a performance of society make any such ‘finalisation’ impossible. There is ‘defective’ Hiberno-English from the (presumptively perhaps even a glimmer of the fact that the Essay itself, English) reader: by ‘collecting’ samples of Irish English and repeating them ‘to all eternity’ as bulls, is contributing to the very conditions that make its own earlier stated goals impossible to achieve: 24 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

(7) How to speak Irish in one easy lesson (Earls 1988: 80) the particular interests that typify them (Warner 2002: 75). Say very quickly: whale The final set of examples to be discussed here exemplifies oil all these traits. beef hooked Overheard in Dublin Before turning to the contemporary material, it is important to point out that the shibboleth-laden ‘brogue’ As of mid-May 2007, second place on the Irish of the Stage Irishman, and the ‘anti-folklore’ of the bull paperback nonfiction bestseller list is held by a small book – even though the former manifests itself most clearly called Overheard in Dublin (Kelly and Kelly 2007). The book on the plane of phonology, and the latter on the plane emerged from the very successful collaborative blog of of syntax/semantics – were in constant contact with each the same name (www.overheardindublin.com), other. The utterance of bulls by Irish characters onstage established in 2005, which asks its users: ‘Overhear was often done in a ‘deviant’ Irish English filled with anything funny, interesting, unusual in Dublin?? Tell us what shibboleths. The full title of the most famous joke book you’ve heard!’7 Anecdotes submitted to of the late 1680s provides a rich example of the ‘Stage- overheardindublin.com – which come in to the web site at a Irish’ English phonology discussed earlier: rate of at least five per day – are in a standardised format: each bears a ‘title’ supplied either by the editors or by the (8) Bogg-Witticisms; or, Dear Joy’s Commonplaces. Being a user; the text of the anecdote contains some reportage Compleat Collection of the most Profound Punns, Learned Bulls, of the setting, context, and participants of the reported Elaborate Quibbles and Wise Sayings of some of the Natives of utterance or exchange, and then the directly quoted Teague-Land. material. Beneath this in fine print is Overheard by [name], Shet fourd vor Generaul Nouddificaushion: And followed by even more specific information about the Coullected bee de grete Caare aund Panish-Tauking location of the original utterance, and the date it was of oour Laurned Countree-maun. Mac O submitted online. Below in (9) is a representative sample: Bonniclabbero of Drogheda Knight of the Mendicant Order (Earls 1988: 16). (9) Priceless My friend was on the old 123 from James’s into town. Already by the 18th century, then, Irish English manifested A scanger was talking to some unlucky passenger itself in and through the circulation of embedded genres saying: – entextualised ‘bulls’ circulating as set-pieces and ‘For years I thought my kids name was Darren, me readymades on the stage and in joke books, with reflexive mot told me its bleedin Aaron!’ typifications of stereotypically ‘Irish’ pronunciation This is the god’s honest truth. circulating in and across them as shibboleths. These facts Overheard by DEKO, 123 of circulation, moreover, change over time in pattern and Posted on Friday, 01st April 2005 intensity.6 The reflexive awareness of these facts of circulation One wonders how widely this anecdote can circulate, and on the part of authors, readers, theatre-goers, and others, still be effective: to ‘get’ the joke one needs to know that brings into being a distinctively Irish ‘public’, as the term ‘the old 123’ is a Dublin bus line, that ‘James’s’ refers to is used by Michael Warner: a ‘social space created by the St James’s Hospital on the north side of the city, and that reflexive circulation of discourse’ (Warner 2002: 61). ‘scanger’ is a derogatory term for lower-class Dubliners who stereotypically reside on the city’s north side (e.g., in It is not texts themselves that create publics, but the Tallaght; it is roughly synonymous with the British-English concatenation of texts through time. Only when a term chav). previously existing discourse can be supposed, and a Sampling the printed version, one notices first of all a responding discourse be postulated, can a text address a number of clear-cut instances of ‘Irish bulls’, though public. Between the discourse that comes before and the none is labelled as such; now, they seem to be associated discourse that comes after, one must postulate some kind almost exclusively with elderly Irish women: of link. And the link has a social character; it is not mere consecutiveness in time, but a context of interaction (10)Overheard two elderly ladies on the no. 2 bus (Warner 2002: 62). discussing the drug problem in Dublin: Mary: ‘Jaysus, Josie, aren’t them drugs terrible?’ The discourse forms in terms of which publics are Josie: ‘Mary, if it wasn’t for the Valium, I’d be on organized, says Warner, employ forms of address that drugs meself’ are Overheard by Mark, no. 2 bus (Kelly and Kelly 2007: 22)

tightly knit up with a social imaginary: any character or trait (11) Two aul dears queuing for the no. 27 bus. Just caught I depict typifies a whole social stratum. Individual readers the end of the conversation: who participate in this discourse learn to place themselves, Old dear #1: ‘Sure whoaya tellin. De kids dees days as characterized types, in a world of urbane social is terrible bold’. knowledge, while also detaching themselves ethically from Old dear #2: ‘And ye know it’s not de parents I Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 25

blame, it’s de mudders an fadders’. with a big smile on her face. Overheard by Anna, town (ibid., p. 109) Overheard by Jemima, The Buttery, Trinity

Stories and anecdotes on the Overheard in Dublin web site Overheard in Dublin reflects the changing landscape of an are organised into six categories (not counting increasingly multi-cultural Irish society; it abounds with ‘miscellaneous’): four of these have reference to the representations of social types – including, of course, location where the utterance(s) were overheard – immigrants: ‘Transport, Workplace, Pub, On the Street’ – and two refer to highly salient Irish social types, who happen to (16) Security guard, foreign national probably Nigerian, be located at the bottom, and at the top, respectively, of gesturing with his walkie-talkie to dealer bloke to tidy up the Irish class hierarchy: ‘Skangers’ and ‘D4 Heads’. pallets and boxes near shopping centre doorway. Two samples will serve to illustrate the types of items Dealer: ‘Der’s no problem, mate. Get yer gaffer on attributed to ‘Skangers’, stereotypically young, male, the blower and I’ll have a chinwag wih ‘im, he hoodie-wearing denizens of the urban underclass: knows the jackanory’. Retreats one very confused security guard! (12) I was coming home from College last November, Overheard by Anonymous, Ilac entrance, Moore Street on the no. 65B. As I got upstairs I got a real strong smell of hash! I saw a group of 14 year-old skanger lads sitting in Characters are identified with a rich array of identifying the back talking and smoking away! One lad walked up descriptions: scumbags, customer (D4 persuasion), a group of and said lads, total Dubs, Finglas heads, An elderly woman in a wheelchair ‘I’m gonna write ‘JOINT’ on the window’ with an auld Dub twang, Elderly woman in a bar in Ballyfermot, as they were fogged up! In true skanger style he wrote Two ‘head-de-balls’, Two ‘howyas’, a Chinese fella in a Dublin ‘GIANT’. jersey, A Nigerian mother dressed in full traditional dress and sandals, Nice to know that being high didn’t affect his ability to three classy birds ordering cocktails, An impatient Russian builder spell! (obviously not familiar with joviality!), a rather trollied looking fellow, Overheard by Stephen, over the M50, Tallaght (63–4) An American couple eating weetabix with marmalade on it [thinking it was Irish soda bread], and so forth. (13) One strung-out skanger passing another strung-out The tone of reportage in Overheard in Dublin is one of skanger at a bus stop in Irishtown: mild aggression, albeit tempered with a stance of Skanger 1: ‘Where ya goin?’ inhabited ‘joviality’: the Irish elderly are casually Skanger 2: ‘Nowhere’ patronised, the un-Irish speech and other behaviors of Overheard by Katie, Irishtown (114) immigrants are portrayed with detached amusement (one anecdote in the book, involving Chinese people, bears This last appeared under a casually derogatory title, the heading Irish racism), the pretensions of the newly rich probably supplied by the editors: Truer words were never (‘D4 Heads’) are casually lampooned (compare El Tom spoken. At the other end of the class spectrum are ‘D4 1998). The book and the web site offer a (seemingly heads’, sometimes identified by the delocutionary handle endless) series of ‘vernacular performances’ of other ‘ya roights’: people’s vernacular performances. Such characterisations are (14) Two ‘yaw roights’ dolled up to the nines, admiring each other, drinking mudshakes and waiting to be asked The stuff of performed stances that can range from to dance. Eventually an average-looking guy approached immersion to irony or even aggressivity, in a way that one of them: always has some affective charge – hipness, normality, Guy: ‘Grea’ in here isn’t it, de ye wan ti dance?’ hilarity, currency, quaintness, freakishness, and so on. The girl looked at him scathingly from head to toe and What is called ‘vernacular’ performance is therefore in reality replied as bitchily as she could, structured by a continually shifting field of artfulness in ‘No thanks, I’m fussy about who I dance with’, managing the reflexivity of mass circulation … The use of and then smirked at her friend. Quick as a flash the guy such pseudovernaculars or metavernaculars … helps replied, sustain the legitimating sense that mass texts move ‘I’m not love, that’s why I asked you’ through a space that is, after all, an informal life-world. Overheard by x, Turks Head That the maintenance of this feedback circuit so often takes the form of humor suggests that, as with all joking, there (15) A typical Trinity/D4 toff asking a lunch lady in the is a lively current of unease powering the wit (Warner 2002: Buttery: 73). Toff: ‘Sorry, is there anywhere I can get wawter?’ Lady: ‘Sardy, love?’ But above all, Overheard in Dublin is fulsomely attentive to Toff: ‘I want wawter’. the ‘punctuality of its own circulation’ (Warner 2002: 68); Lady: ‘WHA?’ it ‘obsessively represents scenes on the margins of its own Toff: ‘WAWTER’. public, places where its own language might circulate but This went on for an amazingly long time till she finally that it cannot (or will not) capture as its addressee’ (ibid., copped it and said, p. 78). ‘Ohhh… whaaaaaaaateh’ 26 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

There is no speech or performance addressed to a public ‘imitations’ of Irish accents. Callers to confessional talk- that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly shows like Joe Duffy’s Liveline display a range of often condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation. This is lower-class Dublin accents, while in other programming accomplished not only through discursive claims … but (GAA sports, ‘Farm Week’, and ‘Seascapes’, a weekly also at the level of pragmatics, through the effects of speech report on maritime activities) a wide range of rural genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, nonstandard Irish English can be heard in abundance. mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, Meanwhile, on-air presenters, comedians – and other lexicon, and so on (ibid., p. 82). ordinary callers – can be heard producing a wide range of ‘performed’ accents, including in imitations of well- Most noticeable in the Overheard in Dublin book and known political figures (the ‘flat’ northside Dublin accent website are the mechanisms used to pin down the location of the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is a favorite target). of each reported utterance-token in time and space, using If not to the State-run media, we might look to dates, times of day, and exact locations, ‘formulations Ireland’s newspaper of record, The Irish Times for a source of place’ (Schegloff 1968) that appeal to readers’ ‘inside’ of authoritative English usage. Tellingly, the frontispiece knowledge of Dublin (and Ireland) streets, of the Irish Times’ official Editorial Stylebook presents neighbourhoods, postal-code areas, pubs, and public an editorial cartoon that alludes to the sociolinguistic transportation systems. These notational practices deploy condition of the society.8 shared frameworks for calculating the sequentiality and simultaneity of the (17) experience-near encounters in interaction that go to make up daily life. They calibrate the relationship between the event being reported on, and the event of reporting (and of receiving the report), across known intervals of social spacetime. Readers and web site visitors will recognise themselves and salient types of ‘others’ across a social landscape refigured now as the backdrop for innumerable overheard and experienced encounters.

Conclusion The ‘continual recurrence or rotation of ideas, events and blunders’ noted in 1802 by Maria Edgeworth continues apace in post ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. If in fact these forms of entextualisation circulate across the permeable boundary between public performance, print, broadcast media, and informal conversation, then there is every reason to believe that they could have had, and be having, real effects on sociolinguistic change in Ireland. The question remains: what kind of influence? How, if it exists, does this influence work? No previous sociolinguistic work on Irish English has posed these questions. Looking to the usual institutional sources of regulating linguistic usage under an ideology of hegemonic Standard, one finds, rather than forces of linguistic homogenisation, something like the opposite. Programming on the State-run broadcaster RTÉ, for example, offers a plenitude both of first-order ‘accented’ English, and of stylised Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 27

The cartoon, interestingly, is open to multiple readings, stereotypes is the more remarkable given the major one of which would see in it an acknowledgement that transformations in Irish society and politics since 1600. all the Irish Times can do in the face of Irish heteroglossia in English is to regulate spelling. ‘A public’, writes Warner, ‘unites strangers through Endnotes participation alone’ (Warner 2002: 56); ‘lacking any institutional being’, he writes, publics ‘commence with 1 I have re-formatted the passage slightly in order to highlight the moment, must continually predicate renewed the distinction between directly quoted speech and non-quoted attention, and cease to exist when attention is no longer speech: passages of directly quoted speech are presented in lines predicated. They are virtual entities, not voluntary indented one tab-space; this same format will be applied to all associations’ (Warner 2002: 61). the examples below.

2 A public can only act within the temporality of the The RTÉ mockumentary ‘Dan and Becs’, for example, is the circulation that gives it existence. The more punctual and video diary of a young, affluent couple who speak a richly rhoticised ‘D4’ English; RTÉ’s own promotional piece ends abbreviated the circulation,and the more the discourse with the tagline ‘The Celtic Tiger throws up’ (at http:// indexes the punctuality of its own circulation, the closer a www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlL1sREvtCE); see also the web public stands to politics (Warner 2002: 68). site (http://www.rte.ie/tv/danandbecs/). Witness also the series of novels narrated by the pseudonymous Ross O’Carroll- It was suggested by one commentator above that the Kelly, and written entirely in a stylised ‘D4’ register (e.g., O’Carroll- relative lack of study of Irish English ‘owes something Kelly 2006). to its lack of a symbolic or unifying function in society’. But the issue may be not the lack of a ‘symbolic or unifying 3See Leerssen’s discussion of the role of the audience in forcing function’ but rather the absence of a codified, autonomous, major revisions to the character of Lucius O’Trigger in R.B. denotational code functioning as a State-supported Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals (Leerssen 1996: 144–48ff). Standard (Stewart 1968) – a matter, then, of linguistic 4 For reasons of space alone, a popular tradition of dictionary- form rather than function. Indeed, the material surveyed making will not be discussed here (see, e.g., Dolan 2006, Todd here shows that Irish English, even in the absence of a 1990, O Muirithe 1996, among others). Standard register, has many ‘symbolic and unifying 5The teaching of English to Leaving Cert students in the national functions’ in Irish society. But these only become visible schools appears to be focused mainly on literature and written if one widens one’s construal of what counts as a language composition, but more research – preferably in-class beyond the idea of an autonomous denotational code ethnography – would be needed for any assessment of the role (preferably codified as a Standard) to include the kinds of the schools here. of textual phenomena considered here, because it is in terms of these formations of register and shibboleth that 6Earls, for example, notes that in early versions of Robert recognizable figurations of (types of) personhood Harwood’s play The Committee (1662) the comic Irish servant emerge in and through differences of speech: Teg did not utter bulls – but when the play was revised in 1792, Teg was given ‘a number of bulls’ (Earls p. 5). [T]here is no infinitely accessible language, and to imagine 7 Users who submit a story must agree to the terms and that there should be is to miss other, equally important conditions, which include granting to the authors/webmasters needs of publics: to concretize the world in which discourse the ‘royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, circulates, to offer its members direct and active modify, adapt, publish, translate and distribute the content (in membership through language, to place strangers on a whole or in part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other shared footing. For these purposes language must be works in any form, media or technology now known or hereafter concrete, making use of the vernaculars of its circulatory developed’ – rights, in other words, over all future re-circulation space. So in publics,a double movement is always at work. of the anecdotes. Styles are mobilized, but they are also framed as styles 8Space does not permit consideration of the much-discussed (Warner 2002: 77). ‘RTÉ accent’ displayed some of the time by some of the presenters, and grist for many outraged letters to the editor of the Irish Times. I have tried to point to the remarkable pervasiveness of It is interesting to note, however, the dismissal in November metalinguistic representations of ‘accented’ forms of 1953 of the Dublin-born announcer Patrick Begley, because his English speech from at least 1700 to the present; these ‘cut-glass’ RP accent – acquired through elocution lessons – ’was highly stylised ‘reflexive typifications’ (Agha 2003, 2007), not considered suitable for the Irish State Broadcasting service’. very often in a broadly humorous or satirical key, are Begley’s termination was debated in the Dáil, and spurred many themselves governed by conventions that are remarkably letters to the editor, one of which, in its entirety, read as follows: robust, stable over time, and pervasive across media, ‘Sir Oim goin’ after a Raadio announcer’s job roight away. And from the stage plays and joke books of the Elizabethan bejapers Oill have the hole of the Auld Country behoind me. period, through the 19th century to the stage plays, joke Edjecation? No, but Oi can assure ye Oim Oirish begorrah’ (Irish books, and websites of the present. Through it all one Times, 6 September 2000). notices ‘a lively current of unease powering the wit’. The apparent stability of the stylistic and presentational conventions of entextualisation of such performable 28 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

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Croghan, Martin 1985. ‘The brogue: language as political — 2005. ‘Irish English in the context of previous culture’, in John Harris, David Little, and David research’, in Anne Barron and Klaus Schneider (eds), Singleton (eds), Perspectives on the English Language in The pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Ireland. Proceedings of the First Symposium on Hiberno- Gruyter.17–44. English held at Trinity College Dublin, 16-17 September — 2006. Irish English. Its History and Present-day Forms. 1985. Dublin: Centre for Language and Cambridge: CUP. Communication Studies, Trinity College Dublin. 259– Hinskens, Frans, Jeffery L. Kallen, and Johan Taeldeman 69. 2000. ‘Merging and drifting apart: Cronin, Michael 1996. Translating Ireland: Translation, convergence and divergence of dialects across political Languages, Cultures. Cork: Cork University Press. borders’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, — 2007. The Barrytown Trilogy. Cork: Cork University 145: 1–28. Press. 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the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Thomason, Sarah, and Terrence Kaufman 1988. Language Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century. Cork Contact, Creolisation, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University Press in association with Field Day. Critical University of California Press. Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs, no. Todd, Loreto 1990. Words Apart: A Dictionary of Northern 3. Irish English. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Manning, H. Paul 2004. ‘The streets of Bethesda: the slate Smythe. quarrier and the Welsh language in the Welsh liberal Warner, Michael 2002. ‘Publics and counterpublics’, Public imagination’, Language & Communication, 33, 517–48. Culture, 14(1), 49–90. McCafferty, Kevin 2005. ‘William Carleton between Irish Williams, N.J.A. (ed.) 1981. Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis. and English: using literary dialect to study language Dublin: DIAS. contact and change’, Language and Literature, 14(4), 339–62. Milroy, Lesley 1987. Language and Social Networks. Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Morash, Christopher 2002. A History of the Irish Theatre 1601–2000. Cambridge: CUP. Neill, Michael 2001. ‘Mantles, quirks, and Irish bulls: Ironic guise and colonial subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 52(205), 76–90. Odlin, Terence 1997. Hiberno-English: Pidgin, Creole or Neither? Dublin: Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Occasional Paper No. 49. Ó Baoill, Dónall P. (ed.). 1985. Papers on Irish English. Dublin: Irish Association for Applied Linguistics. Ó Ciosáin, Niall 1999. ‘The Irish rogues’, in Donnelly and Miller (eds), Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850. Dublin/ Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press. 78–96. O’Carroll-Kelly, Ross [= Paul Howard] 2006. Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade. Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Ó Muirithe, Diarmuid 1996. Dictionary of Anglo-Irish: Words and Phrases from Irish. Dublin: Four Courts Press. — 2006. Words We Use. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. O’Neill, Stephen 2007. Staging Ireland. Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Schegloff, Emanuel 1968. ‘Notes on a conversational practice: formulating ‘‘place’’ ’, in Pier Paolo Giglioli (ed.), Language and Social Context. Penguin. 95–135. Sheridan, Thomas 1761. A Dissertation on the Causes of the Difficulties Which Occur in Learning the English Tongue.With a Scheme for Publishing an English Grammar and Dictionary Upon a Plan Entirely New. The Object of Which Shall be, to Facilitate the Attainment of the English Tongue, and establish a Perpetual Standard of Pronunciation. London: R. and J. Dodsley [cited in Agha 2003]. Silverstein, Michael 1974. ‘Dialectal developments in Chinookan tense-aspect systems: An areal-historical analysis’, International Journal of American Linguistics, Memoir 29 [IJAL 40, no. 4, part 2]. — 1987. Monoglot ‘Standard’ in America. Standardisation and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. Chicago: Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies, no. 13. [Reprinted 1996 in Donald Brenneis and Ronald K.S. Macaulay, eds, The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 284–306.] Stewart, William 1968. ‘A sociolinguistic typology for describing national multilingualism’, in Joshua Fishman (ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton. 531–45. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Confusing origins and histories: the case of Irish Travellers

Dr Aoife Bhreatnach*

In the six years that I spent researching and writing about in 1963, there has been popular acceptance of the theory the historical relationship between Travellers and settled it advanced to explain nomadic families and their lifestyle: people in twentieth-century Ireland, I was asked one that Travellers were the result of economic crisis during question with annoying frequency ‘where do they the Famine in the 1840s and earlier colonial dispossession (Travellers) come from?’ Further discussion revealed that (Commission on Itinerancy: 34). This simple theory was this question sought an explanation for the beginning of useful because it appealed to popular nationalist Traveller cultural distinctiveness in the historic past. It understandings of Ireland’s past and justified the overt would have been better phrased as ‘when did Travellers attempts to ‘settle’ Travellers in houses or on sites during emerge?’ Clearly, the question of origins is to the fore of the 1960s and 1970s. The power of this theory is the reason popular thinking about Travellers, to the frustration of that Micheal MacDonagh believes the origins question this historian who was studying the history of Travellers must be researched. ‘No longer is it acceptable to say that in twentieth-century Ireland, that is, how change over time Travellers were settled people and therefore it’s perfectly affected Travellers. It was particularly disturbing that alright to resettle or reassimilate them’ (MacDonagh: 21– historians, who in other contexts would refer to origin 2). The belief that Travellers emerged from a pre-existing myths as ‘invented traditions’, insisted on confusing origins community was not confined to the Famine dispossessed and histories. There is a very clear distinction between theory as is demonstrated by Michael Hayes’s work on looking for the first recognisably distinct Traveller and the 1952 Tinkers Questionnaire, collected by the Irish studying the relationship between an established cultural Folklore Commission. While many different origins were minority and the majority society. However, some advanced by the settled informants, most were rooted Traveller activists also believe that explaining Travellers’ in the assumption that a minority had been created by beginnings as a separate group in Irish society is vitally crisis, exile, economic collapse or foreign perfidy. As important. According to Micheal MacDonagh, Hayes points out, all of these origin theories cast explaining Travellers’ origins will ‘not only condition the Travellers as outsiders, or ‘others’, by portraying the way people think about Travellers but will also dictate settled tradition as normal (Hayes: 127–42). That what kind of services they will provide and the way these Travellers themselves tell stories about their origins that services will be delivered’ (MacDonagh: 21). To feature the dislocation of colonisation merely serves to understand the centrality of the origins debate, and its illustrate the potency of such narratives in an Ireland relevance for Traveller history, this article will outline the where the Anglo-Irish relationship has assumed political theories put forward by scholars from various disciplines, and cultural centrality (Bhreatnach: 52). assessing them with historical research in mind. The themes of dispossession and poverty emerge particularly strongly as does an unfortunate habit to locate the roots Celts of Irish society in a ‘Celtic’ past. The confusion between origins and history in literature about Travellers is Yet another theory about Traveller origins locates the pervasive, and partly reflects the challenges faced by ‘beginnings’ in pre-history: Eoin MacNeill’s casual researchers looking for a numerically small, marginal reference in Phases of Irish History that Travellers were nomadic group in the documentary record. descended from Celtic and pre-Celtic industrial communities has been cited by some Travellers as significant (MacNeill: 82; MacDonagh: 22). The claim Origins: the story so far that origins could be found in the ‘Celtic’ past is itself symptomatic of a deep-seated and long-standing Since the Commission on Itinerancy published its report tendency, in both popular and academic circles, to draw

*Department of History, NUI Maynooth Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 30-35 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 31 direct links between a pre-historic idyll and contemporary pastures. Booleying is important in the context of Ireland. For example, the noted historical geographer E. nomadism because it was an agricultural practice Estyn Evans focused on ‘millennial continuities from demanding seasonal movement that survived in some prehistoric to modern cultural landscapes’, to the form until the nineteenth century. Its persistence illustrates detriment of Gaelic Ireland (Duffy, Edwards, the difficulty of describing all agriculture as necessarily Fitzpatrick: 34). As historians of post-Norman Gaelic sedentary, when the pastoral economy favoured by the Ireland have pointed out, Celticism has significantly Irish cattle farmer could be described as partly nomadic. distorted the historiography and perceptions of the later However, this apparent link with a Gaelic pastoral Gaelic period (1250–1650). The ‘Celts’ were chosen to economy is dismissed by Nicholls, who also believes that represent the pure Irish, members of an ancient civilisation the extent of crop cultivation by the population has been ‘sufficiently remote and elusive so as not to bring with it neglected by scholars (Nicholls: 131, 137). Whether craft any cause for dissension.’ (Duffy, Edwards, Fitzpatrick: workers, such as skilled metal workers, were also nomadic 35). Since calling the inhabitants of Ireland ‘Celtic’ is not is an issue that has not been investigated. Much work without problems (Richter: 3, 23–4), the persistent belief remains to be done before categorical statements in continuity between ‘Celtic’ and modern societies is regarding the nature of sedentary or nomadic lifestyles worrying. in Gaelic Ireland can be assessed. The habit by authors of linking the ‘Celts’ to the present emerges particularly strongly in relation to language and the formation of Traveller Cant, or Shelta as it is called Drop Outs in academic literature. Macalister’s compilation of the work of previous scholars on Shelta was prefaced with The work of anthropologists Sharon and George an explanation for the origins of this curious, obscure Gmelch has been the most important in giving scholarly language recorded by John Sampson and other members credence to the theory that Travellers emerged from a of the Gypsy Lore Society. A professor of Celtic wandering population with three distinct aspects: archaeology at UCD, Macalister located the origins of craftsmen, the poor and dispossessed, and social misfits. Shelta in the romantic mists of ‘ancient Ireland’, where The metalworkers and their families were the founder druids and wandering scholars mixed with slaves and population, dating to pre-Christian times (Gmelch and homeless vagabonds, producing a secret ‘thieves cant’ that Gmelch, 1976: 227–9). In later centuries, endemic was later spoken by Travellers (Macalister: 123–9). poverty, Cromwellian wars and dispossession, evictions Thankfully, a less sentimental analysis of Shelta has led and pressure on land all combined to produce ‘the crisis scholars to conclude that it emerged when the Irish of the Irish peasantry’, driving thousands to the roads language was displaced by English, approximately 350 (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1976: 231). While the authors are years ago according to Ó Baoill (Ó Baoill: 160). The use careful to state that ‘It is impossible to know how many of linguistic arguments as part of the origins debate … dispossessed tenants and labourers joined the ranks illustrates the need for multi-disciplinary research into of itinerant craftsmen and became permanent Travellers’, Traveller history, a potentially broad area of study that they cannot resist making a link between contemporary historians, with little understanding of material or cultural Traveller surnames and the poverty-stricken population artefacts, cannot undertake alone. Of course, these of the west of Ireland (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1979: 231). questions are not directly about Travellers, but to discover The section on poverty concludes with the astounding their antecedents scholars must understand the structure claim that ‘after 1850, the antipathy which characterizes of society as a whole. Before the historic cultural present-day attitudes towards itinerants began to distinctiveness of Travellers can be described, scholars develop’, although the authors do not cite any sources to must comprehensively analyse the nature of nomadic and support this assertion. The final suggestion regarding the sedentary living patterns in Ireland. origins of the Traveller population – that they derive from ‘social misfits’ – is the most contentious, and as Sinéad Ní Shúinéar has argued, has perpetuated negative Gaels attitudes to contemporary Travellers. The authors assert that there is ‘little doubt’ that ‘strolling’ women and their The wandering habits of Gaelic Ireland have been children, who were socially unacceptable to the sedentary advanced as a possible explanation for nomadic population, ‘were absorbed into the Travelling metalworkers, with numerous scholars citing the same community’ (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1976: 232). Yet, in a reference by David Quinn to metalworkers called ‘plain later footnote the authors are very definite that the tinkers’ (Helleiner: 536–7; Ní Shúinéar, 1996: 63; Gmelch individual male beggars, often alcoholics, were ‘never and Gmelch, 1976: 227). Helleiner has emphasised the classified as Travellers’ by anyone (Gmelch and Gmelch, mobile, nomadic nature of Gaelic society, believing that 1976: 236). This contradiction was never addressed by the suppression of this lifestyle during the sixteenth-century the authors. Over time, Travellers became a separate Tudor reconquest laid the colonial foundations of anti- group because they were permanently nomadic, while Traveller racism (Helleiner: 535–6). Yet elements of the also remaining distant from the aforementioned male Gaelic pastoral economy continued, the best known tramps who were always on the roads. This strange example being booleying, a practice of pastoral contradiction acknowledges that ‘similarity in their transhumance where cattle, accompanied by people living lifestyles’ was not the most important factor in ‘creating’ in temporary shelters, moved from winter to summer the Traveller population. Next, the authors cite the 32 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

‘growing isolation’ from the settled population as a question ‘where did Travellers come from?’ makes unifying force for Traveller society, but do not provide dangerous assumptions about continuities between the any historical evidence of antipathy between nomads and past and present because it equates Travellers’ past and the housed population. Instead, in a classic example of present lives, placing them outside history. Unfortunately, historical conjecture based on contemporary experience, even deciding who is a Traveller is risky, as Ní Shúinéar’s they cite the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (1963), research on family trees and genealogies demonstrates. presuming that the farming population has eternally hated Her work shows that Travellers themselves see important and persecuted Travellers (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1979: internal differentiation in their society, based on origin 233). But the greatest weakness of their 1976 article is its myths, occupational traditions, marriage patterns, deliberate vagueness on chronology; the authors refuse language and behaviour. Ní Shúinéar even goes as far as to say in which century Travellers emerged as an ethnic to say that Traveller society should be seen as a series of group. On the basis of what we know about present- microethnicities, comprising intermarrying clusters that day Traveller society, Ní Shúinéar has effectively see themselves as distinct and apart from other demolished the Gmelchs’ arguments but once again she intermarrying families (Ní Shúinéar, 2007: 82). With this worked from a near-contemporary perspective, research in mind, should we assume that historic presuming that Travellers in the recent past lived almost manifestations of Traveller society were similarly identical lives to their earlier predecessors (Ní Shúinéar, differentiated? At the very least, historians have to be 1994: 68–70). This may well be the case, but since our aware that group labels can conceal and obscure knowledge about historic Travellers is negligible, it remains considerable internal diversity. Nonetheless, a researcher to be proven. must choose a set of records based on certain assumptions. The most basic assumption to make is that, historically, Travellers were nomadic, moving in family Historical approach units from place to place to earn a living. This central assumption has led some to rely heavily on the enactment Before a historian looks for Travellers, she must firstly of punitive legislation as proof that nomadic Travellers decide what, historically, distinguished Travellers from existed in the historic past. Thus statutes against the the rest of the population. It is, fundamentally, an issue ‘wandering Irish’ or ‘tynkers’ prove that Travellers were that perplexes historians more than practitioners from present in sixteenth-century Ireland (Gmelch and Gmelch, other disciplines because it relates to how the past is 1976: 227; Ní Shúinéar, 1994: 62). However, without perceived. The Gmelchs made a fundamental error in examining the implementation of such statutes, it is assuming that the origins of Travellers in general explained difficult to understand the historical context surrounding the contemporary situation of their research subjects in attitudes to vagrancy and nomadism. It is important to 1960s Ireland. Put simply, the Gmelchs sought Travellers note David Dickson’s assertion that the Henrician statute in the historic record on the basis of their observations. against vagrancy was not consistently used in Ireland until While all historians acknowledge that the history they the harvest crises of the 1620s, suggesting that targeting write is conditioned by the society it is written in, this does cultural minorities was not its purpose (Dickson: 149). not imply that all historical narrative is entirely relative or Also, historians have shown that the mobile population so blinded by prejudice as to be useless. Historians make was numerous and complex, making locating a group a conscious effort to examine their assumptions by similar to Travellers difficult. constantly reminding themselves of one simple fact: the individuals, societies and belief systems they study are lost because the historical sources they use to interpret the past Wanderers and vagrants are a selective collection of material that can never fully represent daily life. It was a history graduate, L.P. Hartley, The historical research on wandering people thus far who coined the now proverbial phrase ‘the past is a does not substantiate the popular belief that those of no foreign country; they do things differently there’ which fixed abode emerged as a result of dispossession and expresses the profound distance that exists between past colonial oppression. Historians have not blamed Anglo- events and our understanding of them. This is the Irish relations for the existence of homeless individuals discipline of history, but those who have written on and families who subsisted on begging and seasonal Traveller history have not confronted its implications, the employment. Instead, epidemic disease, the lack of most obvious of which is that Travellers may not appear organised welfare, economic crises, poor harvests and in historical records as a distinct cultural minority. The demobilisation feature in these narratives. Local studies well-understood boundaries between Travellers and of efforts to ameliorate the situation of the homeless poor settled people evident in the recent past, based on family show that institutional confinement was the method structure, work patterns, religious beliefs and gender favoured by eighteenth-century society (O’Carroll; roles, cannot be presumed to exist in earlier societies. Logan). Since there was no statutory, nationwide system Twentieth-century Ireland is as foreign to the Ireland of of poor relief in Ireland until 1838 urban and rural 1830 as to the Ireland of the ninth century. dwellers who could not earn or produce enough to Thus we cannot presume that Travellers in the past support themselves frequently resorted to mendicancy were the same as contemporary Travellers. Searching for and vagrancy. Thus the population on the roads was a near-contemporary social phenomenon in the records diverse, though women were more numerous than men, of past societies is profoundly unhistorical. The very both because of their restricted employment Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 33 opportunities and greater success at begging (Geary: are voluminous. If the fourteen volumes of the 122–3). The families of labourers tramped the roads Commission’s findings, published from 1835 to 1837, separately to the adult males who worked as spailpiní, yielded just two references, it is illustrative of the real or migrant farm workers (Geary: 123). The lean summer difficulties facing researchers searching for historical months between the end of one year’s potato crop and Travellers. However, there is reason to believe that close the harvesting of the next forced many to leave their scrutiny of all available government papers on the poor homes and beg. But as Geary points out, ‘It is impossible and vagrant classes will yield more references to ‘tinkers’. to distinguish the propelling force behind this annual Since official sources contain the most comprehensive migration, to differentiate between compulsion and examinations of the wandering population and their custom’ (Geary: 127). Naturally, the sources that describe habits, these are potentially the richest sources for Traveller this seasonal mendicancy offer few explanations from history. the perspective of the poor themselves on travel and tramping. It is certain that many people were faced with the decision to travel in search of work or assistance: the Mobility and Seasonality Poor Law Inquiry in the 1830s estimated that over 2 million individuals were in need of assistance for thirty Of course, mobility was not confined to the destitute, weeks of each year (Geary: 128). but was a relatively common feature of agricultural and Although the wandering population was large, it was urban work. Apart from the aforementioned booleying, not amorphous to contemporary observers. What labourers travelled to gather the harvest, and the annual emerges strongly from research into Irish attitudes to migration between Britain and Ireland has been well- poverty before 1838 are attempts by society to studied (O’Dowd). However, little is known about the differentiate between the men, women and children who internal migration patterns of seasonal labourers, who travelled the roads seeking work or alms (Ó Cíosáin). In travelled between certain counties or areas. Although Irish eighteenth-century Dublin, O’Carroll points out that agriculture may not have required as many seasonal those with money and authority attempted to ‘devise workers as the farms of England or Scotland, harvest specific types of responses to the different types of time continued to generate a demand for labour that pauper which they perceived to exist’ (O’Carroll; 79). could not be met by farmers’ families or the local labour Distinctions were made on the basis of origin, health, force. For example, in his study of English-speaking ability to work, age, gender and religion. But even within farmers in East Galway, Carles Salazar found strong these categories, there were further differences. As a result memories of the recently ended seasonal migration from of this ongoing and sophisticated attempt to understand Irish-speaking parts of the county. It is telling that these the homeless population, the sources are full of different labourers were perceived as outsiders in a similar fashion terms such as strange beggar, local beggar, habitual to Travellers, and Salazar includes both groups in his beggar, foreign beggar, stroller, mendicant, vagrant, chapter on contractual relationships (Salazar: 41–51). This vagabond, badged poor, impotent poor, sturdy poor, example shows how, within the county unit, a idle poor, church poor, foundling. The number of terms geographical and administrative area that commands and the subtleties of meaning conveyed by their varying significant popular affection, even temporary mobility uses in different contexts suggests a complex attitude to provoked cultural conflict. Salazar’s example is important the homeless, and one deserving of considerable because the Irish-speaking workers were not landless historical research. It is impossible to say whether the labourers, but owners of very small farms who struggled extent of differentiation included noticing culturally to earn a living from their holdings. Similar to Travellers, distinct nomads as separate from, or in addition to, the mobility and cultural difference cemented the economic various categories of homeless poor. Since the sources distance between these workers and their employers. were primarily interested in describing people with no Seasonality, and its attendant mobility, persisted even in fixed abode who solicited alms, the cultural life of these industrial occupations, as Samuel’s analysis of the ‘Comers individuals was not particularly important. Only oblique and Goers’ of London illustrates. City and town dwellers insights are possible into the lives of those who did not also left their fixed abodes to become seasonal agricultural control the documentary record, but with careful reading, labourers, while men employed in the building trade the sources can convey the texture of social relations tramped for miles to secure work (Samuel: 124). Samuel between the needy and the alms giver (Ó Cíosáin). Only divides up the ‘migrating classes’ into four separate two direct references to nineteenth-century ‘tinkers’, who categories, based on the extent and patterns of their appear to be similar to Travellers, have been located thus mobility. In the first group, there were habitual wanderers far. In the records of The Commission on the Condition of the who possessed no home base. Second, there were those Poorer Classes (1835), two respondents claimed that who spent a large part of the year on country roads, but ‘tinkers’ were a ‘separate class’ distinguished by who kept ‘regular winter quarters in the town’. Thirdly, intergenerational nomadism, work patterns and begging some were ‘fair weather’ travellers, who travelled only (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1976: 228). This is certainly a very in the summer, but stayed in one place for the remainder important piece of evidence that a group similar to of the year. Finally, some travelled frequently on short Travellers existed in early nineteenth-century Ireland. trips to the country, never travelling far from their home However, the Gmelchs never stated whether these two base (Samuel: 124). Samuel also points out that the Gypsy references were isolated or representative; this is an population could be similarly differentiated, with some important point because the records of the Commission groups having very limited seasonal travel circuits, while 34 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 others ranged much further afield (Samuel: 125). Travellers. The scale of the task facing researchers looking This raises the question of whether it is more useful to for Traveller history is therefore considerable. categorise wanderers by their travelling habits rather than by trying to assign a label such as Traveller, Gypsy or vagrant on the basis of the limited cultural information Conclusion contained in many sources. Since nomadism could take many forms in practice, can Traveller-Gypsy nomads be In many respects, looking for Travellers in historical easily distinguished from the other travelling people? In sources is just part of the research that is needed. Scattered the vast numbers of people travelling, tramping and references from many sources will only make sense when camping throughout Britain and Ireland from at least the the historical contexts such as attitudes to mobility, work, eighteenth to the end of the late nineteenth-century, it is gender roles and family structure are also considered. The difficult to see the cultural polarity between nomadic and economic situation is also vitally important, with issues sedentary that McVeigh and Mac Laughlin have argued such as seasonality and the penetration of the cash lies at the heart of Western European society (McVeigh; economy needing elucidation. Inevitably, the question of Mac Laughlin). Samuel points out that the distinction poverty and its relief will dominate, not because between settled and nomadic was as fluid as the nomadism is necessarily impoverishing but because most boundaries within the travelling population (Samuel: historical sources construct wandering people as poor. 152). Even the elite of British and Irish society were Unpalatable as it may seem for Travellers themselves, migratory. The aristocracy travelled from country estate writing their history will involve engagement with sources to town house, from rural seclusion to the metropolis to concerned with poverty, destitution and criminality. A attend court or parliament. As the nineteenth century history of Travellers’ past lives can be written from such progressed, the British rich and titled were increasingly sources, although it will always only be a history from peripatetic, travelling further afield for longer periods, the point of view of the (mostly) men who created such often living abroad permanently (Cannadine: 370–86). documents. Just as a history of the literary representations But it is the middle classes whose bourgeois nationalism of Travellers can never see beyond the images of tinkers and property-owning culture is supposed to lie at the heart constructed by authors to the real Travellers that inspired of anti-nomadic, sedentary values. In rural Ireland, these portrayals, so historians cannot hope to narrate the property ownership was fundamental to the farming historical past as Travellers understood it. A good historian mindset, but conflicts over land, its possession and might be able to show how Travellers lived, and the distribution did not end with nineteenth-century tenant attitudes of sedentary society to their presence but, unless purchase legislation. After the foundation of the state, substantial new sources emerge, a historical narrative is the continued existence of the Land Commission and unlikely to recover the experience of Travellers themselves. the payment of land annuities to the British government No doubt, the origins question will continue to obscure show that ownership was far from secure until the mid- efforts to understand historic Travellers but the twentieth century (Dooley). Perhaps the absolute sense ‘beginning’ of Traveller culture will not be proved by of entitlement to land can be interpreted as a historical methods. Harnessing ‘history’ to a manifestation of insecurity as much as cultural contemporary political cause – the case for equal and complacency. In fact, the stereotypical Irish farmer, sensitive treatment of Travellers – will not advance the obsessed with land ownership, was not a middle-class arguments of advocacy groups, because history is open phenomenon but the product of a particular rural milieu. to endless debate and reinterpretation. If one historian The urban middle class did not share the property seeks to prove that Travellers existed in the ninth century, obsession of their rural counterparts, since there were another will try to undermine that argument. Believing very few owner-occupiers until the mid-twentieth century. that Traveller culture only has historical validity if it is As most houses were rented, people were free to move ancient is a disturbing beginning for a scholarly or political according to economic or familial circumstances. Indeed, argument. many people moved house seasonally, renting houses or rooms by the sea during the summer months, announcing their summer addresses in the pages of society journals References such as Irish Society. In Dublin, middle class home-owners appeared in greater numbers after World War I, but the Bhreatnach, Aoife 2006. Becoming Conspicuous: Irish rental market was not immediately replaced by a new Travellers, Society and the State, 1922–70. Dublin: UCD property-owning class (McManus: 335–44). Moving Press. from house to house and from place to place was Cannadine, David 2005. The Decline and Fall of the British ubiquitous in Britain from the late eighteenth to the early Aristocracy. London: Penguin Books. twentieth century (Whyte: 275) but assessing geographical Commission on Itinerancy, 1963. Report of the Commission mobility is difficult because ‘of the three basic on Itinerancy. Dublin: Stationery Office. demographic variables – fertility, mortality and migration Dickson, David 1998. ‘In search of the Old Irish Poor – it is the hardest to measure as it was not a finite event Law’, in Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (eds), and is often poorly documented’ (Whyte: 273). Assessing Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland 1500–1939. attitudes to nomadism without even considering aspects Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers. 149–59. of migration, occupational mobility and seasonality will Dooley, Terence A.M. 2004. The land for the people: the land not yield much insight into historic perceptions of question in independent Ireland. Dublin: UCD Press. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 35

Duffy, Patrick J., David Edwards, Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Dickson (ed.), The Gorgeous Mask: Dublin 1700–1850. 2001. ‘Introduction: Recovering Gaelic Ireland Dublin: Trinity History Workshop. 64–85. c.1250–1650’, in Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Ó Ciosáin, Niall 1998. ‘Boccoughs and God’s Poor: Elizabeth Fitzpatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland c.1250–1650: Deserving and Undeserving Poor in Irish Popular Land, Lordship and Settlement. Dublin: Four Courts Culture’, in Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder (eds), Ideology Press. 21–76. and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Dublin: Four Courts Geary, Laurence M. 1999. ‘ ‘‘The whole country was in Press. 93–9. motion’’: mendicancy and vagrancy in pre-Famine O’Dowd, Anne 1990. Spalpeens and Tattie Hokers: History Ireland’ in Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon (eds), and Folklore of the Irish Migratory Agricultural Worker in Luxury and Austerity: Historical Studies XXI. Dublin: Ireland and Britain. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. UCD Press. 121–136. Richter, Michael 1983. Medieval Ireland: the Enduring Gmelch, George and Sharon Bohn Gmelch 1976. ‘The Tradition. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Emergence of an Ethnic Group: The Irish Tinkers’, Salazar, Carles 1996. A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Anthropological Quarterly, 49 (4), 225–38. Community in Rural Ireland. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gmelch, Sharon and George Gmelch 1979. Tinkers and Samuel, Raphael 1973. ‘Comers and Goers’, in H.J. Dyos Travellers. Dublin: O’Brien Press. and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Hayes, Michael 2006. Irish Travellers: Representations and Realities Volume I. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Realities. Dublin: Liffey Press. 123–60. Helleiner, Jane 1995. ‘Gypsies, Celts and tinkers: colonial Whyte, Ian 2004. ‘Migration and Settlement’, in Chris antecedents of anti-traveller racism in Ireland’, Ethnic Williams (ed.) A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain. and Racial Studies, 18 (3), 532–54. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 273–87. Logan, John 1999. ‘Tipperary paupers in the Limerick House of Industry, 1777–94’, Tipperary Historical Journal, 111–19. Macalister, R. A. Stewart 1937. The Secret Languages of Ireland: with Special Reference to the Origin and Nature of the Shelta Language Partly Based upon the Collections and Manuscripts of the late John Sampson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacDonagh, Michael 2000. ‘Origins of the Travelling People’ in Frank Murphy and Cathleen MacDonagh (eds), Travellers: citizens of Ireland: our challenge to an intercultural Irish society in the 21st century. Dublin: Parish of the Travelling People, 21–5. MacNeill, Eoin 1937. Phases of Irish History. Dublin: Gill. McVeigh, Robbie 1997. ‘Theorising sedentarism: the roots of anti-nomadism’, in Thomas Acton (ed.), Gypsy politics and Traveller Identity. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. 7–25. Mac Laughlin, Jim 1998. ‘The political geography of anti- Traveller racism in Ireland: the politics of exclusion and the geography of closure’, Political Geography, 17 (4) 417–35. McManus, Ruth 2002. Dublin, 1910–1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Nicholls, K.W. 2003. Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages Second Edition. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Ní Shúinéar, Sinéad 1996. ‘Irish Travellers, ethnicity and the origins question’ in May McCann, Séamas Ó Síocháin and Joseph Ruane (eds), Irish Travellers: Culture and Ethnicity. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies. 54–77. Ní Shúinéar, Sinéad 2007. ‘History as Dialogue: an Anthropological Perspective’, in Ciara Breathnach and Aoife Bhreatnach (eds), Portraying Irish Travellers: Histories and Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 65–85. Ó Baoill, Dónall P. 1996. ‘Travellers’ Cant: Language or Register?’, in May McCann, Séamas Ó Síocháin and Joseph Ruane (eds), Irish Travellers: Culture and Ethnicity. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies. 155–69. O’Carroll, Joseph 1987. ‘Contemporary Attitudes towards the Homeless Poor, 1725–1775’ in David 36 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Ploughing her own Furrow: Anthropological Perspectives on Farm Women in Ireland

Olive Wardell

Little anthropological research has been conducted to date on farm women in Ireland. About six per cent of Irish farms are owned by women and, although a state survey was carried out in 2003, Irish farm women felt that they were not really given a voice. In the summer of 2005 the author collected narratives from twenty-three farm women in Leinster and Munster, and from their insightful accounts emerged a fascinating story of women in Irish farming. Drawing on the anthropology of work, the present article includes a comparison with farm women in Illinois and a discussion of attitudes towards work and of the physical experience of work.

Introduction from the Wicklow Hills to the plains of Kildare, from the heart of Laois to the tillage and dairy land of Carlow. How may we define a farm woman? These women are There was enormous interest in the topic – this we will the owners and managers of the farm. They do the see from the vibrancy of the narratives. Field research paperwork and much of the physical work themselves gathered momentum with more and more informants and at busy times hire contract labour. At least seventeen advising who ‘would be a good person to talk to’ – hence of the informants for the research on which this essay in the large number of narratives collected. based were ploughing their own furrow (metaphor The methodology for this research followed Egon borrowed from Shortall), and can be categorised as Guba’s Fourth Generation Evaluation – this is a process of farming in their own right. Eight of these women were evaluation that moves beyond previously existing single and without children, four were married and five generations, which were characterised as being were widowed. More women are farming in their own ‘measurement-orientated, description-orientated, and right at the present time because of increased judgement-orientated’. The ‘Fourth Generation’ is a new mechanisation and smaller families. However, most level of evaluation, whose key dynamic is negotiation. women still subscribe to patrilineal inheritance patterns In contrast to the ‘top down’ approach by the state, the and only one informant was passing on her role to a emphasis is on the informants as agenda setters. daughter. None of the informants expressed an active interest in farm machinery. A few highlighted the issue of Gender and Work – a comparison with Illinois loneliness; only nine perceived themselves to be victims of gender discrimination. Thirteen informants ‘Work is the foundation of human culture, since there are elaborated on issues of unfair land inheritance – a topic no beliefs, values, or behaviours without a material setting, fraught with difficulties. One informant recalled the and no material setting without work’ (Barfield: 497). The arrogance of her brother when he declared: ‘Ah, well, anthropologist Jane Adams has noted the ‘perpetual farm Miriam – I’ll get the farm, I’ve got things between my crisis’ – the ever-declining number of family farms and legs and you don’t’. Three women had health problems, the increasing number of women entering the wage which were related specifically to sheep farming, and the labour force. She presents an interesting discussion about majority of the informants were in their middle years. the ‘ideological devaluation of farm women’s work’ in Predictably, nostalgia dominated the narratives of those the U.S., which began in the nineteenth century as part of in their seventies. Field research took place from the the transition to industrial capitalism. Labour-saving mountains of County Waterford to the bogs of Offaly, technologies developed and women’s work was

Olive Wardell graduated from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, in September and October 2006, with BA and B Phil degrees in anthropology and philosophy. She is currently reading for an MA degree in philosophy. This article is an edited version of her undergraduate anthropology thesis and she wishes to extend her gratitude to Dr. Chandana Mathur for her advice and guidance with the drafting and writing of her thesis, and to Dr. Abdullahi El Tom for his advice on field research.

Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 36-40 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 37 separated from the public male capitalist economy Gender Discrimination (Adams: 9). Calvinism stressed the importance of woman’s role as the family’s ‘moral centre’ – women were An early stimulus to conduct research on farm women not seen as productive workers and if they did enter the came during a preliminary visit to Edenderry Cattle Mart, labour market their work was valued beneath that of County Offaly, in March 2005. The mart was men’s work. The ideology included the notion that mental overwhelmingly male (80:2) and some informants activities reduced a woman’s reproduction capabilities. recounted difficulties at the marts. Janet, a breeder of Men were in charge of the farming sphere and women Simmental bulls, recalled an episode heading into the ring: were in charge of the home; women’s economic contributions were overlooked by reformers. Farm You’re there and you’re holding onto the bull yourself women’s work was simply not accorded an equal status and he’s sixteen hundred-weight … he’s bigger than you as men’s – their commodity production was and all that keeps him there is one halter and a nose ring … conceptualised as a sideline by their husbands and by the you have power over him through the nose but … it’s census takers (Fink, quoted in Adams: 5). It is interesting limited […] So then he bolted … and I hung on because to note that when male and female farmers entered the the next thing is, if you don’t and let go, you can very well labour market in the U.S., they received a lower rate of end up getting hurt, so your natural instinct is to hang on return on their labour than industrial labour did, for dear life and swing out of his nose … supposedly because of ‘unequal terms of trade between sectors’ (Cochrane, quoted in Adams: 6). Adams argues Janet was bothered for years afterwards by one particular that the ‘persistent inequity in the valuation of agricultural male farmer because she was a woman: ‘oh I know you, labor compared to labor in other sectors of the economy you were the girl with the bull’. She recalled the politics ... is due to the persistence of production for use as a of bidding at marts and how she learned to play the necessary (albeit decreasing) part of the production games the ‘exact same way as the lads’. She continued with process». She asks why farmers and women have ‘gone a story about purchasing a tractor. The role of the tractor along with’ inequalities in labour return for so long and is classic sign of ‘male farm identity, symbolising work, holds that many farmers are still caught in the technology and control over nature’ (Brandth, quoted in contradiction between the notion of farming as a way Ní Laoire: 17). of life and farming as a business. Intellectual elites are therefore partly to blame for the inequities in farm labour Now you should be a woman and try and buy a tractor! and the low value attributed to farm work in general. We That’s a whole new story – they see you coming! The might note that it was ‘only in 1861’ that Illinois women machinery side of it is a whole different ball game. I spent ‘achieved the right to own property in their own name, about six weeks trying to buy an old tractor. It was a regardless of marital status’ (Adams: 6). challenge … it was an eye opener, and eventually I ended Some trends of the Southern Illinois farm women are up with a local guy – I had picked out a tractor – I had similar to those in Ireland. For example, many women actually got somebody to look at it because I really didn’t are farming some of their land part-time, raising beef know anything about tractors. And he wouldn’t get it cattle and/or suitable crops. They have also developed ready for me. And I went out there one day and I proceeded their own enterprises in the home, such as catering, to burst into tears right in front of him – I couldn’t help hairdressing, and baby-sitting. The ‘ideological it! Now I never do that! Poor man – I think he didn’t know devaluation of farm women’s work’ has been echoed where to look. So we eventually – we did a deal on the tractor here in Ireland, however the issue of the contradiction but when he delivered it – it was quite funny really, he came between farming as a way of life and farming as a and cried on my shoulder virtually because one of his deals business was not raised by the farm women of this study. had just fallen through and he didn’t know if he was going Interestingly, this was an issue for the male farmers in Ní to get his money back! So it was very odd, it really was Laoire’s work. With regard to female farm ownership (laughs) – poor chap! Ireland still lags far behind Illinois and her European counterparts – the Succession Act of 1965 allowed Several informants agreed that a woman had to work women to inherit land for the first time and in the National harder to prove herself, particularly Angela, who Development Plan (NDP) survey of 2003 only six recounted a case of discrimination even where she was percent of respondents indicated that the successor in a more powerful position being a native of the country would be a female.1 We have seen from the Illinois study and the secretary of the local lamb producer’s group. She that those who are in positions to influence policy makers still felt inferior to a man, who was a foreign worker in rarely understand the practicalities and realities of farming an abattoir: itself. This point was reiterated by farm women in Ireland, whose agendas were set for them by government officials, And the lambs were not stunned … this Pakistani lad who had no real insight into the difficulties facing farmers would come in and oh, did he hate women! It wasn’t my as they used the aforementioned ‘top down’ analysis of place to be anywhere near him, where he was in the farm work. abattoir. So I spoke to the group. Somebody had to go and supervise the killings – right? So I would go up and I’d see your man sharpening his knife from one side to the other, and to get in line where the lambs were processed 38 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

you have to walk up a step behind him – and he was sort farmers. Darina is indeed in poor health at the age of forty- of out on a little ridge and he was cutting the throat. So eight and will in all likelihood sell her farm in two year’s every time I went by he sharpened the knife. He was time: trying to intimidate me: you just don’t come up near me – I’m doing my job … because they have their little I think I got the back trouble originally from playing holy room before the start of the killing – whatever they badminton. And not giving myself a chance to rest and have to do. So we decided after that that some of the lambs playing more badminton and coming home then and weren’t killed right. And because they were only half slit, farming until the next match. I was not giving myself a they would actually jump off the hook! chance. It was my own fault entirely. Sheep now don’t help backs, I have to say. You have to turn and twist to catch (Oh! Gosh!) And there were lambs that actually ran around them. Much the same as badminton in that sense. But the slaughter room bleeding to death as they ran, right? that certainly wouldn’t help. Some of them ended up in the blood bath. Some of them actually fell off and they actually drowned in the blood bath Sinead is in her early forties and appears fit and healthy. underneath the killing area. We didn’t like that. As a group, However, she spoke of having no feeling in her hands we thought that was very inhumane. So we insisted, as and feet at times and suffers from ‘skeletal troubles’ as a and from the time we discovered all this, that we wanted result of the physical work on the farm doing ‘one and a our lambs killed humanely. He used to see me coming half men’s work units’ for many years. Mary farmed sheep then and he’d say: ‘Kilteel Lambing Group, tsh, tsh . . for thirty-three years and now is ‘gainfully employed’ in . no kill, lads’ and he’d call off his couple of men that he a child-care centre doing an eight-hour day: had working with him. They had to disappear because the stun lads would come in when our lambs were going in I retired sooner than I expected … when the blood … but those Halal boys do not like women! Maybe it’s a pressure got high and when I had a problem with the liver religious thing. Maybe Muslims don’t go near it … It’s complaint … because of sheep dip, sheep sprays, different the culture! things … that I was silly about, not wearing masks … I think I did a bit of damage … now my liver has outgrown Here the knife is a powerful symbol of masculinity – that with a bit of, well I won’t say the rest, but the change Geertz would note the material culture influencing power of occupation is good. relations. The knife symbolises work, technology, and danger – the fact that it was being sharpened exemplifies Another sheep farmer, Angela, suffered from back male control over nature and the feminine, a threatening problems and went to a pain specialist and ‘walked gesture, the male preparing for the kill. Man, the proud through the pain threshold’. She recovered, still farms, hunter, out on ‘the little ridge’, an active performer – how and walks five miles a day. None of the other nineteen dare any passive woman challenge his privileged domain! women suffered health problems related specifically to It is a curious clash of cultures and a clash of gender work on the farm. At thirty-seven, Ciara is small and slight relations. Gender dictates the power relations over and has no health complaints in spite of the hard physical ethnicity, class, and status. It is the ‘skilful hunter who is graft. She has been farming all her life: honoured’, women’s routine work is ‘not given the same symbolic importance accorded to hunting’ (Eriksen: 127). I’d say when my Dad died first they thought: she’ll never Another sheep farmer who married a local farmer do it, she was only there with Daddy like. I think I’ve shown plans to ‘get back into farming’ when her sons go to an awful lot of people after he died … I lambed all the school. Kim did not feel discriminated against because ewes and most of the time I was here by myself doing it. she grew up knowing that her brother would inherit the I was working till twelve and one in the morning to get huge family farm. However, she recalled discrimination them … it was too much work for one person … like you while working as a young woman farmer: might have a ewe that was lambing with one head out and one foot coming and one leg wouldn’t be coming … Like if someone was coming to sell something to you and my Dad might be there. They’d talk to him – I was irrelevant, like a sort of nuisance standing there beside Hazards of the Workplace him. And eventually my Dad turned around and said: ‘You may talk to her, she’s the one that’s paying for it’. Farming is a relatively hazardous occupation and an And you get these looks: ‘Oh, that’s a woman’. (laughs). anthropology of work would be incomplete without a sample of some of the dangers experienced by farm women. Generally the dangers recounted were related Health in the workplace to animals: bulls, cows, and rams and occasionally to machinery. Darina had a bull that used to chase her down A male farmer in the area affirmed that he would never the field when she was on the tractor ‘I would have the leave land to a woman because women were physically tractor in top speed and he could keep up to me on the not able for work on the land. By the time they were forty, tractor and puck the back wheel at the same time! That they were ‘stuffed’, he declared. This claim arose from was the bull!’ Once she narrowly missed getting bucked the fact that three farm women known to him were in by a ram: this situation. I interviewed all three, who were sheep Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 39

The second time he came at me, he missed me. I saw him a local dairy farmer, a common survival strategy of coming and I side- stepped, and he was going so fast that women on the land, and reared three sons and a daughter. he actually fell over on his head! He tripped over the feed Her youngest son will inherit the farm and Eileen has been trough and he looked at me in disgust as much as to say, active on the land all her life. She does all the housework well I’m not going to bother anymore! And he toddled and cooking as she always has done and her father-in- off. law lived with the family for twenty-three years. Again and again her narrative returned to work on the home Ciara recalled an incident when she went out to bring the farm and to the life of farm workers, evoking attitudes rams in: of the era:

Next thing this ram started going for me and I was in the And it was in there they went – to the boiler house. And field with nowhere to go … and this ram coming – and I they loved it. They had fun … they were paid buttons … started running and the ram started running after me, and they were happy with what they had and the train was their all I could see down the very bottom of the field was the timekeeper. They could hear the Angelus in Celbridge or bull! (Oh God!) So I ran down to the bull and I stood at the Leixlip on a quiet day … they could hear the boats on the far side of the bull and the ram never came near me because canal and they knew the time … they would give a hoot the bull was between me and him. So it was like the bull when they were coming near a bridge … but the time was was protecting me from the ram! also set by the train … and do you know, Olive, if you were thirsty, there were spring wells in every field and I used to Several women narrated tales of attacks by cows – they do it with them, you’d scoop it up in your hands and drink held that cows can be just as dangerous as bulls. Sinead the water and it was as clear as a whistle. You wouldn’t do recounted a ewe pucking her knee, cracking her kneecap it now! There had always been a spring … they’d get a fork at eleven at night – an unbelievably painful experience. and pull anything that grew around it – and somebody On another occasion she got kicked in the face, breaking way back had put flat stones – old rough flagstones – the lens of her glasses. Another incident occurred in around it, so that was where the spring came up. And when Wexford, when she was injecting sheep, a sheep hit her they’d get thirsty in the hayfield they knew where the spring from behind and drove her head into an angle iron. She was and you’d see them heading across and they’d have ended up with a splitting headache and had to drive two- the fork with them and if the grass was over it, they’d pull hundred miles to her next sheep trial in Roscommon. it aside … Angela recalled a trailer full of silage falling down on her foot, breaking three toes and on another occasion a ram Heavy with yearning, Eileen recounts an example of caught her in a crush and broke her shoulder. Maeve had sound serving better than sight, similar to seventeenth- been run over by a fork-lift truck when she was seventy. century growing manufacturing districts of England The informants were aware of the hazards of farming where the horn used to awaken people and the bell would and acted accordingly: ‘it’s not the big bravo macho thing’, remind people of their passing (Thompson: 362). one noted. They have to think carefully to minimise the Foucault would note the control of time by the macro accidents; as one informant put it, ‘they substitute brawn forces of Church and State. The narrative evokes the with their brain’. Industrial Revolution and an ‘anonymous network of power relations … meeting the needs of capitalist production’. The train and the boats on the canal function Nostalgia both metaphorically and literally as ‘power pulsed through a society like blood through a body’ (Desjarlais: 97). We Recently widowed, Eileen, aged seventy-three, comes can see that Eileen’s detailed account is one of nostalgia from a farming background and much of her narrative drawing her audience back to the past with brief was taken up with reminiscences of her home farm, comments on the present such as ‘you wouldn’t do it now’ which specialised in pigs. She recalled buying a sow from or ‘I can still taste that water’. It is a well-known habit to Maynooth College farm and her reaction when the sow use the good old days as a stick to beat the present with produced only one bonham [piglet]: (Williams: 12). Some would see the workers as exploited by their capitalist employers – ‘they were paid buttons’. I rang Con Murphy who was the farm manager. ‘Ah, he In 1946 the workers went on strike for about two months. says, you often get a pig like that!’ ‘Well, you can take her Their pay was not augmented for a year and then it went back,’ I said … ‘Bring her back and we’ll have her served up by a shilling a day. The farm was unable to support so again’, you know. I drove the tractor with a trailer behind many workers and employment was very scarce at the it and a crate on it round the back of the college in Maynooth. time, recalled a worker from the home farm. How will I drove the tractor to Dorset Street in Dublin with a load today’s discontented workers recount their lives in fifty of potatoes on it! I did! (laughs). year’s time? Will they also see them through ‘rose-tinted spectacles’? Eileen’s father and uncle both died young, leaving her mother and a family of five girls and one boy. Eileen was the only one with a passion for farming, but her mother could not afford to keep on the farm and it was sold in the fifties, much to her regret. She subsequently married 40 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Conclusion Oxford: Blackwell. Desjarlais, Robert 1997. Shelter Blues. Philadelphia: It may be concluded that farm women have a very University of Pennsylvania Press. positive attitude towards work, it is about flexibility and Eriksen, Thomas H. 2001. Small Places, Large Issues. time management skills – they see themselves as hard London: Pluto Press. working but not exploited. They do not perceive Guba, Egon G. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. themselves as working a ‘double day’. If two jobs are Newbury Park, California: Sage. taken on, one job is allocated less time. During lambing Martin, Emily 1987. The Woman in the Body. Boston: Beacon time the housework and cooking are set aside. They treat Press. employees fairly and with respect. They expect a fair day’s Ní Laoire, Catríona 2002. ‘Young farmers, masculinities work for a fair day’s pay. Women with sons do the bulk and change in rural Ireland’, Irish Geography, Vol. 35 of the housework and this is not perceived as unfair. (1). Housework seems to be taken for granted as something Shortall, Sally 1999. Women and Farming, Property and Power. that women automatically do. One could say it is almost London: Macmillan. ‘a natural phenomenon’. As Emily Martin puts it: ‘almost Thompson, E.P. 1993. Customs in Common. New York: all women share the primary responsibility (if not the The New Press. actual job) of their family’s housekeeping – cleaning dirty Williams, Raymond 1993. The Country and the City. floors, diapers, and toilets, taking out the garbage, washing London: Hogarth Press. clothes’ (Martin: 201). It has been argued that the household is an area that women choose to control – the question is, why are all men not ‘house trained’ from infancy? Women may exert considerable power domestically and indirectly, but technology and land ownership tend to be controlled by men (Eriksen: 27). Most of the informants did not have second jobs – one did consultancy work in addition to farming, and one was secretary for a lamb producer’s group. In spite of the farm work being a challenge, all the women were contented with their work. If they were not, they undoubtedly would not have consented to being interviewed. There was much concern regarding the unviability of the farms and the recommendations for taking on a second job. They did not elaborate on the hiring of contract labour – although one informant complained of the expense of hiring contractors and spoke of machinery now being too big for one-hundred- and-fifty acres. The most pressing difficulty was to find the additional labour for smaller tasks on the farm, such as fencing or hanging gates, as these jobs are normally done in pairs. There was a feeling of sadness that women were leaving the land and the majority of informants did not see a future for farming. It looks indeed as if a way of life is becoming obsolete. Farm women in Ireland have been under-researched and the enthusiasm of the informants has shown that Irish farm women are only too happy to be given a voice through anthropological narrative.

Endnotes

1 http://www.ndpgenderequality.ie/publications/reports/ publications_20.html. Accessed 20.1.2006.

References Adams, Jane 1991. ‘Woman’s Place is in the Home: The Ideological Devaluation of Farm Women’s Work’, Anthropology of Work Review, Vol. XII, No. 4. Barfield, Thomas 1997. The Dictionary of Anthropology. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 41

Anthropology and Attachment

Peter Mulholland

In the second half of the last century Ireland, along with private homes or from rented rooms in hotels and much of the Western world, witnessed a remarkable community centres and in the hundreds of dedicated surge of interest in experientially-based forms of religion healing centres, spas, ashrams and retreat houses that have that often emphasized spiritual or ‘magico-religious’ been established all across the country (see Costigan). healing practices1. As Robbins’s 1988 review of the literature on modern New Religious Movements (NRMs) shows, the sociological origins and functions of these The Dynamics of Religious Change: Inglis movements has been extensively studied and theorized. and Taylor In this essay I will argue that recent developments in the field of developmental psychology bridge the gap The flourishing of interest in magical practices and NRMs between sociological and psychological theories of in Ireland is not a new phenomenon. Ireland has a very religious behaviour in a way that promises to deepen our old tradition of folk and faith healing and in the late 1800s understanding of religious behaviour and explain there was a minor flourishing of interest in Theosophy individual and collective surges of interest in devotional in which W. B. Yeats, George (AE) Russell were involved. and magico-religious forms. James Joyce also took an interest before renouncing the In the 1960s numerous new and some not-so-new group and calling its headquarters in Dublin the religious movements like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘Yogibogeybox in Dawson Chambers’ (Kime Scott, 54– Seventh Day Adventists emerged and flourished in 5). Traditional Irish Catholicism has also long had what Ireland (see Tierney). Visiting Christian evangelists Inglis described as being a ‘magical-devotional’ contributed to this religious flux with rallies and crusades, dimension. This magical dimension has existed alongside and ‘the healing ministry’ was revived in the mainstream the dominant ‘legalistic-orthodox’ form of religiosity Christian denominations. The rise of these NRMs was that the Church has cultivated since its rise to power in accompanied by a surge of interest in occult practices the middle of the 19th century (Inglis, 11, 38). Though and reported sightings of UFOs as well as in various the legalistic form of religiosity has come to dominate forms of folk or faith healing and experiential forms of Irish Catholicism, Inglis argued, Irish Catholics still tend religiosity within the Catholic Church (Mulholland, 102– to ‘vacillate’ between different ways of being religious 36; Roch, 188–9). This surge was most apparent in the and Catholicism here remains an ‘amalgam’ of ways of overlapping waves of enthusiasm for faith healing and being religious. Inglis describes this amalgam as consisting Charismatic Renewal (Taylor); in the revival of devotional of three ideal types that he calls ‘(a) magical-devotional’, exercises like the ‘nine-day novena’ (Inglis); in the tens of ‘(b) legalist-orthodox’, and ‘(c) individually principled thousands who traversed the country in response to ethics’. He explained type (a) as providing a refuge in times reports of ‘moving statues’ and in the ‘enormous’ increase of personal difficulty and as being aimed mainly at in the number of Irish pilgrims going to Lourdes (Ryan achieving ‘material transformations in this world’. He and Kirakowski).2 Many of the NRMs that flourished at suggested that type (b) emerged out of the magical- this time soon faded from view while others came to be devotional type that prevailed into the 19th century and seen as constituents of the New Age Movement (NAM) as having begun to give way to type (c) in the 1950s; mainly that emerged in the 1970s. This notoriously ‘diffuse’ among sections of the urban educated where increasing movement is made up of many more-or-less discrete numbers seemed to be choosing the ‘beliefs, practices groups and practices. It is an umbrella movement that and ethics to which they adhere’ (Inglis, 12–38 and 244). operates as a network for the promotion of a huge variety Indeed Inglis suggested that all three forms of of ‘self-spiritualities’ and ‘holistic’ or ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’ Catholicism should be seen as developmental stages therapies (Heelas, 2, 9, 68, 75, 80, 82; Puttick, 130). With operating at individual and society-wide levels but with its millenarian goal of transforming the world through the legalistic and magical forms not being easily healing the self, the NAM was soon characterised as differentiated in practice, as both tend to be governed representing ‘a culture of narcissism’ (Lasch, 396–7). Here by a ‘strict adherence’ to the magical formula or to the in Ireland the NAM persists mainly in the form of ‘letter of the law’. However, though he saw them as innumerable spiritual and holistic healing groups and developmental stages, Inglis insists that these stages should professional healers who provide alternative therapies in not be seen as part of some kind of definite or

Peter Mulholland recently completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology at NUI Maynooth. This essay draws on his doctoral dissertation. Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 41-47 42 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 irreversible trend. Rather, they are seen as being strongly Catholicism may be perceptive, they do not explain why related to prevailing needs and circumstances, and Inglis it is that this form of religiosity has more appeal to some explained eruptions of the magical-devotional form as than to others from the very same cultural, socio- being ‘undoubtedly linked to changes in social and economic, educational, and demographic background. economic conditions [but] primarily… to a Taylor’s explanation of the rise and of the rifts within disenchantment with the failure of the institutional Church a group of Catholic charismatics in the 1970s goes some ‘to respond to the more emotional, experiential religious way towards explaining the forces that drive individual needs of the people’ (Inglis, 28–38). quests for religious healing and shape their religious Inglis explained the rise and dominance of the orientations. In his study of a Co. Donegal-based institutional Church as having been a product of a charismatic group he found that, while some of his actors complex interaction of macro-historical and micro- were ‘drawn’ into charismatic groups by their partners, social processes. These included the effects of famine, most were driven by quests for cures for somatic shifts in the relationship between Britain and Ireland, complaints, relational difficulties, profound improvements in medicine, changes in farming practices disappointments and/or psychological malaise (Taylor, and in family dynamics. These changes also saw the 236, 226, 245). But he also found that, as with the Catholic Church becoming deeply involved in shaping pilgrimage groups he studied, class-related ‘quotidian life’ Irish society through ‘a systematic process of socialisation experiences and intimate memories of formative exercised in churches, schools, hospitals, and homes’ relationships played a critical role in shaping their religious where the now religiously ‘valorised’ Irish mother served understandings and orientations (Taylor, 4, 195–7, 218– as the Church’s ‘organizational link’ in the inculcation of 9). Taylor explained the formation of a ‘new sect’ or more civil behavioural norms and values (Inglis, 64, 100, ‘possession cult’ amongst the charismatics as being a 184, 191). Inglis described this ‘civilizing process’ as product of the ‘logic of the [charismatic] experience as having to do with ‘changes in the way people adapted to well as the particular proclivities of a few individuals’. living in more complex, centralised and regulated Delving deeper into the personal narrative of one communities and societies’. And this involved an woman who baulked at the prospect of supporting the ‘increasing expectation … that people be … more formation of a schismatic sect, he found that her decision peaceful, considerate and self-reflective’ (Inglis, 68, 98, was based on experiences of ‘resonances’ between her 130–33). The inculcation of more civil ways of behaving ‘intimate childhood experiences’ and ‘Church structure’. was at the heart of the Church’s ‘civilizing mission’ and Taylor explained how the woman, who harboured involved the promotion of a ‘sentimental and moral’ disturbing memories of feeling unloved and unwanted approach to childrearing amongst Irish mothers (Inglis, by her own mother, experienced powerful resonances 199). However, as Inglis explains, this shift brought with between the iconic figure of Mary, the Mother of God, it a puritanical approach to childrearing that restricted the and a simple, devout and beloved aunt with whom she physical expressions of affection and instilled a ‘sense of had spent some of her school holidays (Taylor, 218–24, shame and guilt about the body’ that supported the 241). For Taylor, then, it was both painful childhood ‘embodiment of the rules and regulations of the Church experiences and memories of class-related, quotidian life in successive generations’. And, he argues, this puritanical experiences that drove his actors’ quests for religious ethos had the effect of inhibiting ‘self-confidence, healing and shaped their religious orientations, experiences ambition and achievement’ and inculcated an ‘emotional and understandings. awkwardness’ and lack of ‘communicative competence’ Whereas Inglis’s generalized approach helped explain that became part of ‘the Irish habitus’ (Inglis, 138, 157, how the religiously valorised model of sentimental 200, 249, 256). mothering shaped the stereotypic Irish habitus, Taylor’s Inglis recognizes the fact that ‘there are numerous work shows how deviations from that model could drive different ways in which Irish Catholics are religious’ and some sections of a seemingly homogeneous religious he is careful to point out that his thesis is a ‘highly community towards the magical-devotional form of generalized and summary account’ of historical processes religiosity and into quests for religious healing that can that rests on the use of ‘general concepts’ and ‘analytical lead to the formation of new sects and experientially- devices to unify a vast array of people, practices and based ‘possession cults’. Taylor, like Inglis, viewed religion events’ (Inglis, 20, 12, 101). Nevertheless, his generalized as being a process or ‘concatenation of processes, approach meant that he paid little or no attention to the personal and historical’ (Taylor, 4). diversity of superstitious, magical and unorthodox religious beliefs and practices that lurked behind ‘the massive, opaque curtain of orthodoxy’ (Fallon, 197; see Explanations for the Rise of New Religious also Tovey and Shore, 324–330; Whelan and Hornsby- Movements Smith, 40). So, while he provides a penetrating insight into the history and dynamics of Irish Catholicism and how Many sociological theories of the modern surge of it shaped the Irish habitus, Inglis’s thesis has little to say NRMs have posited ‘rapid social change’ and/or some about variations and deviations in the dominant model version of a ‘crisis of meaning’ theory as the explanation of socialization and how these may have affected people’s for the post World War II religious flux. Others argued religious orientation and communicative or relational that it had more to do with the heightening of existential habitus. And, though his observations on the psychosocial anxieties flowing from the Second World War, the Cold forces behind eruptions of magical-devotional War, and the war in Vietnam. Robbins provided an Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 43 excellent survey of these theories in his 1988 book, Cults, Christian Jr’s explanation of the intermittent historical Converts and Charisma (see also Monteith in Sutcliffe and pattern of surges of reports of religious apparitions goes Bowman, Ellwood, Rothstein, Wuthnow, and Hallahim some way towards answering these questions. He argued in Greil and Robbins). However, while these various that various ‘apparition episodes … arise from theories and combinations of theories certainly do shed movements very deep in the individual consciousness light on the various forces behind the modern surge of with a collective, often systemic [a]etiology’. And he held interest in magico-religious interests they often tend to that the recent ‘trans-national pattern’ of religious make sweeping generalizations that overlook the fact that apparitions and UFO sightings represented ‘the only a relatively small proportion of any particular crystallization of the Cold War not only within a population was ever seriously involved in the NRM community, but even within the family’ (240–60). Carroll phenomenon (see Bruce, Heelas, York). While the made similar observations regarding the historical pattern Charismatic Renewal Movement with which Taylor’s of Marian apparitions and suggested that they originated Donegal group was affiliated dwarfed all the other in personal attempts to re-establish the presence of a NRMs that surfaced here in Ireland during this period reassuring mother during times of general distress. This the numbers involved never went much above 35,000 argument is well supported by the evidence for the out of a total population of more than three million situation here in Ireland during the rise of magical- (Szuchewycz). Other students of the NRM phenomenon devotional forms of Catholicism and other magical and have studied the types of people they attract and what it millenarian movements. This flourishing of NRMs was is about the new groups that appeal to them. indeed accompanied by a heightening of collective anxiety Some studies of NRMs have highlighted the part and existential angst. The Irish media kept the country played by the psychosocial and emotional needs of those well informed of the threat posed by the Cold War and who become members and Lasch was not alone in the development of the Irish television station, Telefís detecting narcissistic tendencies among them. Alster, Éireann, in the ’60s meant that Irish people were exposed Fuller (1989), Lewis, and Puttick have all highlighted the to vivid and almost daily coverage of the war in Vietnam prevalence of narcissistic and ‘trivial and self-indulgent’ and of the Northern ‘Troubles’ that threatened, and practices (Heelas, 150, 214) among the various new groups occasionally spilled over into, the Republic. Tierney (6) and movements. These and other writers found that both reckoned ‘the Troubles’ attracted some of the ‘itinerant Christian and exotic NRMs were peopled by the socially preachers’ who arrived in Ireland in the early ’70s. But and/or emotionally marginalized (Allen and Wallis, the war in N. Ireland wasn’t the only domestic source of Robbins, Hexham and Poewe). And, arguing along anxiety at this time. The country was plagued by a similar lines to Taylor, many students of religious combination of economic problems at a time of rising behaviour have proffered some version of the expectations and there was plentiful evidence for the kind ‘Integrative Hypothesis’ that sees NRMs as having a ‘latent of ‘rapid social change’ and ‘crisis of meaning’ theories pattern maintenance’ function in helping marginalized or that were advanced to explain NRMs. Kirby (19) anomic individuals to develop the skills they need to adapt reckoned that the launching of the first Programme for to conventional society (Robbins, 28–36). Other studies Economic Expansion in 1958 was a catalyst for change in have found that groups that have come to be associated the economic and cultural history of the Irish Republic. with New Ageism tend to attract people who have been Nic Ghiolla Phádraig, and Fuller (2004) are in substantial grossly abused in childhood. Greenwood cited agreement with this view and media archives provide Rabinovitch’s 1992 study of Wiccans in the USA in ample evidence of the remarkable changes that were support of her own finding that almost every one of the taking place in the socio-economic, educational, cultural, English Wiccans she interviewed had been abused in religious, and political life of the country during this time childhood. Greenwood (150) went on to interpret (Mulholland, 102–73). These diverse arguments and Wiccan practices as symbolic attempts to deal with bodies of evidence lend support the view that the feelings of marginality and powerlessness stemming from flourishing of interest in experientially-based forms of childhood abuses. I also found a good deal of evidence religiosity and magico-religious practices is driven by of childhood abuse in the narratives of the New Age both internal and external forces and circumstances. What healers and healees that I interviewed. But, like Taylor, I they lack, however, is a theoretical framework that also found that quests for healing and orientation towards explains the dynamics of the culture-psyche interface in experiential and magical practices could originate in much steering some sections of the population towards new less severe forms of abuse such as those that left people and exotic magico-religious movements. John Bowlby’s feeling they had been neglected or rejected and unloved neo-Freudian Attachment Theory and recent as children. And, like Heelas, I found that immersion in developments in field of developmental psychology an authoritarian, disciplinarian world also featured in the provide a framework for exploring and explaining the narratives of those involved in New Age healing etc. complexities of this interface. These various findings support the view that explaining surges of interest in magico-religious movements requires a synthesis of sociological and psychological approaches that can account for the fact that they are associated with Attachment Theory: Bowlby and Nuckolls specific historical periods but attract only relatively small numbers of people from all socio-economic, religious, The fundamental premise of Attachment Theory is that educational and demographic backgrounds. humans have an evolved survival need to establish a bond 44 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 with a carer and that a child’s experiences of repeated Mentalization Theory: Fonagy patterns of interaction with significant carers cause it to embody relational models that endure relatively In 2004 a team led by Peter Fonagy developed Bowlby’s unchanged into adulthood. These ‘inner working models’ attachment theory but criticised as ‘naïve’ his conception underpin one’s relational competence and way of of enduring relational templates being formed on the responding to the threat of loss and anxiety in adulthood. basis of childhood attachments. Rather, the members of Bowlby (129) described attachment behaviour as being: the team argue that ‘it is the quality or “depth” of processing of the psychosocial environment that can be any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining or set by early experience’ and affect the development of retaining proximity to some other differentiated and ‘the mentalizing necessary to function effectively in a preferred individual, who is usually conceived as stronger stressful social world’ (98). By ‘mentalizing’ they mean and/or wiser ‘the capacity to envision mental states in self and others’ (23). This ‘mentalization’ theory is supported throughout Mary Ainsworth developed a laboratory procedure with references to recent neuroscientific discoveries and called ‘the strange situation’ that tested Bowlby’s theory the growing philosophical acceptance of the role played and showed that differences in the way mothers habitually by the ‘moral emotions’ like empathy and compassion interact with their offspring profoundly affect their in underpinning personal morality and social integration children’s sense of security and shape their attachment (70, 137–8). Fonagy and his associates posit the existence behaviour. Ainsworth observed three distinct patterns of a ‘neural mechanism’ they call the ‘Interpersonal of attachment behaviour that she called ‘secure’, Interpretative Mechanism’ or IIM. This mechanism, they ‘avoidant’, and ‘resistant’, with both of the latter being argue, underpins the development of our reflective classified as ‘insecure’ types (Goldberg, 11). function or ‘theory of mind’ (ToM), which is described Cognitive anthropologist Charles Nuckolls cited as being ‘the developmental acquisition that permits various bodies of evidence in support of Bowlby’s children to respond not only to another person’s theory and held that it provided the kind of empirically behaviour, but to the children’s conception of others’ verifiable approach that science itself touts. Nuckolls took beliefs, feelings, attitudes, desires … and so on’ (24). Our the violation of every child’s attachment assumption (that naïve ToM supports our social interactions by providing the bond with the mother ‘mediated by intimate physical us with intuitions or insights into the mental states and contact’ will continue forever) to be ‘nearly’ universal. And intentions of others. However, they argue, this does not he argued that that psychological conflict is transferred fully explain the complex reflective processes involved onto religious representations and become ‘crucial to the in ‘higher-order’ thinking. Pointing out the fact that a child development of belief in superhuman agencies’ and the has feelings ‘about the mental states he encounters in possibility of resolving ‘conflicted attachment wishes’. others’ they go on to note that a child ‘may know what Taking the Jalaris of South India as a case study, he argued the other feels but care little or not at all about this’ (29– that their vocabulary of possession ‘represents, through 30). Fonagy’s team calls the higher-order or ‘ultimate’ transference, values and attitudes originally associated with form of affect regulation ‘mentalized affectivity’, the relationship between mother and child’; and that in meaning the capacity ‘to understand one’s own feelings so doing their religious beliefs provide them with a way experientially in a way that is emotionally meaningful (vs. of coping with unresolved attachment conflicts (183– intellectually)’ (96). Mentalization ‘denotes interest in one’s 97). However, Nuckolls went on to note that, while the mind in general [and] “affectivity” denotes interest in one’s violation of attachment assumptions was ‘nearly own affects’. So ‘mentalized affectivity’ describes how universal’, that violation did not give rise to cross-culturally affect regulation is transformed by mentalization’ (436). similar outcomes because both the method and outcome Mentalization theory, like Attachment Theory, holds of individuation processes varies ‘between social groups that incongruent or ‘deviant’ forms of parenting can arrest because of the different values placed on emotion and or hinder psychological development. This can produce fusion and autonomous individuation’. With his focus on borderline and/or narcissistic personality disorders and cultural patterns Nuckolls took no account of ‘potentially terrifying’ experiences of ‘psychic Ainsworth’s finding that differences in the ways mothers equivalence’. Psychic equivalence is a ‘more primitive level from the same culture interact with their children cause of mental functioning where ... feelings and fantasies are them to develop one or other of the three attachment experienced as reality and not as mental states representing patterns revealed in her laboratory studies. So, while he reality’ (4–11, 200, 300–1). Two developmental processes makes a strong case for Attachment Theory in the are identified as being crucially involved in the emergence interpretation of religious behaviour, Nuckolls, like Inglis, (or not) of higher order mentalization. The child’s pays no attention to how variations in or deviations from experience of its internal world is understood as religiously valorised behavioural models of parenting and consisting of ‘two alternating modes [the] mode of socialization might drive the cognitive and religious ‘psychic equivalence’… and a mode of ‘pretend’ (where development of the members of even the most ostensibly internal is forever separated from external)’. ‘Safe, playful homogenous of cultures or communities along different interaction with caregivers’ (including older siblings or paths. friends) supports the integration of these two modes and the development of mentalization (50, 318–9). ‘Safe’ interactions are those that provide the child with congruent and ‘contingent marked’ displays that mirror Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 45 its affects in ways that differentiate ‘as-if’ or ‘pretend’ Conclusions communications from realistic ones. The ‘marked’ element refers to those ‘salient perceptual features that In his 1999 review of developments in psychological distinguish pretend’ actions and/or expressions from anthropology Philip Bock held that there was still a need realistic ones; e.g. knowing looks, facial expressions, to clarify ‘the actual psychological processes that produce changing voice pitch and any gesture that lets a child know [religious] conformity in some instances [and] resistance that one’s expressions are ‘not for real’ and have ‘no or rebellion in others’ (208). Attachment theory and its realistic consequences’ (296). Fonagy’s team call this recent elaboration by Fonagy’s team provide a framework interactive process the ‘social biofeedback mechanism’ for clarifying those processes and explaining their and they explain how its development can be disrupted historical and socio-cultural origins. Attachment theory in ways that leave some people with a well-developed was based on the premise that humans have an evolved facility for the ‘pretend’ mode but with an ‘island of survival need/drive to establish an attachment to what psychic equivalence’ that has roots in traumatic Bowlby described as some ‘differentiated and preferred experience(s) or fantasies associated with loss or abuse. individual, who is usually conceived as stronger and/or Chronic failures in the social biofeedback process can wiser’ (129). The manner in which that universal human undermine the integration of the two modes of thinking need is met differs from culture to culture and, as and undermine the development of higher order Nuckolls explained, is represented in religious mentalization in ways that give rise to more extensive transferences that can help people cope with unresolved experiences of psychic equivalence and a proclivity for attachment needs or conflicts (183–97). However, as ‘concrete’ thinking and the ‘externalization’ of ‘conscious Inglis observed, religious representations also inform and or unconscious - mental representations of (real or shape attachment behaviour and can be used to change fantasized) interpersonal conflicts … [and] socially or, perhaps more accurately, to valorise historical shifts unacceptable desires that generate painful feelings of of emphasis in relational values and behaviour. And, as anxiety, helplessness, guilt, shame, anger, fear, rage, and Taylor noted, those shifts can play out differently in the so on’ (199–200, 295, 413). Two distinct types of personal or familial and class-related quotidian life ‘externalization’ are discussed. ‘Marked’ or ‘symbolic experiences of the members of even the most apparently externalizations’ refer to expression of psychological homogeneous of religious communities. Mentalization contents in which ‘the subject always maintains some level theory enhances our ability to explain how these of awareness and understanding of the representational diachronic shifts and demographic differences can nature of the externalised symbolic form’. Pretend play, support the kind of religious ‘vacillations’ and periodic art, theatre, fiction, and ‘fantasizing or daydreaming … oscillations that were discussed by Inglis and Taylor. without undermining reality testing’ are cited as examples. What Fonagy’s team refers to as ‘realistic These ‘marked externalisations’ are distinguished from externalizations’ and ‘concrete’ or ‘magical’ thinking those ‘that involve a defensive distortion of reality featured large in the kind experientially-based charismatic, perception’ or the development of pathological defensive devotional, and magico-religious beliefs and healing mechanisms involving projective identification and practices that flourished in Ireland and elsewhere in the distorted self-representations (193–5, 294–5). These decades after World War II. Somatic and psychosomatic ‘unmarked’ or ‘realistic externalizations’ are likened to the complaints and psychological malaise or psychosocial kind of ‘idiosyncratic, magical thinking’ that afflicts alienation underpinned the formation of a multitude of people with a poor capacity for mentalization and which little ‘communities of affliction’ (Turner in Taylor, 223) ‘acquires greater intensity in emotionally charged contexts’ in which the ‘somatization’ of affects was often what (193, 294–5, 471). Kleinman called the preferred ‘idiom of interpersonal What Fonagy’s team refer to as ‘realistic distress’ (10). The explanation of how these ‘unmarked externalizations’ and ‘concrete’ or ‘magical thinking are externalizations’ of affects and magical thinking tend to common features of the whole spectrum of erupt in emotionally-charged contexts lends support to experientially-based charismatic, devotional, and magico- the various crisis theories of NRMs and explains why only religious beliefs and practices that flourished in Ireland a relatively small proportion of any particular population, and across the rest of the Western world in the second those with unresolved attachment needs, ever responded half of the last century and fed the growth of the magical, to the stresses and anxieties of the period in magico- millenarian NAM. The concept of ‘psychic equivalence’ religious ways. The developmentalist explanation of the and the locating of its roots in childhood attachment ‘affect regulation’ benefits of these externalizations helps difficulties help explain the psychology behind the origins explain why these anxious and insecure types persisted and appeal of experientially-based magico-religious in practices that repeatedly failed to bring about the forms. And the explanation of how stressful and promised medical benefits or the arrival of some kind emotionally-charged situations can cause those with of personal transformation or millenarian event. This mentalizing difficulties to experience their needs and fears approach may also provide a framework for explaining in unmarked externalizations and magical thinking helps how religiously marked (i.e. ‘set apart and sacred’) or make sense of why those experientially-based NRMs ritualised externalizations can trigger the kind of mystical flourished during this particular period in our history experiences that are reported as ‘born again’ or Pauline- when the Cold War, the ‘Troubles’, and rapid socio- type conversions of the sort that are reputed to have economic and cultural changes caused many to feel effected transformations in the subjective and anxious and in need of some source of succour.. intersubjective or social being of some people. 46 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

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(1998) The Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland. University College 1 The term ‘magico-religious’ was used by Marett to refer to what Dublin Press. he believed was an early stage in the development of religion and Kime Scott, B. 1978. ‘Joyce and the Dublin Theosophists: magic (1914, xxi). I am using the term in a very loose sense to “Vegetable Verse” and Story. Éire-Ireland, Journal of refer to forms of religiosity that have a magical dimension and The Irish American Institute. emphasise the use of ritual practices and objects in attempting Kirby, P. 1984. Is Irish Catholicism Dying? Cork: Mercier to manipulate supernatural powers and achieve changes in this Press. world. Kleinman, A. 1995. Writing at the Margin: Discourse between

2 Anthropology and Medicine. University of California The Sunday Independent, 11–7–76 Press. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 47

Lasch, C. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Abacus. Lewis, J.R. and Gordon Melton (eds) 1992. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany: State University of New York Press. Marett, R.R. 1914. The Threshold of Religion. London: Methuen. Mulholland, P. 2007. ‘Reiki and the Roman Catholic Tradition: An Anthropological Study of Changing Religious Forms in Modern Ireland’. Unpublished PhD Thesis. National University of Ireland Maynooth. Nuckolls, C. W. 2001. ‘Steps to an Integration of Developmental Cognitivism and Depth Psychology’, in Harvey Whitehouse (ed.) The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography. Oxford: Berg. 181–202. Nic Ghiolla Phádraig, M. 1995. ‘The Power of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland’, in Patrick Clancy, Sheelagh Drudy, Kathleen Lynch and Liam O’Dowd (eds), Irish Society: Sociological Perspectives. Institute of Public Administration in association with The Sociological Association of Ireland. Puttick, E. 2000. ‘Personal Development: The Spiritualization and Secularization of the Human Potential Movement’, in Steven Sutcliffe and Marian Bowman (eds) Beyond the New Age. Edinburgh University Press. Robbins, T. 1988. Cults, Converts and Charisma. Sage Publications. Roch, E. A. 1981. Folk Medicine and Faith Healing in N. Ireland. Ph. D Thesis: Queen’s University Belfast: Control No. t4825499. Rothstein, M. 2001. New Age Religion and Globalization. Aarhus University Press. Ryan, T. and Jurek Kirakowski 1985. Ballinspittle: Moving Statues and Faith. Cork: Mercier Press. Sutcliffe, S. and Marion Bowman 2000. Beyond the New Age. Edinburgh University Press. Szuchewycz, B. 1989. ‘“The Growth is in the Silence”: The Meaning of Silence in the Irish Catholic Charismatic Movement’, in Chris Curtin and Tom Wilson (eds) Ireland From Below: Social Change and Local Communities. Galway University Press. Taylor, L. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Tierney, M. 1985. The New Elect. Dublin: Veritas Publications. Tovey, H. and Perry Shore 2000. A Sociology of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Whelan, C. and Michael Hornsby-Smith 1994. Values and Social Change in Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Wuthnow, R. 1986. ‘Religious Movements and Counter Movements in North America’, in James Beckford (ed.) New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. London: Sage Publications. York, M. 2000. ‘Alternative Spirituality in Europe: Amsterdam, Aups and Bath’, in Steven Sutcliffe and Marian Bowman (eds) Beyond the New Age. Edinburgh University Press. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Husbanding Tradition and Marching towards Modernity: Contrasting forms of resistance among the Ovaherero in Pre-Independence Namibia

Ed Du Vivier

Until well into the 19th century, the Ovaherero1 people of present-day Namibia remained practically unaffected by events outside their territory because of their geographical isolation – surrounded by the Namib Desert to the west and the Kalahari sandveld to the east. During the pre- colonial period, they had developed a cattle-based economy organized around a kin-ordered mode of production. From the 1840s onwards, groups of Orlam and Nama, who had migrated into the territory in response to social and economic pressures along the colonial frontier in the Northern Cape, began to raid Ovaherero cattle that ultimately found their way into the international market Namibia for beef (Lau: 87–106). Nevertheless, the first direct contacts between

Europeans and the Ovaherero posed Homeland no threat to their pastoral economy. Homeland However, as the forces of global granted capital inexorably penetrated their self-rule territory, the Ovaherero mode of production was increasingly undermined through unequal trade, territorial constraints by the colonising power and natural population) died between 1904 and 1907 as a result of disasters. this disastrous war with German colonial forces (Silvester When the Ovaherero rose up in 1904, attempting to and Gewald: 111–22, 169–80 and 341–50). The vast counter these forces by military means, their lands and majority of those who survived the genocide were forced their livestock were violently expropriated. It is estimated to sell their labour by working on farms or in mines that that sixty thousand men, women and children supplied the global market with foodstuffs and raw (approximately three-quarters of the Ovaherero materials. The subsequent creation of native reserves

Between 1994 and 2002, Ed Du Vivier worked as a consultant with the Namibian Ministries of Basic and Higher Education. He is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree in Anthropology and Development at NUI Maynooth.

Irish Journal of Anthropology, Volume 10 (1) 2007, pp. 48-53 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 49 facilitated the proletarianization of the Ovaherero people initial indications were that this had been successful. Many by accommodating those who were not contributing to of the survivors converted to Christianity in the the capitalist economy, while at the same time compelling concentration camps, where there was intense the able-bodied to find work off the reserves. competition between Roman Catholic and Lutheran In many respects, the case of the Ovaherero is not missionaries who offered food and other relief in order unusual in the history of the European scramble for to induce captives to attend their services (Gewald 2002a: African colonies. However, domination is never 107). In the years following the conflict, Ovaherero complete. As Tucker reminds us: refugees came out of hiding and congregated at mission stations around the country seeking relief and protection Whether in visible or invisible forms, resistance is always (Alnaes: 274). There was also the widespread adoption present, even in the most repressive of situations. of European forms of dress, in particular the late- Hegemonic situations always contain the seed of their own Victorian attire of Ovaherero women. Gewald argues liberation (1999: 14). that these actions were a calculated tactic by the Ovaherero to obtain what was necessary for their survival and to Those subjected to domination can counter it through gain access to the skills and opportunities associated with public displays of resistance. In most cases, however, such the modern world (2002a: 106–10). In Scott’s terms, they public or declared resistance will incur an even greater constituted a public performance signifying Ovaherero application of power in order to maintain the position conformity to the status hierarchy and ideological of the dominant group. For this reason, resistance often formations of the dominant group. remains undisclosed or is exhibited only in a disguised With the surrender of German forces in the territory form (Scott). Despite the loss of their means of to South African troops in 1915, there appears to have production and their subordination as a people, the been a conscious attempt by some Ovaherero to reclaim Ovaherero used cultural forms to resist the position in their pastoral way of life. Many displayed ‘everyday the global capitalist system that had been forced upon forms of resistance’ by abandoning the mission stations them. This paper describes two contrasting instances of or deserting the farms on which they worked to ‘squat’ Ovaherero resistance during the 20th century. On the one on land where they had once lived. They also began to hand, they sought to recreate their traditional lifestyle accumulate stock, primarily through theft from white when they were forcibly removed to native reserves; on farmers, a form of ‘direct resistance by disguised resisters’ the other, they appropriated military dress and marching (Scott: 198). The Ovaherero appear to have ‘… regarded drills as a means of asserting a modern identity. stock theft as a way of “peaceful reconquest of ‘the land’ without bloodshed” and as a strategy of “ruining the farmers economically”’ (Krüger and Henrichsen: 151).2 Visions of Ejuru: Attempts to Restore Other Ovaherero rebuilt their herds through Pastoral Identity on Native Reserves accommodation with the capitalist system, by entering into labour tenancy agreements or wage labour for In the 18th and early-19th centuries, the Ovaherero social farmers. A recession during the early 1920s benefited these polity was organised primarily around membership of Ovaherero workers, since European farmers did not have patriclan (otuzo) and matriclan (omaanda) groups. From cash to meet their wages and were obliged to pay them the mid-19th century onwards, political and military with stock. power in Ovaherero society became more centralised in When South Africa was granted the mandate to order to counter cattle raids led by Orlam-Nama warlords, administer South West Africa as a League of Nations Trust and this contributed to a growing sense of Ovaherero Territory, it created a number of Native Reserves that identity. The function of this emerging ethnicity was to were later consolidated into bantustans or tribal homelands. provide a means of distinguishing between ‘them’ and Krüger and Henrichsen note that the reserve system had ‘us’, enemies and friends, and to situate groups within a two functions. First, it served to diffuse the political and hierarchy defined by the differential control of resources economic demands by Ovaherero and other indigenous and labour (Wallace: 366–70). The Ovaherero viewed groups without allowing individual land ownership. themselves and were viewed by others as a people with Second, by ensuring that there was too little land on the cattle and guns, who controlled the ehi rOvaherero (the land reserves to support the black population, men were of the Ovaherero). By adopting a centralised model of forced to work on white-owned farms and in the mines. political organisation, the Ovaherero presented a culture Laws against vagrancy and squatting were also introduced that was both worthy of respect by and threatening to to ensure that Africans who were not contributing to the Europeans, particularly to German colonisers in view of white economy were removed from more productive the rise of their nation-state. Although some Germans lands. As the Rhenish Mission office observed in 1926: recognised the Ovaherero as a Volk, with the concomitant desire for self-determination and capable of ‘cultural … the reserves ‘are reservoirs for those of the population raising’, others considered them barbarous sub-humans who are dispensable in the economy, the old, weak, who could never ‘be educated to civility’ (Smith). disabled, probably also for some shirkers, and for the Thus, the 1904–1907 war can be seen as an attempt continually increasing herds of the natives’ (Berichte der by the Germans not only to destroy the political and Rheinischen Missionsgesellshaft, 1926: 122, as quoted in economic autonomy of the Ovaherero people, but also Krüger and Henrichsen: 152). to enforce ideological and status domination. All of the 50 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

However, the employment options available to blacks colonial troops arrived in the territory.4 European outside the reserves were extremely limited and travellers and colonial officials made presents of uniforms unattractive. Wages on white-owned farms were so low to Ovaherero chiefs as part of the diplomatic flattery and working conditions so bad that Africans sought employed to obtain their assent to various treaties, and temporary employment there only as a last resort (Fuller: some chiefs reportedly maintained uniformed body- 199). guards (Werner). In addition, African men and boys were As a group, the Ovaherero adopted two strategies in recruited as native auxiliaries – the Truppenbambusen – as relation to the formation of reserves. On the one hand, personal servants, manual labourers and trackers for the they pragmatically attempted to increase the size of and German colonial troops. There are reports that a group the infrastructure on the reserves through public forms of these Ovaherero auxiliaries deserted and fought against of resistance – petitions, political agitation, passive the Germans in 1904 (ibid.). Moreover, Ovaherero fighters resistance and negotiation – which met with limited took as booty the uniforms and other military success. On the other hand, they engaged in a disguised paraphernalia of German soldiers killed in battle; wearing form of status and ideological resistance by seeking to them was a public status display that symbolised their create a collective vision of ejuru to embody the symbolic equality with the enemy. Regardless of how the Otruppe force of their renewed cultural identity. Although the term started, oral histories suggest that the movement may be translated literally as ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’, it refers represented German military practices that had been metaphorically to the image of an idealised, pastoral appropriated and grafted on to traditional rituals relating landscape. Even if the ehi rOvaherero would never be to the transition to manhood (Hendrikson: 237). restored, the people could re-establish contact with their The Otruppe movement operated as a decentralised glorious past through their aspiration for ejuru (Krüger network of relatively autonomous groups, divided into and Henrichsen: 153–5). three different flag organisations.5 Each district had its When the Ovaherero were forcibly moved into own named regiment, with distinctive uniforms and reserves during the 1920s, this became an opportunity insignia. Within each regiment there was a strict hierarchy; for reconstructing traditional social and kinship relations. each individual member was assigned a military rank, Families that had been separated since the 1904–1907 war sometimes with the name of a prominent German officer were reunited and formed new ovararanganda (clusters appended. Females were also welcomed as members of homesteads, generally related through kinship ties). and, by the 1930s, about half of all members were A rich network of interdependent relations was women. In addition to organizing regular marching drills regenerated, as these ovararaganda formed the basis for and parades, Otruppe groups functioned as benevolent pooling resources, including stock, labour and cash (ibid.: societies, collecting money to support destitute members, 155). Other pre-colonial symbols and rituals were also pay fines and host feasts. They also provided opportunities revitalised, though these were often kept hidden from for isolated groups of farm workers to gather with other missionaries and colonial administrators. Prior to the Ovaherero to engage in self-directed entertainment, 1904–1907 conflict, the ceremonial centre of Ovaherero providing an alternative to the state-supported Bantu culture had been the okuruuo (plural omaruuo, sacred or holy Welfare Clubs and church organisations. Perhaps the fire) and associated ancestral rituals. These omaruuo had most important function of the Otruppe was that of a been extinguished after their comprehensive defeat near burial society, providing financial and emotional support Waterberg in August 1904, but were rekindled as part for bereaved relatives and an honour guard at funerals. of the process of reclaiming cultural identity. While there Indeed, the first public appearance of an Otruppe regiment was some resistance by women to the reintroduction of was at the reburial of the deposed paramount chief, other cultural practices such as polygyny, adults of both Samuel Maharero, at his ancestral plot in Okahandja in sexes supported bringing back male circumcision and 1923 (Krüger and Henrichsen: 156–9 and 162–5).6 female puberty rites as a means of re-asserting their The ceremonial commemoration of the graves of authority over the younger generation (Wallace: 359–61; Ovaherero heroes was a key element in the ‘counter- Krüger and Henrichsen: 155–6). Such undisclosed hegemonic rituals of resistance’ at the heart of the Otruppe practices constituted a hidden form of resistance to movement. Many of these graves were in towns or on ideological domination by missionaries and the colonial white-owned farms where blacks were no longer authorities. allowed to reside. By visiting them for the annual commemorative display, the Ovaherero reclaimed these lost sites and re-encoded the landscape. Whereas the ehi The Otruppe Movement: Cultural rOvaherero had been mapped in the minds of the people Appropriation as Public Resistance as a network of watering places and associated grazing areas in the period before the 1904–1907 war, these While the concept of ejuru attempted to recapture the graves and parade grounds now became the nodes that idealised pastoralism of the pre-colonial period, the tied the Ovaherero to this space (Gewald 2002a; 113– Otruppe3 movement appropriated and reconstructed 14). Public parades by the Otruppe as the surrogate elements of colonial institutions as a means of ‘escaping Ovaherero army created a symbolic occupation of this the dominant order without leaving it’ (Krüger and expropriated territory, while at the same time challenging Henrichsen: 149–50). Oral history and archival sources and undermining the power of colonial rule (Krüger and suggest that the practice of wearing uniforms dates from Henrichsen: 159–61). The Otruppe movement thus the late 1860s, almost thirty years before the first German became an alternative means of demonstrating what it Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 51

Otjozondjupa Okahandja Herero Day 2003 Source: www.klausdierks.com/FrontpageMain.html meant to be Ovaherero. As Hendrikson (238) asserts, members were closely watched by colonial these associations serve to ‘… enact a moral vision of administrators to ensure that they did not have a true [Ova]Herero society in which exemplary men and military purpose. During the early 1920s, however, the women are ranked and unified in the eyes of the ancestors Otruppe movement was strongly influenced by the and fellow, earthly onlookers’. teachings of Marcus Garvey and became closely Whereas those who promoted visions of ejuru looked associated with the United Negro Improvement backward towards an idealised past, the Otruppe Association (UNIA), which was sweeping through Africa movement was unashamedly modern. Rather than at the time. Otruppe structures were used to spread the attempting to restore the kin-ordered relations that Garveyite ideology and to mobilise support, while existed prior to the 1904 conflict, the Otruppe created new Otruppe officers also functioned as leaders of the UNIA. social relations that were independent of kinship ties. The By 1923, however, the UNIA had collapsed and movement operated as a national network, forming and members ceased paying subscriptions because of its maintaining links between those living in the towns and failure to live up to their expectations for radical social on the reserves, as well as between different regiments and political change (Werner). During the late 1920s and around the country. Krüger and Henrichsen (161–2) give 1930s the Otruppe movement became increasingly examples of ‘travel passes’ issued by Otruppe regiments politicised, particularly in urban areas where regiments that identified the bearers as well as providing letters of attempted to interrupt the activities of second-tier introduction to other members in places the bearers authorities and secure election of their candidates to planned to visit. The movement also enabled individual advisory boards. In the lead-up to World War II, when members to gain status and authority within the the Otruppe movement briefly flirted with Nazi ideology, movement regardless of their subordinate positions in the South African administration banned public parades the colonial hierarchy. For this reason, it was particularly and the wearing of uniforms, as well as expelling activists attractive to uninitiated, property-less young men who from the reserves. These conflicts were resolved with the worked as waged labourers in the towns, mines or on outbreak of war, when many Otruppe members were white-owned farms (Gewald 1999a: 265). recruited into the South African armed forces (Krüger Initially, the Otruppe movement had no overt political and Henrichsen: 169–73; Werner). agenda, although drilling and parading in uniform by its South African administrators tended to dismiss the 52 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Otruppe movement as play acting – Truppenspieler – a economic alternatives, such as dairy schemes, the vast parody of German cultural forms. Much has been majority were never able to become independent from written about rituals of reversal such as the carnival, which wage labour or to engage in it in a selective fashion can be viewed as an institutionalised ‘safety valve’ allowing (Krüger and Henrichsen: 166–7). By establishing the the oppressed to let off steam without endangering the reserves and repeatedly promising to ‘look into’ position of dominant groups (Scott: 172–82). However, improving conditions on them, the pre-Independence such a characterisation of the Otruppe movement administration kept alive the hope that the pastoral lifestyle misconstrues its true meaning and intent. Unlike the might be restored. Thus, while promoting visions of ejuru carnival, where normal rules of decorum are not was clearly an act of resistance against enforced enforced and participants give in to their base appetites, proletarianization, it also served to ‘… tie the population the Otruppe observe strict protocols and valorise of the labour reserve to the land, and keep the discipline. Moreover, Ovaherero informants have “redundant” out of the cities’ (Ferguson: 236). Although repeatedly claimed that the wearing of uniforms and aspirations by the Ovaherero to re-establish a traditional parading at gravesites were not adopted to ridicule the pastoral lifestyle may have been partially effective in German colonial troops, but rather to embrace the countering ideological domination, this oppositional underlying symbolism of these rituals as marks of honour cultural formation served only to reinforce their conferred upon heroes (Krüger and Henrichsen: 162– subordination in material terms. 3). The Otruppe movement represents a contrasting Scott (58–66) demonstrates how the parading of example of resistance to the colonial order. Through the troops is a central element in the public transcript of appropriation of modern cultural forms, such as the dominance. During the German colonial period, wearing of uniforms and the holding of commanders often staged public drilling of troops and commemorative parades, the Otruppe engage in public mock attacks as a way of instilling fear and respect among displays of Ovaherero self-worth, as well as propagating the natives. By appropriating these cultural forms, the a public counter-ideology of equality with whites. Otruppe movement demonstrated its resistance to the However, the strategy of asserting Ovaherero ethnic colonial order through public assertions of status and a identity as distinct from other African groups has had public counter-ideology of equality with Europeans. unintended, negative consequences. Since 1964, the Gewald draws a fascinating parallel between the Otruppe Otruppe movement became increasingly associated with displays and parades in quasi-military dress by the parties that took part in the South African-sponsored German population of South West Africa prior to the second-tier authorities and have been sidelined by the Second World War. Much as the Ovaherero, the SWAPO government since Namibia gained its Germans felt discriminated against under South African independence in 1990 (Hendrickson: 213 and notes 2 and rule and needed to reaffirm their sense of nationalist 3, 241). Notwithstanding its radical rhetoric during the identity. Gewald notes that: liberation struggle, the SWAPO government has adopted a gradualist approach to land reform and redistribution, Both the Germans and the [Ova]Herero drew their frustrating aspirations by the Ovaherero to reclaim their inspiration from a common ‘modern’ way of conducting ancestral territory. Thus, while the Otruppe movement has public ritual and sought to influence one and the same persisted to the present day, its status and authority in colonial administration (2002a: 112). Ovaherero society is considerably diminished.7 Nevertheless, the centennial commemoration of the 1904 uprising provided a focus for reviving the movement and for staging a mass public display of resistance by the Conclusion Ovaherero against their perceived marginalisation in post- colonial Namibia (Dierks). Comaroff (3) asserts that ‘… the movement from non- market to market-dominated relations is not an all-or- none, unidirectional process’, but rather entails a ‘complex Notes oscillation’ of cultural dynamics. Paradoxically, attempts by the Ovaherero to reclaim their traditional way of life 1 Although commonly referred to as ‘Herero’ in the historical on the native reserves played into the hands of their and lay literature, the people in question add the prefix ‘Ova-’ colonial masters. Willis has demonstrated how acts of when referring to themselves in their mother tongue, Otjiherero. resistance and the formation of an oppositional sub- In this paper, the term is used to refer to a number of sub-groups, culture can serve to produce ideological effects and including the Ovahimba, the Ovatjimba and the Ovambanderu, cultural forms that induce subordinate groups to as well as the Ovaherero proper. These related groups are of Bantu voluntarily accept their class position in the capitalist origin and migrated into present-day Namibia sometime during hierarchy. In common with other parts of Southern the 16th century (Pool: 3–7).

Africa, the most important function of the reserve/ 2 homeland system was to keep ‘… those unwanted and Internal quotations from F. Poenninghaus ‘Friedliche unneeded by the [white] economy peacefully settled on Zurückeroberung “des Landes” ohne Blutvergiessen’; ‘Farmer the land’ (Ferguson: 236). Although a small number of … wirtschaftlich zur Strecke bringen’, in Vereinigte Evangelischen Missionsarchiv – Rheinischen Missionsgesellschaft, 8th September Ovaherero living on the reserves were able to accumulate 1925. wealth by building up their herds or through modern Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 53

3 Otruppe is a modern word combining the Otjiherero prefix o- Wolfram Hartman; with Ben Fuller Jnr (eds) 1998. and the German word truppe, meaning troopers or soldiers. Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and containment, Otruppe is preferred to the term Truppenspieler (German: playing 1915–46. Oxford: James Currey. soldiers), which is used extensively in the historical literature but Hendrickson, Hildi 1996. ‘Bodies and Flags: The carries negative connotations of ‘aping’ the German Schutztruppe. representation of Herero identity in colonial The generic term Otruppe is also used in preference to Otjiserandu, Namibia’, in H. Hendrickson (ed.), Clothing and which is sometimes used collectively to refer to this phenomenon Difference: Embodied identities in colonial and post-colonial (see note 5). Africa. Durham: Duke University Press. 4 In the early 1860s, a Swedish adventurer – Charles Andersson Krüger, Gesine and Dag Henrichsen 1998. ‘“We have – allied himself with Rhenish missionaries and their Ovatjimba been Captives Long Enough. We Want to be Free”: followers in an attempt to gain a monopoly over the cattle trade Land, uniforms & politics in the history of the Herero to the Cape. A unit of mercenaries – the Otjimbingwe British in the interwar period’, chapter 6 of Hayes et alii. 1998, Volunteer Artillery – including both Europeans and Africans 149–74. was formed to fight against the Orlam-Nama commandos Lau, Brigitte 1994 [1987]. Southern and Central Namibia in (Gewald 1999: 18–23). Jonker Afrikaners’s Time. Windhoek Archives 5 The term Otjiserandu refers specifically to the ‘red band’ group Publications Series No. 8. Windhoek, Namibia: associated with Samuel Maharero. At least two other groups or Archeia. sections were formed to express support for other Ovaherero Pool, Gerhard 1991. Samuel Maharero. Windhoek, chiefs, including the Otjizemba/Otjiapa (white band) and the Namibia: Gamsberg Macmillan. Otjingirini (green band). Hendrickson argues that these three ‘flag’ Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: organisations are the primary institutions of ethnic identification, Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale and that the Otruppe performances are only a component of their University Press. public displays. Silvester, Jeremy and Jan-Bart Gewald (eds) 2004. Words nd 6 Gewald (1999: 279) reports that the funeral of Samuel Maharero Cannot be Found: German colonial rule in Namibia, 2 was, in all outward appearances, identical to the state funeral Edition. Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. accorded to the commander of German colonial forces in GSWA Annotated Reprint of the Imperial Blue Book, in 1914. prepared by Administrator’s Office, South-West Africa: Report on the natives of South-West Africa and their 7 This assertion is based on the author’s personal observation treatment by Germany. London: His Majesty’s Stationery of the Heroes’ (formerly Herero’s) Day commemoration at Office, originally published 1918. Samuel Maharero’s grave in Okahandja in August 1995 and Smith, Helmut Walser 1998. ‘The Talk of Genocide, the personal communication with Ovaherero friends and Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on debates in the acquaintances. German Reichstag concerning Southwest Africa, 1904–1914’, chapter 5 of Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sarah Lennox and Suzanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist References Imagination: German colonialism and its legacy. Ann Arbor, Alnaes, Kirsten 1989. ‘Living with the Past: the songs of Michigan: University of Michigan Press. the Herero in Botswana’. Africa, 59 (3): 267–299. Tucker, Vincent 1999. ‘The Myth of Development: a Comaroff, Jean 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: critique of a Eurocentric Discourse’, chapter 1 of R. The culture and history of a South African People. Chicago: Munck and D. O’Hearn (eds), Critical Development University of Chicago Press. Theory: Contributions to a new paradigm. London: Zed Dierks, Klaus 2005. Chronology of Namibian History: from Books. pre-historical times to independent Namibia (December Wallace, Marion. 2003. ‘“Making Tradition”: healing, 2000). Electronic document, http:// history and ethnic identity among Otjiherero-speakers www.klausdierks.com/FrontpageMain.html in Namibia, c. 1850–1950’. Journal of Southern African accessed throughout Dec 2005 and Jan 2006. Studies, 29 (2): 355–72. Ferguson, James 1994 [1990]. The Anti-Politics Machine: Werner, Wolfgang. 1990. ‘“Playing Soldiers”: the ‘Development’, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Truppenspieler movement among the Herero of Lesotho. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Namibia, 1915 to ca. 1945’. Journal of Southern African Minnesota Press. Studies, 16 (3). Electronic document accessed on Fuller, Ben, Jnr. 1998. ‘“We Live in a Manga”: constraint, December 29 & 30, 2005. resistance & transformation on a native reserve’. Willis, Paul E. 1983 [1977]. Learning to Labour: How working Chapter 8 of Hayes et alii. 1998. class kids get working class jobs. Guildford, Surrey: Gower. Gewald, Jan-Bart 1999a. Herero Heroes : a socio-political Originally published by Saxon House, Teakfield Ltd. history of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923. Oxford: Wolf, Eric R. 1997 [1982]. Europe and the People without J. Currey. History. Berkeley, California: University of California Gewald, Jan-Bart 2002a. ‘Flags, Funerals and Fanfares: Press. Herero and missionary contestations of the acceptable, 1900–1940’. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 15 (1): 105–17. Hayes, Patricia, Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace and 54 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Book Reviews

Susan S. Hunter, Who Cares? Aids in Africa HIV and AIDS, the history of epidemics, and (published in USA as Black Death: Aids in evolutionary biology. Interspersed with this are vignettes, Africa), 2003. New York: Palgrave MacMillan which take the reader from Darwin’s journeys on board the Beagle, and the emergence of his theory of evolution, In his Condition of the Working Class in England published in to contemporary life in a small rural town in the Rakai 1844, Frederich Engels wrote: district of Uganda. It should work! The strength of ‘Who Cares?’ is that it presents a detailed When one individual inflicts bodily harm upon another, historical analysis of these trends, and locates the current such injury that death results, we call the deed HIV and AIDS pandemic in that context. Chapters are manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that dedicated to Africa’s political and economic the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But development, epidemic rules, sexually transmitted when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a diseases and disease and evolution. By addressing causes position that they inevitably too meet a too early death and conditions as well as the internal dynamics of and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death epidemics, Hunter draws attention to global economics by violence as that of the sword or bullet; when it deprives and political power to seek explanations from historical thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under antecedents that may inform present and future solutions. conditions in which they cannot live… knows that these That said, there are enormous problems with the book, thousands… must perish, and yet permits these not least of which are the questions raised in the final conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as chapter. Effectively what Hunter argues is that genetic the deed of the single individual… we read these things analysis of world population reveals two major clusters every day in the newspapers and take no further trouble in ‘Africans and non-Africans’, and since human behaviour the matter. But society cannot complain if after the official is conditioned by our evolutionary past, that non-Africans and non-official testimony here cited must be known to may be genetically predisposed to racism. it – the offence may be more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. If the rest of the human species is more related to one another than they are related to Africans, is it simply a case These sentiments seem to be echoed in Susan Hunter’s that human genetics determines that we suffer less guilt book, Who Cares? AIDS in Africa. ‘In the face of an in leaving Africa to fall into ruins? Is this intra-species rivalry, epidemic, failure to act is a form of action on the part which, as we learned from Darwin, is the most ruthless of of those who are not affected.’ (223) Given that there is all nature’s competitions? If we help Africa, are we helping something of a formulaic feel to much of the the ‘less fit’ to survive? (219) contemporary writing about HIV and AIDS in Africa, a book heralded as ‘one of the most important books on This line of enquiry is unhelpful and worrying, primarily AIDS to be published during the last several years’, and for the possibility that it justifies an abdication of the ‘long-needed AIDS 101 primer’ (back cover) is responsibility for a problem that has roots in social and certainly to be welcomed. Hunter’s objective is: cultural factors rather than biology. This is a justification that many people would be willing to accept. As Hein to widen our focus from the relatively narrow fields of Marais (2005) observes: science and medicine to look at the epidemic’s social, political, and historical antecedents if we are going to find Humans find it difficult to think of epidemics as a ‘cure’ for AIDS. (9) phenomena that ‘happen’, as opposed to phenomena that are ‘made’ or perpetrated… We seek order and meaning, Insofar as this book broadens the debate on HIV/AIDS and insist on detecting and plotting patterns in apparent policy outside the realm of science and biomedical/ randomness. And so, plagues are often interpreted as public health and into the realm of global economics and forms of reckoning, a spiritual accounting or a balancing political power, it is successful. Few other books on the of scales… Swirling about it is an obdurate suspicion that subject of HIV and AIDS in Africa have given much more something this ghastly and relentless cannot be mere than a cursory nod in the direction of colonialism by way happenstance… of historical reference. As Hunter points out: ‘The emergence of HIV/AIDS in Africa is a result of the Hunter does make a heartfelt plea for social action, convergence of long-developing trends in human history, observing the need to deepen our compassion as human technology, philosophy and evolution.’ (10) beings as well as our ‘technical appreciation of Who Cares?, written explicitly as ‘a layperson’s book coevolutionary relationship with our pathogens’. about HIV/AIDS in Africa’, is an ambitious attempt to However, she simultaneously suggests that there is a weave together four themes – the exploitation of Africa, biological predeterminism to our apathy and inactivity, Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 55 thereby undermining her own argument. Despite her expressed wish to highlight the suffering of This final argument comes in a book which is littered individuals afflicted by the disease, and to validate the with unsubstantiated claims, (semantically) courageous work that women throughout Africa do in uncontextualised debates, intermittent referencing and response to HIV and AIDS, the use of composite unreferenced quotations, all of which combine to give characters has effectively robbed them of their voice and the impression of a careless, ‘cherry-picking’ approach objectified the subjects of her study. The invented to building an argument. For example, Hunter cites dialogue does not ring true, and results in one-dimensional Caldwell ‘[in Africa] virtue is related more to success in caricatures, which do a huge disservice to the very women reproduction than to limiting profligacy’, but fails to Hunter wishes to honour. Here was a golden opportunity properly reference, or even refer to the fact that the work to present ethnographic accounts of real people doing conducted by Caldwell et al (1987, 1989, 1991) has been the work. One gets an overwhelming sense of an highly criticised not only for claiming that sexuality in opportunity lost. Africa is inherently permissive, but for methodological flaws and for being cavalier with source material. It has FIONA LARKAN, also been consistently and thoroughly rebutted in the years Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth since publication (see Le Blanc et al. 1991, Chege 1993, Heald 1995, and esp. Ahlberg 1994). The following examples, chosen at random are References illustrative of the type of unreferenced statistics, which pepper the book: Ahlberg, B.M. 1994. ‘Is there a distinct African sexuality? Americans still have the highest rate of STDs of any A critical response to Caldwell et al.’ Africa, 64(2), 220– developed country in the world, largely due to high rates 42. of sexual activity. (154) Caldwell, J.C. and P. Caldwell, 1987. ‘The cultural context of high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa’, Population and STDs are rampant in young people because their elevated Development Review, 13, 409–37. sex drives lead to higher rates of sexual activity, higher rates Caldwell, J.C., P. Caldwell, and P. Quiggin 1989. ‘The of partner change, and lack of knowledge [of] and failure social context of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa’, to use protection. (154) Population and Development Review, 15, 185–234. Caldwell, J.C., Orubulwe, I., and Caldwell, P. 1991. ‘The A child is 40 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a destabilisation of the traditional Yoruba sexual stepparent than by a biological parent, and being a system’, Population and Development Review, 17, 229–62. stepchild is the strongest risk factor for child abuse. (197) Heald, S. 1995. ‘The Power of Sex: Some reflections on the Caldwells’ ‘African Sexuality’ thesis’, Africa 65(4), Similarly, findings attributed to ‘a study sponsored by 489–505. UNICEF’ (74) and quotes from ‘a South African’ (73) Marais, H. 1995. Buckling: The Impact of AIDS in South raise more questions than they answer. Africa. University of Pretoria, Pretoria. Presumably the style of referencing is a conscious decision on the part of Hunter and/or her editors – perhaps an attempt to make the book more accessible Ullrich Kockel and Máiréad Nic Craith (eds), to the non-academic. Hunter has acknowledged elsewhere that the book underwent radical editing to Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions, reduce its size from approx 600 pages to 225. The result, 2007. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan however, is an engagement in quasi-scientific theorising which attempts to make extremely complex and There are two points that are especially striking about this contentious arguments accessible to a lay reader without varied collection of thirteen papers, the first of which is taking the time to properly build a case. Some footnotes the broad agreement amongst the contributors as to how, do exist, but again, these are erratic – being either non- nowadays, heritage matters should be approached existent or stretching to one and a half pages. More anthropologically. Although quite a lot of effort is importantly, the erratic referencing and absence of a expended on the definition of concepts recurrently used complete bibliography robs the reader of the throughout, the prevalent perspective is summarized in opportunity to challenge or test, or even to confirm them. a quotation from an earlier publication by B. Graham et Most unfortunate, however, is Hunter’s use of the alii on ‘The Uses and Abuses of Heritage’: ‘heritage is that composite characters, ‘Pauline’, ‘Robina’ and ‘Molly’, part of the past which we select in the present for whose story: contemporary purposes’. This being so, what is required from ethnographic work on heritage issues is a focus on has been fictionalized from real community activities in the current economic, political and cultural influences Uganda’s Rakai District in 1989, combined with which result in the past being appropriated and valorized community stories from other countries … many of the in specific kinds of ways by particular groups and events and all of the dialogue have been invented. None individuals. Because this collection includes ethnography of the opinions expressed can be attributed to actual drawn from Australia, Europe, Africa and Asia, by the people. (1 fn2) time one has read all the papers, one emerges with a fairly 56 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 clear idea of how effective and rewarding it is to pithily asserts (in chapter 2) that ‘all heritage is approach heritage issues in this way. «concocted»’, but it quickly becomes evident throughout The second point is the striking diversity of ways in this volume that concoction is achieved with highly which local communities respond to the variable degrees of subtlety, skill and intelligence. Most commodification of heritage both by themselves and by especially in the final two contributions, Heather Gill- external authorities, as well as the problems which follow Robinson and Barbara Hewitt turn their attention to the hot on the heels of regional and international global dealing in heritage items where uncompromisingly commercialization. Several of the contributors detail how rough trade is the order of the day. In chapter 12, Gill- particular communities (or loose groupings of them) Robinson cuts through some of the often precious post have successfully exploited their cultural capital and modern writing on heritage tourism by insisting (p.188): turned it to conspicuous advantage. In chapter 5, Anne ‘Heritage and culture are treated in the same way as other Kathrine Larsen describes how local groups in Sweden commodities, reducing cultural identity to an insignificant and Malaysia were able to weave novel webs of meaning factor in an otherwise economic equation.’ She marshals around two women who, in the 17th and 18th centuries an impressive diversity of illustrative material – from the respectively, were executed for gross transgressions. proposal to float China’s magnificent Terracotta Army Redefined and reconstructed in the present as heroine and on the stock market through to the touristic Madonna, their resting places became significant sites to commodification of the Mysterious Bog People – in visit. In the context of post colonial Namibia, Ian order to substantiate her justifiably materialist line of Fairweather details (chapter 7) how, under the powerful argument. In the last chapter, Hewitt likewise draws auspices of SWAPO, representatives of markedly together a welter of statistical data and case material to contrasting ethnic groups at the country’s National highlight the devastating effects of internet trading in Cultural Festival were geared to forging a new identity heritage items, which generally flow from Third to First as «a nation of contrasts», so that their respective heritages World locales. Having pointed out, amongst much else, became significant sources of group empowerment. that the looting of archaeological sites is nowadays the Fiona Magowan describes (chapter 4) how the Yolngu third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world (it in Australia’s Northern Territory have taken full advantage follows in the wake only of drug trading and computer- of new technologies for the transmission of the more based theft), Hewitt concludes with a number of intangible aspects of their culture, albeit in such a way as recommendations; but such is the power of her overall to raise complex, but not unfathomable, issues relating argument that one works through these with a growing to its recording, documentation and archiving. sense of pessimism and despair rather than (as is, By contrast with these generally positive and doubtless, the author’s intent) the opposite. sometimes profitable outcomes to the commodification In short, do not be put off by the ungainly title of this of heritage, other contributors detail the conflicts and the collection (which should, at the least, have been phrased cleavages which can result. In a particularly skilful in the singular?) It is a well-organized, deftly-edited and contribution (chapter 9), Gabriele Marranci describes the professionally-produced volume which incorporates twists and turns taken within Northern Ireland’s Moslem both interesting ethnography and intriguing analytic community as its members attempted to retain their insights in a way which should provoke further ideas for Islamic identity within the broader sea of religious and research into the anthropology of heritage and tradition. secular divisions. Having tried for some time to educate the up-coming generation themselves, they finally ceded ADRIAN PEACE the task to an official imam from Malaysia, only to find University of Adelaide that his more authoritarian and doctrinaire style ill-suited not just their children but also the political balancing act which their minority status had long demanded. In a similarly impressive paper, Anna Bohlin (chapter 6) details Andrew Finlay (Ed.), Nationalism and how coloured and black populations in a small South Multiculturalism: Irish Identity, Citizenship African town refused outright to accommodate a and the Peace Process, 2004. Munster: Lit proposal from the dominant whites to reorganize their Verlag long-established local museum on more balanced lines. Bohlin persuasively argues that their resistance had more involved roots than was immediately evident. Local The changes that have overtaken Irish society over the community resistance is also the central concern of last generation have arrived at such pace and volume that Gabriella Aspraki’s essay (chapter 3) in which she the detail can often become lost in the haze. Occasionally describes the communal divisions generated by one of though an event comes along that appears so the EU’s LEADER projects in a mountainous location paradigmatic of where things are headed that it assumes in Greece. External authorities imagined that a a particular clarity. The respectful silence that greeted the development project which cast the locals in the role of rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’ when the English tradition-minded peasants would hold out considerable rugby team visited that citadel of Irish cultural nationalism, attraction to the urban tourist. It did not appeal, however, Croke Park, might be considered one such moment. And to a substantial number of local women who stalwartly the decision of no fewer than one thousand Polish resisted its imposition on them. immigrants to apply for positions in the Police Service One of the editors of this volume, Ullrich Kockel, of Northern Ireland could in all likelihood be considered Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 57 another. Taken together, these moments are suggestive offers an implicit explanation of this silence when he of the multiple changes that are currently reshaping Irish suggests that the contribution of unionists to debates on society north and south – the rebranding of what it means cultural pluralism has ‘hitherto been muted’. This to be Irish, the newfound status of the island as a place particular version of events should, however, be regarded of mass immigration and the faltering transition towards as distinctly questionable. The contribution of unionist something like peace in the six counties. It is this specific intellectuals to debates on cultural and political identity and dynamic conjuncture of processes that provides the in Ireland has been a substantial and, arguably, even focus for an engaging new collection of essays entitled formative one. It could perhaps be suggested that the Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish Identity, Citizenship and controversies over ‘revisionism’ that have spanned the the Peace Process. last four decades owe their origins to the incendiary early In his editor’s introduction, Andrew Finlay indicates writings of the British and Irish Communist Organisation. that the intention of the text is to examine two versions The provocations of the ‘two nations’ thesis sparked a of pluralism that are of rather different vintage: an ‘old’ debate that has never since quite abated and provided one that emerged to encourage cultural understanding the inspiration for subsequent generations of unionist and dialogue during the dark days of the troubles and a thinkers. The writings of Arthur Aughey in particular over ‘new’ one that has sought to advance the interests of the last two decades represent a thoughtful and migrants recently arrived to these shores. In the essays that sophisticated – if, ultimately, politically questionable – follow, writers from a range of academic backgrounds attempt to wrestle with the issues of subjectivity, map out the ways in which the recent period of rapid collectivity and citizenship that are among the principal social change in Ireland has been shaped by and refracted themes of this collection. The absence of such a through public policy, political activism and cultural perspective from Nationalism and Multiculturalism debate. Some of the contributors to the book discern represents a glaring and puzzling omission that serves to certain broadly progressive trends in the flux of social airbrush out of existence an important strand of the transformation. Louis de Paor suggests that the Good contest of ideas that the book otherwise largely Friday Agreement represents a welcome attempt to successfully seeks to narrate. move beyond the constraints of orthodox and exclusive The text exhibits at least one further and altogether notions of political sovereignty. In his contribution, Piaras more important shortcoming that becomes apparent Mac Éinrí notes that the open door that has greeted when we come to consider the particular version of migrant workers from the EU Accession States indicates progress that it seems to describe and prescribe. While that the Irish state can at times behave in a liberal manner. the collection articulates a range of political perspectives, And Gerard Delanty suggests that the complex processes there is one that would seem to be privileged, not least in of globalisation are generating ‘cosmopolitan currents’ the contributions of the editor. In the essays provided that promise to dissolve the power of the Irish state and by Gerard Delanty, Robin Whitaker and Andrew Finlay, of traditional cultural nationalism and thereby enable the we encounter a distinctive account of the manner in construction of modes of Irishness that are more diverse, which the cultural and political life of contemporary complex and outward looking. Ireland are – or, more precisely, should be – evolving. The While some progressive trends are discerned, in the specific political scenario that these contributors would main the contributors to the collection tend to take a rather appear to endorse entails the gradual dissolution of the jaundiced view of recent political and cultural power traditionally exercised by the state and cultural developments in Ireland. Both Andrew Finlay and Robin nationalism as citizens increasingly come to look beyond Whitaker puncture the liberal pretensions of the peace the island to construct themselves as individuals in ever process by attesting that the Belfast Agreement actually more complex and contingent ways. The essential reinforces and reifies cultural distinctions in the six problem with this particular version of the progressive, counties and in so doing reproduces the very problems however, is that it simply fails to square with the actual to which it is meant to the solution. In addition, Gerry political realities of life either side of the Irish border. Boucher and Piaras Mac Éinrí suggest that the political The era of supposed ‘late modernity’ has engendered culture of the Irish Republic is deformed by an official outcomes rather different to those described and desired discourse marked by equivocation and cant. And Michael between the covers of Nationalism and Multiculturalism. Far Cronin draws our attention to the appalling irony that from having diminished, the power of the state and of the era of the supposed ‘knowledge society’ has been one cultural nationalism have been enhanced in recent times that has seen the systematic erosion of a public realm in – in some crucial respects at least. The persistence of a which new and critical ideas can flourish. fairly traditional rendition of what it means to be Irish In the main, Nationalism and Multiculturalism represents has not in fact prevented a growing sense of individuality a valuable addition to that growing body of work and might perhaps be said to have actually nurtured it. dedicated to a critical understanding of the increasingly The particular version of subjectivity that has become complex cultural and political realities of contemporary commonplace in Ireland over the last generation, Ireland. It is, of course, not entirely without shortcomings. however, proves rather different to the one that the As with all edited collections, the text suffers from a certain contributors to this collection would seemingly wish to unevenness of tone and quality and, more importantly, see emerge. The condition of ‘late modernity’ in Ireland from some glaring omissions. Arguably the most is one that includes an increasingly draconian state, a significant absence here is that of an authentic voice from populist nationalism that enjoys continued and the unionist tradition. In his introduction, Andrew Finlay considerable resonance and a hegemonic construction 58 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 of individuality that elevates having over being, Tok Freeland Thompson, Ireland’s Pre-Celtic consumption over citizenship. There are many moments Archaeological and Anthropological that articulate this baleful conjuncture but few as readily Heritage, 2006. Lewiston, Queenston and as the recent attempts to rebrand the Easter Rising as a Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press cultural festival. The inner logic of this process is one that will year upon year involve the performance of state power before an audience of citizens encouraged to Tok Freeland Thompson holds an MA in Folklore, a PhD conceive of actual historical events as merely further in Anthropology from Berkeley and is a Research Fellow opportunities to consume. There can be few greater at Trinity College, Dublin, and his thesis focuses on the indictments of the current iniquity of Irish cultural and way in which pan-Celtic notions of Irishness have political life than the sight of the defence forces parading subsumed and to a great extent submerged the longer past the GPO in a display of national(ist) hubris while narrative of pre-Celtic history and its continued influence some of their comrades patrol a civilian airport in County on Irish identity and culture. He seeks to redress this Clare in order to facilitate the termination of national through an interdisciplinary investigation of the pre-Celtic sovereignty by a foreign, imperial power. past, looking at work in archaeology, folklore, history, The particular and troubling manner in which a revived linguistics, and genetics in this area. Given the paucity of populist cultural nationalism and a rampant consumerist evidence available on the pre-Celts, Thompson’s findings individualism can in practice sustain one another is a are necessarily tentative, as Iain Mac Aonghuis points out process to which most of the contributors to the in the Preface, but there is enough here to convincingly collection would appear blind. There is though one ground his central hypothesis of a strong and enduring important essay that appears towards the close of the pre-Indo-European influence in Ireland and to offer an text that acknowledges the existence and dangers of this intriguing notion of ‘a new old Ireland’. particular collusion between two rather different – Treading a careful path between the ‘Irish Celt as myth’ though comparably morally bankrupt – modes of approach of James and Chapman on the one hand and subjectivity. In a characteristically insightful piece, Michael the notion of the Irish as having a solely Celtic heritage Cronin notes that the construction of self as consumer on the other, Thompson suggests that both approaches that has become so prevalent in Ireland over recent times are undermined by the available evidence and obscure acts to cast all social relations in purely instrumental terms. the reality, both of the nature of the Celts’ impact on When others are defined solely in terms of their material Ireland and the significance of pre-Celtic heritage. He (dis)advantage to us then there is the substantial danger writes engagingly on the context in which pan-Celtic ideas that the recently arrived in particular will become regarded of Irishness were formed in late 19th and early 20th not in terms of what they have to offer but rather what century Ireland; a period dominated by notions of Aryan they have to take. In this context of suspicion and supremacy, when the possibility of building a new nation competition, the circumstances exist in which a state depended on the suppression of an indigenous past profoundly individuated notion of self can and a moment when Celtic national identity ‘provided a simultaneously produce some of the more virulent forms key symbol in opposition to British influence’ and the of chauvinism. In seeking to avoid this fatal conjuncture means to unite the nation. Thompson goes on to outline of vacant consumerism and exclusive nationalism, Cronin the discourse of the Irish as Indo-European and assess eschews the liberal/late modern/postmodern version available material on the pre-Celts in allied disciplines. His of subjectivity that distracts many of his fellow engagement with folkloristics is a noteworthy attempt contributors. The cultural and political revival of Ireland to take into account endemic responses to history when will, he suggests, entail a critical examination of what it reconstructing the past, a discipline often been overlooked means to be Irish that requires an acknowledgement not by its academic neighbours. only of where we are but also of who and where we Thompson is sensitive to the legacy of colonialism in come from, an appreciation that the past is not only a Ireland, but does not hesitate to challenge the essentialism snare but a resource as well. This assertion of the of Irish identity that resulted where a more complex and importance of the collective and the historical in an age nuanced picture of Ireland’s past is at stake. He touches of the perpetual consumer and the perennial present on the political use of debates on the Celtic and pre-Celtic represents an important counterweight to some of the world in recent times, particularly in Northern Ireland; other contributions to the collection and brings a the related anecdotes are fascinating, but always held welcome, radical edge to a text that ultimately proves firmly under the academic microscope. For example, the rather less critical than it would like to have us believe. ‘Irish Celtic’ claims on the North by some Catholics and the opposing claims of Cruithin heritage and thus COLIN COULTER ancestral claims to the land by some loyalists (the Cruithin Department of Sociology, NUI Maynooth. being a pre-Celtic Irish tribe) are both challenged. With respect to the Cruithin, Thompson suggests that this is a shared heritage: there is no basis in scientific proof that Cruithin ancestry belongs to either contemporary Catholic or Protestant Irish communities in the north exclusively. In problematizing essentialist ‘one size fits all’ notions of Irish identity and offering a picture of regional Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 59 diversity in ancient Ireland, it is hard to ignore this study’s of the proudest nation-builder. Yet Thompson could potential for encouraging a more regional focus within scarcely be accused of not questioning essentialist notions contemporary Ireland, as does the work of Brian of Irishness, so one feels he can be allowed such a flight Graham. Yet Thompson’s hesitation to draw explicitly of fancy. political conclusions is appropriate in a historical text; what In conclusion then, I would highly recommend this is more clearly articulated is the suggestion that history book as an introduction to key debates in the field, both fits uneasily within essentialist discourses and is, on the in terms of content and methodology and as a largely whole, far more interesting than they would allow. It is convincing picture of the pre-Celtic past and its continuing tempting to risk the cliché that the truth is stranger than influence in Ireland. Considering the breadth of the study, fiction, but Thompson is wisely suspicious about using Thompson’s project remains clear and well-defined and the term in relation to a past which contains many voices, his argument for a reassessment of notions of Irish making it clear that the job of assessing the past and identity in the light of findings on the pre-Celtic world is investigating the way in which the past is explored are a highly persuasive one. Ireland’s Pre-Celtic Archaeological and inextricably linked. It is a self-reflexive reconstruction of Anthropological Heritage is an admirable and sincere attempt the past that stays close to the implications of the academic to give a nuanced picture of Ireland’s Celtic and pre-Celtic evidence, both an anthropology of history and a history past. of anthropology. The book’s questioning approach to each discipline VICTORIA WALTERS and their interrelationships is extremely valuable in University of Ulster (Magee) methodological terms and this is one of its main strengths; Thompson convincingly argues for the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to studying the micro- narratives of the past, and for including the findings of Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, The folklorists. Another strength is, of course, Thompson’s Anthropology of Ireland, 2006. Oxford, New fascinating, if necessarily tentative sketch of pre-Celtic York, Berg Ireland, a time when sacred sites such as Bruig na Bóinne or Newgrange were already very much in existence and the knowledge on which Druidic lore was based highly The need for a book on the anthropology of Ireland has developed. The chapter on language is particularly been acknowledged for at least two decades, as well as interesting in its suggestion that when Celts arrived, (separately or together) a comprehensive bibliography probably inhabiting coastal regions at trade gateways, the of anthropological work on Ireland. What usually ended indigenous populace may have learned Celtic words for discussion was the absence of any clear idea of what reasons of trade and commerce, largely retaining the form such a book might take. There was no question of grammar of their non-Indo-European language. So Irish attempting an anthropological equivalent of Hilary Tovey Gaelic was ‘more likely a hybrid language’, which tallies and Perry Share’s weighty volume A Sociology of Ireland. with the recent findings he describes in genetics, which There had not been enough ethnographic research to suggest that the ancestry of modern-day Irish people is sustain such a volume; it was even less clear what might more demonstrably linked to early indigenous tribes than unify it theoretically. A book based simply on local to Indo-European Celts. ethnographies was an option but carried more than the Two of the book’s weaknesses could also be seen as possibility that it would be limited and dull, if it got its strengths: firstly, it is as useful an introduction to debates published at all. At that point discussion ended with the about the Celts as it is to that about the pre-Celts, which basic question still unanswered. begs the question: how much new empirical material on Wilson and Donnan have, finally, come up with an the pre-Celts is available here? A review of discussions answer, not the only possible one, but a very good one. around the Celts provides a vital context for Thompson’s What they offer is a thematically-driven overview of main argument, but one feels that this could have been modern Ireland, north and south, that anchors itself in, outlined more briefly. Secondly, when we get to the but does not restrict itself to, the anthropological research findings on pre-Celts the reader is sometimes left on of the past 70 years. It works extremely well. Its themes tenterhooks. Considering Irish Gaelic in relation to the are well-judged, unmistakably contemporary while Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Thompson tantalises with the opening up to fresh appraisal work that is often decades suggestion of ‘a time when groups in Europe and groups old. This is not, it should be said, what the design on the in North Africa were less differentiated’ followed by a cover of the book prepares one for: the centre piece is a frustrating, ‘I will refrain from saying more.’ However, detail from a landscape painting by Hans Iten ‘Farmlands, the fact that the meaning of findings are not extended Donegal, c1929–30’, which leaves open the question of beyond reasonable supposition is in many ways a point whether is a tribute to the ancestors, a more than usually in its favour; the evidence that exists has been deftly subtle form of postmodern subversiveness, or (most handled and thoughtfully engaged with. Finally, there is a likely) a recognition of the enduring commercial value danger of replacing one layer of romanticism with of images of traditional Ireland. In any event the cover another at times; the introduction describes an old belies the content. What the authors have done is to select woman singing an ancient folk song in one of Donegal’s some very contemporary themes in terms of which they Gaeltachtaí and the author compares the woman to Ireland both draw on and discuss the individual works. The itself in a Mother Ireland metaphor that would be worthy intersections between these are often as striking as they 60 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 are unobvious. ‘Controlling Bodies’ brings together the Ben Tonra. Global Citizen and European work of Messenger, Scheper-Hughes and Saris on Republic: Irish Foreign Policy in Transition, sexuality and madness in rural Ireland, Bell and Jenkins 2007. Manchester, Manchester University on sectarian and political violence on the streets of Press Northern Ireland, and Feldman and Aretxaga on forms of nationalist resistance in the prisons. Bracketing in this way invites, of course, the question of why a sub-theme International Relations and anthropology are not natural is dealt with in one chapter rather than another. The disciplinary bedfellows, but this study by a political Riverdance phenomenon is about nothing if not bodies scientist determined to push out the narrow boundaries (lots of them and highly controlled ones at that), but it is of his discipline brings him into territory that Irish located as the lead topic in the chapter on ‘Re-presenting anthropologists will be familiar with. Tonra’s argument ‘‘Irishness’’, which also covers sports and parades, St is that if we are to understand Irish foreign policy-making Patrick’s Day parades and Orange marches (Orange we need to look beyond the major political personalities, marches as a way of re-presenting Irishness?). Economic Ireland’s geo-strategic location and the more immediate matters come up in two chapters. One is ‘Ireland’s conventional variables of political science (party politics, ‘‘Other(ing)’’ Economies’ which ranges across the themes interest groups, economic interests). In particular we need of marginality, subversion and resistance: Traveller to foreground the issue of national identity. Tonra argues economic practices, job-seeking among the unemployed that not only do national narratives play a role in foreign in Belfast, bargain-hunting across the border and the policy-making, they frame the entire process. This is a bold political use of commercial boycotts. The other chapter claim and the book sets out to prove it. If it does not is ‘Transnational and Global Ireland’, though a key quite deliver on its promise, it is well-structured, well- discussion in the chapter is the racism generated or written, engaging and stimulating, and also indicates where revealed by economically-based immigration. ‘Frontier we need to go from here. Tales and the Politics of Emplacement’ covers structures The book begins with a chapter setting out its of local community (Peace on Inveresk gets major constructivist approach. This is followed by four chapters attention), ‘telling’ in Northern Ireland and identities in that cover what Tonra sees as Ireland’s four national the border region. In addition, specific ethnographic narratives: the ‘Irish Nation’, the ‘Global Citizen’, the studies and themes get discussed in an early chapter ‘European Republic’ and the ‘Anglo-American State’. The ‘Locating the Anthropology of Ireland’ and (less following two chapters deal with the policy-making satisfactorily) in the final one ‘Ethnographic Experience process. There are then three chapters, each dealing with and Engagement in the Anthropology of Ireland’. a particular policy area – Europe, security and neutrality, A different selection of themes would have fore- and the war on Iraq – and looking at the narratives that grounded different studies and made for a different, and shaped the policy outcome. The final chapter summarises perhaps better, North-South balance. It is certainly the and further extends the argument. case that some of the studies listed in the 36-page Despite its evident strengths the book left this reader bibliography are more important contributions to Irish with questions in two key areas central to the study. One anthropology than their brief (or no) mention in the text concerns the analysis of the narratives. Anyone who tracks suggests. But some degree of unevenness was inevitable Irish political discourses will be familiar with these in a book that had to reconcile conflicting imperatives in narratives. What we needed was in-depth analysis and this just 190 pages of text. Ultimately what is important is Tonra does not really provide. There was scope for it: a that the themes selected strike a chord, permit engagement good part of each of the narrative chapters is taken up with a wide range of studies and sustain an analysis and by straight political and cultural history. A rigorously discussion that is consistently high. This is certainly the case structuralist approach would have replaced the history and it makes for at once a very good introduction to Irish with analysis of the structures and logics of discourse in anthropology and to contemporary Ireland. Teachers of the here and now. There are also difficulties with Tonra’s courses on Irish anthropology and anthropology students linear, bounded, approach to identifying narratives. contemplating postgraduate research in Ireland will find Rather than conceiving the narratives as separate, each it, quite simply, indispensable. with its own intellectual pedigree, they could be thought of as part of a complex discursive field with distinctions, JOSEPH RUANE, yes, but also intersections, crossovers and borrowings. University College Cork To take one example, while it is certainly the case that ‘revisionism’ prepared the ground for the Anglo- American state narrative of the 1990s, at the end of the 1980s revisionism played a central role in advancing the narrative of the ‘European Republic’. There is also need to pay more attention to commonalities across the narratives: in particular, it would not be difficult to point to nationalist principles operating at the heart of all of these narratives. A different set of questions arise from Tonra’s stress on the public context of the foreign policy-making Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 61 process and his use of public debates and be too stark an opposition, but there may be too much pronouncements for evidence for the discourses shaping pragmatic, short-term calculating going on for particular policy. How much do those publicly-circulating national narratives to actually frame the discussion. In any discourses actually shape policy? The key decisions in event, before we can wholeheartedly embrace Tonra’s foreign policy-making are made at private meetings vision of the process, we need much more information between ministers and senior civil servants. What are the on what elites say and do away from the public gaze. narratives that come into play in these settings and what Despite these qualifications this is a well-conceived, relationship, if any, do they bear to those circulating in imaginative book and Irish anthropologists will read it the public domain? Is it possible that what weighs most with profit. in elite discussions are precisely those variables whose importance Tonra seeks to downplay – pragmatic, short- JOSEPH RUANE term calculations of geo-strategic and economic interests University College Cork – and that national narratives come in subsequently to legitimate decisions made on other grounds? That may

News Miscellany

Conference Reports

Critical Issues in Anthropological Research: A Postgraduate Symposium, Queen’s University Belfast 5 December 2006

Noomi Mozard, QUB

On 5 December 2006 the Anthropological Association and performance in Ireland and elsewhere constitute a of Ireland organised a postgraduate symposium hosted core of postgraduate research on issues such as music by the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s and identity in Ulster-Scots communities; music making University Belfast. This day was dedicated to in East Bavaria; and interaction and exchange processes postgraduates in anthropology who are currently based within the online electronic music scene. In the tea breaks in Ireland and the aim was to bring together anthropology between sessions and during lunch many took the students from institutions across the island to facilitate opportunity to exchange ideas and share experiences. The an exchange of research experiences and debate about event concluded with papers that highlighted research practices. Both Masters and PhD students reconciliation and remembrance through an examination participated in the event providing a diversity of levels of the removal of Australian Aboriginal children from and types of research being conducted. While some their families; language use as a space of negotiation in students presented a section from a ready or nearly ready Northern Irish politics; the role of sport in South African thesis, others discussed the research proposal and reconciliation processes; and the place of memory and fieldwork issues that lay ahead of them. Participating remembrance among Palestinian refugees in Syria. students came from the National University of Ireland While some would say it can be a lonely time during Maynooth, Trinity College Dublin, Queen’s University postgraduate studies, this event provided an opportunity Belfast and the City University of New York. to meet and get to know some of the peers in the field. The day proved to be an exciting opportunity to As the event showcased a wide range of topics and become acquainted with some of the new approaches to the subject of anthropology that are anthropological work currently taking place in Ireland. currently being researched by postgraduates, it was a day The day was divided into four sessions. The first, entitled which helped many to move forward, to develop their ‘Institutions, Models and Discourses’, boasted topics own work and to keep their motivation going. ranging from understandings of mental health in Ireland Great enthusiasm was shown by students for the day to the problem of fieldwork when looking at sexual to continue and this groundswell of support must surely expression among the elderly, to political and ean the symposium will have to become an annual event! environmental discourses surrounding the plans for the modification of the port of Cituadella, Menorca. In the second session topics for discussion included the Irish mushroom industry; the Polish minority in Belfast; and the development of the Belfast Gaeltacht Quarter. Music 62 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

‘Séamas Ó Síocháin, Bill Kavanagh, Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan in serious mood in Bristol’

Report on the 9th EASA Biennial Conference and the 105th Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2006

Mark Maguire Department of Anthropology NUI Maynooth Bristol 2006 flows that transcend borders – were not confined to the work of the keynote speaker. Plenaries includes sessions The 9th EASA Biennial Conference took place in Bristol on colonial legacies, markets and culture, diffusion and from 18 to 21 September 2006. Over 900 people trans-nationalism. Indeed, if one were to take the latter attended over the 4 days, marking it off as a substantial term as a keyword around which a cluster of other terms triumph in terms of the key criteria for success – getting revolve – diaspora, migration, multiculturalism and people together. As a location, Bristol was appropriate assimilation – then Europe in a trans-national world was to the theme of the conference, Europe and the World. The arguably the dominant theme of the entire event. In all city, with its maritime history, was one of the key port there were 98 workshops of which fully 23 dealt with routes that connected Europe to the rest of the world migration in some way and 15 directly addressed this from the 14th century onwards: a history of connections, issue. Other dominant themes included, not surprisingly, movements of material culture and ideas and, on a darker topics within the field of medical anthropology, the note, slavery. Empire was the topic of the keynote anthropology of violence and terror, and address by Jean Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder in the anthropological understandings of Europe itself. Post-colony: Is Europe Evolving Toward Africa?’ While As with the last EASA Biennial Conference in Vienna the violence, disorder and the laws brought by European two years previously, the contribution of anthropologists imperialism were in the background of her analysis, based in Irish departments and graduates of those Comaroff was essentially asking a provocative question: departments was significant. From NUI Maynooth, how are we to explain the coincidence of disorder with Lawrence Taylor presented a paper on the moral an obsession with legalities in post-colonial contexts? In geography of the US/Mexico border; Mark Maguire answering this she was looking to Africa in particular for presented on Vietnamese refugees in Ireland; and new forms of global thought and theoretical endeavours. graduate students Chiara Garattini, Chiara Dallavalle and Such provocations – to think historically and James Quinn gave papers on Dublin’s cemetery comparatively, and to pay attention to connections and landscape, political discourse in contemporary Sicily, and Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 63 post-colonial change, respectively. From Queen’s enough to be virtually non-existent in some places and at University Belfast, Jonathan Skinner presented on some moments and strong enough to kill at others? The ‘Creeping Changes and Careful Observation’, a paper question is, of course, not one that is specific to a region on the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, and convened but rather one that cuts to the heart of research on violence a workshop on applied anthropology; Maruška Svašek and the State. convened a workshop on emotional attachments in a world of movement; and, Rosellen Roche presented a paper on the inclusion of young people in policy making San José 2006 in Northern Ireland. From the University of Limerick, Albert Doja presented a paper on ‘Identity The 105th Annual Meetings of the American Schismogenesis in Post-Communist Turbulence’. And, Anthropological Association took place from 15 to 19 from University College Dublin, Lorenzo Canas Bottos November in San José, California. The event attracted presented on ‘Old Colony Mennonites’, which looked the usual galaxy of ‘stars’ drawn from US universities: at Mennonite settlements in Bolivia and Argentina, as well Renato Rosaldo, Akil Gupta, Anna Tsing, Emily Martin, as convening a workshop on secularism and human George E. Marcus, Paul Rabinow, and Nancy Scheper- emancipation. Trinity College was also represented: Adam Hughes, to name but a few. Other well-known figures Drazin presented a paper on home making among Irish- also were involved in some fashion, such as Judith Butler Romanians in Dublin and, with Sabina Stan from Dublin and Donna Haraway. However, it is worth recording that City University, convened a workshop on moral journeys 2006 was the year in which Clifford Geertz died and the (Sabina presented a paper on the Romanian health care AAA meeting was without a single panel or event to services). Andrew Finlay presented a paper on the culture remember his work. The only public comments made concept and the peace process in Northern Ireland. about this curious silence where those by his former Some familiar faces were also to be found among the student Paul Rabinow, who remarked that Geertz had presenters: David O’Kane, now at the Centre of West ‘set anthropology back by 20 years, some would say’. African Studies in the University of Birmingham, Perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves of William presented a paper on bio-politics and the developmental Roseberry’s comments about Geertz in Anthropologies and state in Eritrea; and Stuart McLean, now at the University Histories where, passim, he noted that when academics of Minnesota, presented on anthropology as and members of the public reach to the bookshelf for comparative metaphysics. an anthropologist’s work it is invariable Geertz that their Reviewing such a large event is always a problem, with hand rests on. the sheer number of workshops and the much beloved As with the EASA conference in Bristol, migration, system of ‘dipping in and out’. However, to give some violence and terror, and medical anthropology were flavour of the content of the workshops, I attended the amongst the dominant themes. Perhaps this is full session on ‘Violence and the State’. The papers ranged unsurprising as the theme of the conference was Critical in topic from reintegration in post-war Bosnia to border Intersections/Dangerous Issues. There was an impressive control and from counterinsurgency in Kashmir to contribution by anthropologists based in Irish sorcery and death squads in Mozambique. The departments and by graduates of those departments. anthropological contribution to the understanding of From NUI Maynooth alone, Jamie Saris presented a state violence is still in its infancy, with few major paper on ‘Culture at the Intersection of Theory and State publications evident prior to the 1990s. As a younger sub- Practice’; Rob Moore presented on ‘Purloined Letters’; field it lacks integration in terms of critical evaluation of and, Mark Maguire on ‘Belonging Trans-nationally’, while methodologies and in terms of theoretical dialogue graduate students Emma Heffernan presented a paper between colleagues. This was evident, for example, when based on her research into prostitution in Dublin, and one listened to papers that could loosely be described as Francisco Arqueros spoke about Marxism and labour. research on memories of violence. The principal There was also representation from Queens University methodology employed was one of narrative-based and from Trinity College. research. While many of the researchers deserve credit It will be of interest to readers to note a very large for gathering together the often-painful memories of number of anthropologists carrying out fieldwork in survivors of state violence, the notoriously difficult terrain Ireland who presented at or attended the conference. At of memory and imagination must always be walked the invitation of Veve Lele (Denison University) a short upon carefully – to paraphrase Peter Berger, the past is get-together was held and those involved ranged from malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection the familiar to some anthropologists new to Irish Studies: interprets and re-explains it. Anna Hoare, Helen Kelly, Helena Wulff (Stockholm One of the outstanding papers contributed to the University), Diana Shandy (Macalester College), Liam D. workshop on ‘Violence and the State’ was by Madeleine Murphy (California State University), Angèle Smith Reeves from Cambridge. Reeves presented on border (University of Northern British Columbia), Elise guards and everyday violence in the Ferhgna Valley, which McCarthy (Rice University), and Tom Taaffe. Considering connects Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and spoke of both the breath of interest in Ireland represented by this group, a casual violence and a curious absence of the state. The it would seem appropriate that the AAI include them in question asked is familiar to all who study violence and correspondence and event information and, perhaps, the state and particularly those who carry out their appropriate that in the future the AAA host a workshop fieldwork on borders: how is it that state can be weak on the anthropology of Ireland. 64 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Those familiar with the AAA meetings will know that Johns Hopkins made an outstanding contribution on it is difficult if not impossible to capture the flavor of sexual assault victims as research subjects, while in the latter these conferences due to the size and scope of the events. category once could have hardly asked for better than To give some sense of the work that one may have Aaron Goodfellow’s ‘I’ll Die F**king: Life, Death, and encountered I attended one full workshop ‘Sexing Methamphetamine’, which, with its meditation on Anthropology’, which one would have thought would narcotic temporality, addiction and love, was one of the have been packed to capacity – sadly for the organizers most original papers I’ve ever heard. the session ran parallel to ‘The Anthropology of the All in all, both the EASA and AAA conferences of Orgasm’. The papers in this session were with out 2006 boasted interesting anthropological work and exception of an extremely high quality and flowed from important contributions by anthropologists from Ireland. meditations on research ethics and methods (what If any lack could be noted then it would be that of discussant, Lawrence Cohen termed ‘research-ability’) to interdisciplinary research and a general focus on the public provocative new research. In the former category of role of anthropology. paper, those on ‘research-ability’, Sameena Mulla of Eamonn McLoughlin,

The Globe in a Glass Case: Ethnographic Collections in Ireland

National Museum of Ireland as opposed to curatorial knowledge threatened the curators’ ability to uphold the value of collecting and The National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, conserving. Dr Anne O’Dowd, National Museum of Dublin, was the venue for the Anthropology Association Ireland, Folklife Division, looked at the history of the of Ireland’s 2007 Conference ‘The Globe in a Glass Case: Museum’s Irish folklife collection. The origins of the Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’ held on 11th and 12th collection can be found mainly in the work of Swedish May. As the National Museum prepares an exhibition of scholars who came to Ireland in the 1930s, which was its important collection of Ethnographic material, it was supported by Dr Adolf Maher, the National Museum now an appropriate time to reflect on the issues of Ireland’s first Director. The ambiguous response by surrounding displays of other cultures at a moment in local officials in the west of Ireland to the Museum’s first history when Ireland itself is starting to look out on the exhibition of Irish Folklife in 1937 reflected changing world. attitudes as the nation began a process of modernisation. In his opening address Dr Patrick Wallace, Director The next set of papers looked at the origins of of the National Museum of Ireland, outlined the ethnographic collections in Ireland. Rachel Hand, Museum’s plan for an exhibition of ethnographic material University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and which he said would be central to a major future expansion Anthropology, has recently catalogued the Pacific, of facilities at Collins Barracks. How to display the African and Americas collections of the National collection would require careful consideration and advice, Museum of Ireland. Comprising some 12,500 artefacts he stressed, as it would be «very easy to get it wrong». today, the material that formed the founding collections The problems facing ethnographic collections in of the Science and Art Museum, later the National European museums today was the subject of Professor Museum, came from older institutions such as the Royal Gosewijn van Beek’s keynote address ‘The Comfort of Dublin Society and Trinity College Dublin. In researching Things’. The good and the bad news was that the old the origins of the collections she has gathered new ethnographic museums are on the way out. The information on individual collectors and explorers, and legitimacy and relevance of their displays is under scrutiny. new material that may have been collected on the second What to do with these «guilty» collections is the dilemma and third Cook voyages has come to light. Winifred facing museum curators and managers as they confront Glover discussed the ethnographic collection of the increasing social and political pressure to re-invent Ulster Museum and its origins in the Belfast Natural themselves. However, museums could use this History and Philosophical Society founded in 1921. The opportunity to seek alternative approaches to their Society requested that ‘travellers, merchants, sea captains collections as they look for a solution to this legitimacy and Army and Navy officers’ should bring back conundrum. While this was to be welcomed as a positive interesting objects from around the world. The Ulster development, Professor van Beek warned against a Museum’s approach to interpreting this collection was «process of aestheticization» where ethnographic objects to emphasize the local connections to the material. In the become art pieces devoid of historical context. discussion afterwards it was noted that the exchange Dr Anthony D Buckley, Ulster Folk and Transport relationship between the traveller/explorer and the native Museum, touched upon the rise of manageralism in was not always one sided but was very often defined by museums in the first paper on Saturday morning. He ideas of status and reciprocity. Dr Bill Hart, University noted that curatorship was confined not just to museum of Ulster, Coleraine, looked at ethnographic material sent professionals but that every town had its own curators to Dublin from Africa in 1822 by Brian O’Beirne, an Irish of local knowledge who enriched the lives of army surgeon, that is now part of the National Museum communities. The move towards administrative expertise of Ireland’s collection. In his paper Dr Hart sought to Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 65 explain how the O’Beirne material that was sent from a members as they attempted to retrieve and restore cultural colony in Sierra Leone in west Africa was actually knowledge. In ‘Archives and Artefacts: Collecting, collected from ‘more civilized’ states hundreds of miles Collections and Ethnography’, Dr Diarmud Ó Giolláin, away in the interior of the continent rather than the colony University College Dublin, discussed how the ambiguity itself. He suggested that the material sent back to Ireland of the ‘national- popular’ concept in the creation of a reflected the prejudices of O’Beirne and his national literature allowed verbal artistic traditions to contemporaries. transcend the social conditions of the peasantry from The relationship of ethnographic material to their whom they were collected. The conference ended with ‘source’ communities was explored by of Dr Laura Peers, a lively exchange of views in a discussion session chaired Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. In her paper, Dr Peers by Pat Cooke of UCD. looked at the potential of historic collections from North America to affect the lives of source community

Forthcoming Conferences

Present plans are to hold a 21st Anniversary Conference ‘Journeys of Expressions VI: Diaspora Community of the Anthropological Association of Ireland on 20– Festivals and Tourism’, 4–6 October 2007, York, UK. 21 March 2008. The title is: ‘Disseminations: The Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Impact of Anthropological Research’. Details will be Metropolitan University. www.tourism-culture.com posted on the AAI web-site. Call for Panel/Session Applications for ICAES 2008. The ‘Global Photographies: Histories, Theories, 16th International Congress of Anthropological & Practices’, Wednesday-Friday, 27–29 June 2007, IADT. Ethnological Sciences on the Theme of ‘Humanity, www.globalphotographies.ie. [email protected] Development and Cultural Diversity’ will take place from July 15–23, 2008, in Kunming, China. ‘Things that Move: The Material Worlds of Tourism and Travel’, 19–23 July 2007, Leeds, UK. Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University.

AAI News

The AGM of the Association took place on 11 May in journal production and distribution, and conferences the National Museum of Ireland (Collins Barracks) in were the major items on each agenda. conjunction with the AAI Conference on Ethnographic Collections. The following are the committee members 2. A post-graduate symposium was held in QUB on elected. 5 December 2006 with 25 people attending and 17 research papers were presented. Chairperson: Fiona Magowan Vice-Chairperson: Mark Maguire 3. The conference ‘The Globe in a Glass Case: Secretary: Michael Roberts Ethnographic Collections in Ireland’ commences Membership Secretary: Jaime Rollins McColgan immediately after this AGM. The conference Treasurer: Francisco Arqueros organisation, under the stewardship of Séamas Ó Public Relations Officer: Attracta Brownlee Síocháin, has produced a great result. An impressive cadre Web Co-ordinator: Adam Drazin of speakers from home and abroad are here to give of Journal Editor: Séamas Ó Síocháin their expertise. Ordinary Members: Jonathan Skinner; Andrew Finlay; Chandana Mathur 4. A 21st anniversary conference proposed for March Co-opted Members: Anne Nolan; Sheila Fitzgerald 2008 titled ‘Disseminations: The Impact of Anthropological Research’ will be described in detail later in this meeting by the Chairperson in her Address. Secretary’s Report to 2007 AGM 5. Membership has increased steadily with fees 1. The AAI Committee met in June and October 2006 reviewed and approved since AGM 2006. The at TCD and again in February 2007 at QUB with good membership period has changed from mid-year to start attendance on each occasion. Issues of membership, in January until December to facilitate the update of 66 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 records. We hope that members will renew quickly, ideally 1.1 Visibility Nationally and Internationally through bank standing-orders. Maintaining current members and increasing membership will be achieved While we are now a larger committee than previously, only if AAI can provide services that are critical to the and sterling efforts are being made on the part of needs of its membership. We would invite members to committee members to attract additional subscribers, the keep the committee informed of their requirements. With membership of the society has remained very much the all of this in mind, the website is now well developed same with numbers being low. This is despite the fact that and the journal has been revamped with a new look and our visibility has increased internationally with Attracta as well as its scholarly articles, it includes a range of current Brownlee as PR officer who has done a great job at issues for debate, news items from anthropology in building up a database of contacts across Europe, Ireland and conferences updates. The inclusion of other America and Australia. So, we recognise that we must be forms of membership, such as corporate membership outward looking, not only to the anthropological for large public and private organisations, is intended to academy but also more broadly to the public and to other draw in a larger body of members. This in turn will place businesses and organisations who draw upon more service requirements on AAI. However, under the anthropology and anthropologists in their activities. While strong stewardship of our Chairperson, the future looks we have increased our visibility, bigger organisation and bright and exciting. larger conferences inevitably draw scholars away from smaller ones partly due to time and funding. This has 6. The Journal committee has produced and impacted upon how we view our membership. Rather distributed three editions of the Irish Journal of Anthropology than relying upon members to renew or to join at AAI in 2006, one of which was the 2005 volume. Our new conferences we have now actively targeted the larger presentation and style of journal has been very well conferences by promoting AAI and IJA at them. These received and commented on. The journal content, as efforts include the presence of the association at last year’s always, is excellent and is endeavouring to reach out to a EASA in Bristol where the AAI ran a stall at which broad range of interests. Members’ contributions will members could join or buy the journal. It proved to be determine journal contents. Please keep sending in your modestly successful in attracting new recruits and work for inclusion. Congratulations to the journal encouraging past members to renew and was a focal committee for their work in this regard. point for catching up with colleagues!

7. The AAI website is now much more developed and 1.2 AAI Online Profile suitable for AAI use through the work of Adam Drazin in particular. We are keen that our members should feel Another area in which the AAI profile has continued to able to contribute to the site with issues of develop is on the website which is instrumental to our anthropological importance. Please continue to make existence. Many thanks are due to Adam Drazin for his your contributions in this regard. maintenance and updating of the website information. It now includes details of past conferences and offers 8. I propose a vote of thanks to all the out-going the potential to disseminate postgraduate research as committee, most of whom will form the incoming students can place information and images on it relating committee, for their hard work during 2006/07. Many to the their fieldwork. A number of students have already thanks to you all for making my job, as Secretary, more availed of this great opportunity. productive and enjoyable. Another aspect of disseminating postgraduate research is the potential for the website to post abstracts Michael Roberts of recently completed PhD and MA student theses as Hon. Sec. 2006/07 well as information on where postgraduates go after their degree and what jobs they enter. We would encourage you to tell your students about Report of the AAI Chairperson, Fiona this and ask them to submit materials to Adam for the Magowan, at the 2007 AGM website as the more information that is made available the more likely it will be that others will submit their work as well. As chair this year and a committee member for two years We have got a little further this year with the potential before that I have some sense of the progression of AAI for electronic payments online through the Paypal system over the past 3 years. which Queen’s School of History and Anthropology has agreed to underwrite financially. Key Issues in 2006-07: Some key issues that continue to confront us are: 1.3 Postgraduate Involvement

o Visibility nationally and internationally The third issue of postgraduate involvement is one that o Membership has seen some improvement over the past three years. o The Involvement of Postgraduates Critically, anthropology in Ireland depends upon the motivation and encouragement of postgraduate students north and south a number of whom are entailed in its Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 67 future and should be at the heart of its efforts. In March 2. Future Conferences: Disseminations: The 2005, it was Larry Taylor who first proposed that a one- Impact of Anthropology day postgraduate conference should be organised. I am pleased to say that this came to fruition in December 2006 As I mentioned earlier, one of the key issues we are faced organised by myself and Chandana Mathur and hosted with is making anthropology relevant to the broader by Queen’s. The symposium entitled Critical Issues in public. In response to this, it was envisaged that a Anthropological Research: was designed to conference should be held to celebrate the 21st anniversary · Enhance postgraduate student awareness of and of the society next year. The conference was originally potential for new research synergies in north-south scheduled for September this year, but due to funding collaboration. applications, it is now anticipated that it will be held in · Encourage greater discussion between February 2008. (See conference attachment). postgraduate research students working in the same or related disciplines in the north and south of Ireland. 3. Potential Future Agendas for AAI Develop postgraduate student skills in writing and presenting for an audience of peers from other Finally, in thinking about the internal agenda for AAI, universities. some key questions for us to think about for the If postgraduate students are to consider being part Association for the future are: of the Association they need to feel not only that they belong to a dynamic and critically engaged body of 3.1 Organisational Collaborations scholars but also that they have a role to play in it. This symposium was one attempt to give students the How does the AAI relate to other anthropology platform to present their key issues and to get feedback organisations or networks? Some of you may be aware from their peers. While a large number of postgraduate of the new European initiative networking 5 research topics focus on Ireland north and south as one anthropology departments through the Bologna process. might expect, there are also postgraduates working in Maynooth, have joined with Barcelona, Ljubljana, Menorca, East Bavaria, Aboriginal Australia, South Africa Stockholm and Vienna for a European joint-MA and Palestine. As it can be a lonely time during programme in Anthropology. Next academic year, postgraduate studies, and postgraduates across the island Queen’s will begin a joint anthropology MA programme seldom get the opportunity to meet one another, this with the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, event offered this possibility. Some commented that it China. was a day that helped them to move forward, develop What should AAI’s role be in collaborating with these their own work and keep their motivation going. The types of network if any, and how might the AAI support shown for it means it is hoped that it will become encourage international and overseas postgraduate an annual event. students involved in such programmes? Committee members have also made some efforts this year to bring the Association to the attention of their 3.2 Research Leadership postgraduate students in classes. Queen’s has seen an increase in the number of postgraduate students joining What should the role of the Association be in providing as a result and a number of Maynooth and Dublin research leadership for its members and for younger postgraduates continue to support the AAI, although with scholars? each new cohort this encouragement must be ongoing. Earlier this year the Association was asked to It would be good to see students from these universities comment on and contribute to the develop of a also joining with students from other disciplines and document on key priorities for research in the social institutions for interdisciplinary events or conferences in sciences in Ireland produced by the Royal Irish Academy the future. Committee for Social Sciences. I would like to see a postgraduate network initiated The final document that was produced after by AAI although chaired and run by postgraduates as this consultation with all the disciplines and some feedback kind of initiative needs to be taken up by the from the AAI highlighted the following themes as key postgraduates themselves. Potentially the next annual research priorities in Ireland: postgraduate symposium could be arranged to discuss this possibility and it would allow postgraduates to talk Migration about the things that they would like to see developed Irish identities within their own network. This network could expand Inequality and public policy postgraduate horizons with the potential for them to Health and healthcare in Ireland interact with other postgraduate wings of other Children and Young people organisations. I believe that there are plans currently within Families and Family life the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) to create Border research a global postgraduate network which has significant Democracy possibilities for students in Ireland to connect with their Religion peers in other parts of the world. Crime Urbanisation, Economic Growth and Social Change 68 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

It was recognised that the support for these themes Apart from the communications to members and should be based on the need to integrate north-south and keeping you up to date with what is happening in the international dimensions to the research agenda through society, Anne has been responsible for developing a a comparative orientation and interdisciplinarity. database of members that has set us up for the future to With these research priorities and initiatives in mind, access members’ records and details easily. We are very how can we build upon our research strengths and links grateful to her for the input she has given not only in this as an Association, rather than just as individuals to increase regard but for her input at all of the committee and opportunities for postgraduates and staff through conference meetings and I am sure you would like to join collaborative, cross-border and international research with me in showing your appreciation for all her efforts. grants?

Outgoing Committee Members

Before we move on to the elections, I would like to thank Anne Nolan for all her hard work over the past year.

News from Members, Colleagues, Institutions

Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, grown up, mainly through the language she used. Anna University of Ulster (Magee) Connors, an intern from Milwaukee, spoke of her Native American heritage and shared stories from the Native American tradition. Mary Delargy Cliona O Carroll visited from University College Cork to speak on the Northside Folklife project. She gave a The Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages (AICH)has held fascinating insight into how the project brought together a number of events over the last few months with both staff from within the university and members of the staff and postgraduate students organising a varied wider community in Cork to develop a project which programme. collected local experiences from Cork’s Northside, Among recent events were a seminar entitled ‘from preserved these historical insights and at the same time Third Party to First Party’. This was jointly organised by provided training skills which people, many of whom Jill Strauss, a PhD student at AICH and The Junction, a were long term unemployed, could use to improve their centre for community relations and peace building chances of finding employment. resources. The seminar explored the role of the third A special day for PhD students was organised by party in conflict mediation predominantly in the Northern Professor Ullrich Kockel from AICH. Entitled Ireland context. Among the speakers were: Anne Crilly ‘Interactive Fieldwork’, it examined different ways of producer of ‘Mother Ireland’ who has recently made a collecting information from communities being studied, documentary on Kathleen Thompson, shot in Derry in such as participant observation. It provided a number 1971 and whose death has never been fully investigated; of useful insights into different ways of conducting and Richard Moore who was blinded by a rubber bullet research as well as some examples of how not to at the age of ten and who recently met the soldier who approach the subject! fired at him. The final event before Easter was a series of three ‘Belonging’ was an event for International Women’s papers from the postgraduate students programme. Two Day organised by Mary Delargy. Staff at the Academy of these were presented by PhD students from AICH. discussed what gave them their own sense of belonging, Micheál MacAmhlai explored Dark Tourism in the either through family experiences or stories and songs Northern Ireland context and John Sherry looked at early which define their culture. Mary Delargy began the social networks in the Ulster-Scots community in evening by sharing her own upbringing in Derry, an eighteenth-century Ulster. The third speaker was Johanne upbringing which defined its Irishness through the Devlin Trew from Queen’s University, who is researching Waltons programme on Radio Éireann with its advice Narratives of Migration and Return in communities from to listeners ‘If you feel like singing, do sing an Irish song’ both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. and the fairy stories of Sinéad De Valera. Maria Angela Forthcoming events include the inaugural lecture by Ferrario shared her experiences from the north of Italy the Academy’s Director Professor Máiréad Nic Craith where women are traditionally presented with bouquets on ‘Intangible Cultural Heritages, the challenge for of mimosa flowers as a symbol of friendship to mark Europe’, a workshop on Joseph Beuys as anthropologist, International Women’s Day. Angelika Dietz, a PhD and a seminar on Lithuanian Emigrants. student, spoke of her sense of identity, which, rather than being a German national identity, was specifically linked to the particular area of Germany in which she had Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 69

Queen’s University, School of History and The Institute of Irish Studies seminar series for the Anthropology: Anthropological Studies News spring semester was entitled Histories of Culture including papers on the 1939 World Fair in New York (Prof. Mike Cronin), the Irish Sweepstakes (Dr. Marie Coleman), and International Symposia the Belfast confetti of the nineteen twenties (Dr. Alan Parkinson). We have also hosted conferences on The Institute for Cognition and Culture which is part of ‘Protestant Politics in Ireland’ and ‘Women’s History’. Anthropological Studies is holding an International As part of its regular seminar series Anthropology Symposium ‘Past Minds: Evolution, Cognition, and hosted ten seminars under the rubric of ‘Being human: History’ from 25–26 May 2007. The symposium will Perspectives from anthropology, philosophy, and address the relevance of cognitive and evolutionary elsewhere.’ The rationale, as organiser Dr. Lisette approaches to the study of history. Josephides outlined, was to engage philosophical and In Anthropology, Dr. Maruška Svašek organised an anthropological perspectives in a fruitful debate, by interdisciplinary series of three Arts and Humanities considering the possibility of retrieving a universal idea Research Council funded symposia from 2006–07. The of the human. Dr. Vassos Argyros (Hull) set the scene by highlights of the first symposium on 11–12 May 2006 putting the question in historical context in his seminar included Loretta Baldassar’s paper on ‘The role of return entitled ‘Reflections on anthropology’s «anthropos»’. Dr. visits in transnational caregiving’ (Anthropology Department, Kai Kresse (Berlin) followed with an examination of the University of Western Australia) and Zlatko Skrbis’s Swahili concept of ‘utu’ as used by a Muslim poet to analysis of ‘Transnational families: theorizing migration, emotions embrace all humanity. A similar religious openness was and belonging’ (Department of Sociology, University of described by Dr Hwee-San Tan (UCD) in her research Queensland). In the second symposium, 17–18 on Buddhism. In its actions of hosting musical November 2006, Colin Wayne Leach from the competitions recording ‘sounds of the human world’, a Department of Psychology, University of Sussex probed Buddhist sect attracted contestants from many religions ‘Migrant emotions in the context of changing status positions’, while and as far afield as Brazil, Korea, France, Germany, Johanne Devlin Trew from the Centre for Migration Australia and Canada. Also ethnomusicologist, Dr. Suzel Studies and the School of History and Anthropology at Reily (Queen’s) engaged dialogue about the forms of Queen’s brought emotional analysis closer to home with street music to be found in Brazil and Belfast. Hinduism her paper on ‘Migration and Return: Issues of identity and was the focus of Dr. Kala Shreen’s seminar (University belonging amongst Protestants from NI’. The final symposium of Madras and Charles Wallace Fellow in Anthropology) on 9–10 February 2007, focusing on emotion in the arts, on the role of temples in the Nattukottai Chettier included a presentation by a former Queen’s University community. Dr. Andrew Irving (Manchester), whose Charles Wallace Fellow in Anthropology, Sameera Maiti research explores how the world appears to people close from the University of Lucknow, who discussed ‘The price to death, showed poignant pictures and told moving of progress: Dying arts among the Karen of the Andaman Islands’; stories of people living with HIV/AIDS in Kampala and the final contribution was Frances Lloyd’s consideration New York. Despite its subject matter, his seminar of ‘Emotional agency and transnational contemporary art practices’ revealed a beauty in the world, human creativity and even (Kingston University London). The series was brought freedom. Mining for humanity in the harsher landscape to a close with a lively and exuberant performance piece of American slavery, Professor Catherine Clinton’s given by Ghanaian Art performer George Hughes from (Queen’s) tellingly-titled seminar, ‘Being Inhuman: US the State University of New York, Buffalo, who blew Slavery’s Invisible Scars and 21st century Legacies’, the audience away as he improvised a large artwork on reminded us that more than time is needed to erase his impressions of Belfast whilst singing and dancing, to racially-based traumas. Despite her equally show that ‘What you perceive is what you conceive’. The uncompromising title (‘«I don’t think of them as human artwork can now be viewed on the wall of beings»: Building and Overcoming Boundaries in the Anthropology’s Performance Room in 13 University British Immigration and Asylum System’), Dr. Alex Hall, Square. a Queen’s Anthropology PhD now at Durham University, gave a nuanced account of the relationship Public Lectures and Seminar Series between asylum seekers and workers at a holding centre. Finally, at opposite ends of the life cycle, Professor Signe The School of History and Anthropology has held a Howell (Oslo) described transnational adoption in an number of lectures and research events involving the increasingly globalized world, while Dr. Heonik Kwon public. Emeritus Professor Ruth Finnegan (Open (Edinburgh) discussed the rights of the dead as a Hegelian University) chaired the panel discussion of the British dilemma in the opening of the Korean War mass graves. Academy public lecture series, ‘Who’s Creating Knowledge? The challenge of non-university Exhibitions researchers’, in which Professor Hastings Donnan has been involved. The discussants were Professor Ronald Dr. Kala Shreen the 2007 Charles Wallace Fellow in Barnett, (University of London), Dr. Mike Heyworth Anthropology, curated a photo exhibition ‘Viewing (Director, British Council for Archaeology) and Professor Hinduism’, which was organized by Professor Hastings Dorothy Noyes, (Ohio State University). Donnan. The exhibition was arranged to coincide with the Wiles Lectures being delivered this year by Professor 70 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

Christopher Bayly, Vere Harmsworth Professor of space in Belfast. Imperial and Naval History, on ‘Liberalism at Large: This ESRC project developed out of previous South Asia and Britain, c. 1800 to 1947’. The exhibition research looking at the use of symbols in Northern Ireland was opened on 15 May and ran until 25 May in the foyer after the 1998 Multi-Party Agreement. As a result of that of the University’s Queen’s Film Theatre. work, staff at the Institute have been conducting research Given the interest that has been shown in research on on the use of flags in both ‘official’ and ‘popular’ contexts, South Asia by different schools and departments, this and a report was recently published following a survey exhibition was conceived with a view to drawing in a of flags on all the main roads in the Northern Ireland. range of academics, students and the general public. Why The Institute has just received funding from the Office a photo exhibition? Why not a conventional lecture or of the First and Deputy First Minister of the Northern paper presentation? Visualization has seen an ever- Ireland government to undertake a second survey this expanding application in different fields including social summer. sciences. If one were to use Fred Barnard’s (1927) phrase Staff at the Institute have also been undertaking work «One picture is worth ten thousand words», then this with Belfast City Council to evaluate the good relations visual presentation of Hinduism was equivalent to a paper outcomes of the annual St Patrick’s Day Carnival in the comprising three hundred and fifty thousand words. It city. An evaluation of the 2006 event was published last gave viewers an insight into the Hindu pantheon of gods year and a follow-up evaluation will be made available and goddesses, such as Brahma, Shiva and Shakthi and shortly. We have been developing research looking at St their avatars (reincarnated transformations) as well as Patrick’s Day on a global scale, exploring the way Ireland’s some of the age-old temple towers, tanks, courtyards national day is used around the world in so many different and sculptures built and sculpted between the seventh and contexts. nineteenth centuries in Tamilnadu, South India. The Dr Kris Brown has been working with Healing images also gave a glimpse of the public and private Through Remembering, exploring a ‘living memorial forms of Hindu rituals and brought to light the grandeur museum’ of the conflict and PhD student Elisabetta and colour seen in Hindu practices such as elaborate street Viggiani has finished compiling a database of processions and Hindu beliefs in animal worship and contemporary memorials in Belfast which has been abishekams (idol bathing). It also captured the sacred placed on the CAIN web site: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ objects that are housed in Hindu temples such as vahana viggiani/ (vehicle for transporting the temple deity) and those found in Hindu homes such as incense dispenser, bell and oil Postgraduate Workshops and Seminars lamp. Some of the photographs were taken in sites which have been given the status of World Heritage Sites by In Anthropology, postgraduate students have been UNESCO. treated to a varied selection of workshops presented by external speakers. Dr Iain Edgar (Durham University) Research Projects delivered a half-day workshop on ‘Applied Dreaming and Anthropology’ focusing on research techniques that deal As part of an Economic and Social Research Council with the conscious and unconscious mind. Students (ESRC) funded project on senses of risk in moving produced submissions for the Anthropology in Action through the city of Belfast held in Anthropology, two journal edited by Dr. Skinner. Dr Stephanie Schwander- focus groups were organised by Professor Hastings Sievers (University College London) and Dr. Garry Donnan, Dr. Fiona Magowan and Anne Montgomery. Marvin (University of Roehampton) gave a half-day They brought together representatives from the postgraduate workshop on Academics as Consultants Department for Regional Development, Roads Service; and Expert Witnesses that aimed to encourage sensitivity the Blind Centre Northern Ireland; the Royal National to one’s space and place as a researcher, as well as the Institute for the Deaf; Belfast City Council; Disability potential and impact of research. They offered a diverse groups; bus companies and walking and cycle groups. and useful range of research scenarios and consultancy The first focus group examined how different levels of cases for pre-fieldwork students in considering how to risk are evaluated by each of these groups at a range of avoid compromising situations, and advised post- junctions and intersections. The second focus group fieldwork students about how to develop their portfolio considered the relationship between the senses and of skills and expertise into the private and legal realms. synaesthesia in experiencing risk in different areas of the Both of these half-day workshops were organised and city. A forthcoming symposium will examine concepts co-delivered by Dr. Jonathan Skinner. of shared space and road ownership by these user groups. Dr. Kala Shreen gave a workshop on Kolam design The Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University for Dr. Maruška Svašek’s students in the Anthropology Belfast, has been developing an interdisciplinary research of Art. Dr. Svašek also arranged for a Music scholar programme around issues of identity and community trained in Indian Classical Music (singing and sarangi), through understandings of Irishness and Britishness. Marianne Svašek, who lectures at Rotterdam Under the Economic and Social Research Council’s Conservatory, to give an afternoon workshop in (ESRC) Identity and Social Action programme historians Dhrupad singing and two lectures on Drhupad-style Prof. Sean Connolly and Dr Gill McIntosh have been Classical Music to Ethnomusicology and Anthropology working with anthropologists Dr Dominic Bryan and students. Dr John Nagle exploring the negotiated nature of civic The Institute for Cognition and Culture holds a weekly Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 71 postgraduate seminar that gives a general introduction propose research problems arising from their proposed for postgraduate students to methodological issues in projects as topics for think-tank sessions. cross-cultural research related to the field of cognition and culture. These help students to plan comparative Details of all the above mentioned research projects cultural research and realize their research projects in an and reports are available at: optimal way. It also runs weekly think-tanks on Tuesdays http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ from 2–3pm to debate new methods, problems, and AnthropologicalStudies/ discoveries as these emerge both from work going on http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ within the Institute and from the wider research InstituteofCognitionCulture/ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ community. Some think-tanks involve both staff and schools/IrishStudies/Research/CurrentResearch/ students in round-table discussions. Students may also

Research and Awards

Adam Drazin, ‘Intel and the RTP Conduct Anthropological The aim of my thesis is to explore the production of Study on the Impact of Access to Transportation Needs for Older discourse, identity and value within the context of the People’ Serbian black metal (BM) music scene. The origins of BM can be traced to a small but active music scene in The Rural Transport Programme (RTP) supports small Bergen, Norway. During the early 1990s a group of transport companies and community initiatives in 32 musicians, fascinated with Nordic landscapes, locations across Ireland, which help people with misanthropy and a ‘volkish’ utilisation of Satanism transportation needs for health, shopping or social life inflected through Nordic mythology, gained international in rural areas. Many companies use minibuses weekly that notoriety when one of its members burned down the travel along regular routes, going door-to-door through historic Fantoft Stave church. Several BM musicians were the country lanes, picking up a regular clientele, who then also arrested following a series of murders, and collect pensions, do shopping and meet up together in photographs of a former vocalist’s suicide were used as local towns. Each bus route tends to develop its own an album cover. Although the scale of these events has social group, character and spirit. not been replicated anywhere else, there has been a huge To better understand what impact access to growth in the popularity of BM music throughout the transportation might have on the health and well-being world. of older people in Ireland, the Rural Transport An interest in the power structures enabled through Programme (RTP) and Intel’s Digital Health Group, the production of identity and the degree to which sound based in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, are conducting collaborative relates to social structure influenced my initial selection ethnographic research. The research is focusing on the of Serbia as a location for fieldwork. During my experience of transport in the lives of people over 65 in fieldwork in Beograd I lived with a musician who plays rural areas, and is being led by 3 ethnographers (two with several elite Serbian black metal bands. Through anthropologists and one sociologist). conversations, interviews and by becoming part of the Intel’s Digital Health Group was established in 2004. ‘scene’ I managed to gain an insight into and appreciation At the end of 2005, the Intel Digital Health Group created of the depth and complexity of the beliefs and practices a Health Research and Innovation group in Ireland that of a tight-knit neo-tribal community bound together consists of designers, engineers and social scientists through tight networks of affiliation and a shared sense working together to develop a deep and integrated of communitas. underststanding people/practice, technology and There is/was in Europe a common misconception business needs across the continuum of care. The social of Serbia as an ‘intransigent maverick state’, and in the science team has been conducting ethnographic work same vein black metal is often regarded and regards itself exploring the ageing process, examining the material as a deviant yet misunderstood genre. Therefore my culture of the home, sociability, memory and mobility. research shall address issues of representation that are Health Research and Innovation helped create the TRIL contingent upon an analysis of tropes of Centre (Technology Research for Independent Living), misrepresentation and their capacity to produce layers looking at the role of technology in addressing problems of meaning that are subscribed to and contested in a around falls, social connectivity and cognitive health. strategic manner. An example would be the prestige and cultural capital arising out of an individual’s or group’s proximity to real and imagined forms of violence. David Murphy, a post-graduate student in NUI Maynooth, received in 2006 a Hume Scholarship for Ph.D. Mark Maguire, A. Jamie Saris (Project Director), both research entitled ‘Hate Couture: Sub-cultural from NUI Maynooth, and the artist and photographer Fundamentalism Within Extreme Music Scenes’. David Maeve Hickey have been awarded a research grant is working under the supervision of Dr Jamie Saris and from the Clinton Institute in University College Dublin has recently returned from fieldwork in Serbia. He writes: for a project titled: The American-Irish: A Visual Ethnography. 72 Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007

The aim of the project is to record in an open-ended and Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, artistic way the lives of US citizens who have migrated Stanford University. The scholarship will fund a research to Ireland. The project will draw together an international project titled: Biometrics, Immigration and the State. This network of scholars, artists and practitioners to inform project examines international moves towards using its progress: the anthropologist George E. Marcus, the biometric technologies to regulate immigration as they photographer Tanya Kiang, and sociologist Rebecca are currently manifesting themselves in Ireland and across Chiyoko King Ó Riain. Further information may be Europe. The project resonates with an important found at http://www.ucd.ie/amerstud/ international literature that has emerged in recent years ResearchProjects/ around the topic of ‘biopower’. By studying the roll-out of biometric technologies the project will be able to examine how specific state actors, stakeholders and Mark Maguire, NUI Maynooth, has been awarded the imagined communities are affected by and implicated in 2007/2008 Fulbright Scholarship for Advanced Research the production of new forms of governmentality. and University Lecturing Award in anthropology at the

Recent Publications

Civilizing Ireland: Ethnography, Cartography, Translation

Irish Academic Press 2007 present the Ordnance Survey of Ireland continues to map Stiofán Ó Cadhla and pursue raw information, in Cork under the aegis of the Central Statistics Office, unaware of their long lost What is the Ordnance Survey, what does it mean and cousins the folklorists and ethnologists. One of the aims where did it come from? It was established in 1791 with of this work is to retrace this genealogy. its headquarters in the Tower of London under the Master This works takes an overview of the ethnographic or General of the British Board of Ordnance. Ordnance folkloristic aspects of the work of the nineteenth-century Survey is a historic amalgam of two key terms in the surveyors in Ireland. It is the first time that this has been history of ideas and the governance of knowledge. Used done from within the perspective of the discipline of since the eighteenth century in combination with the term folklore and ethnology, itself an offspring of the earlier survey it remains the name for the three official map- nineteenth-century ethnological and folkloristic ideas that making bodies of Britain and Ireland. The first term informed the survey. It was perhaps Translations the play ordnance or ordinance is derived from the French written by Brian Friel that attracted attention to the ordenance and the Latin ordinâre meaning to order, ordain, bilingual and cross-cultural aspects of the survey. In the arrange, regulate or rule. From the fourteenth century it play he depicts the renowned Irish scholar John referred to militaristic warlike provisions or the decrees O’Donovan anglicizing the Irish language names. These of a sovereign. Ordnance came to refer specifically to names were enshrined legally in the imperial, and later the the artillery corps of the army and the British military national, government. Although driven by patriotic remained in the survey’s Dublin headquarters until sentiment places like Port Laoise and Dún Laoghaire independence in 1922. opted to have names in Irish by plebiscite no Irish language Survey means to oversee, the French surveoir combines place-name had legal status in Ireland until 2004. the stem sur or over and veoir to see, the Latin vidçre or The book treats the three related methods of video. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had cartography, ethnography and translation to re-enliven the sense of a view from a commanding position, an the interpretative processes that led to the re-imagining inspection or an examination. A survey was also a of Ireland in the English language. A central trope of this comprehensive mental view, a written description or the interpretation was that the Irish language and culture, measurement of a tract of ground. It is a coordination classified as folklore rather than found or discovered or of hand, eye and mind. The contemporary sense refers recovered, was in fact archaic, barbaric and uncivilized. to any systematic collection or analysis of data, attitudes The introduction of translation as a stage in the process or opinions. In the first half of the nineteenth century the of interpretation, and not merely a natural aspect of British Ordnance Survey of Ireland combined all of these cultural process, remaps the mapmakers themselves and senses from ordering to authoring, from inspection to relocates their work as part of the self-conscious civilizing measurement and from voyaging to voyeurism. Not desire of the Empire. In this mission there are diverse or unlike a nineteenth-century Guinness Book of Records it heterogeneous cultural and political forces at work and records that Peggy Frizell was a public character and an the result is not always the desired one. idiot or that a woman in Aghagallon had twenty-four children. It notes that Fanny Marlin of the village of Curran was a great fighter and a hermaphrodite. At Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007 73

NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Submission of Material Authors are encouraged to submit items for the IJA. Articles, which may be in English or Irish, should be original and should not be under consideration elsewhere. IJA is a refereed journal and articles submitted will be assessed by readers for their suitability.

Articles for consideration should be sent to the Editor or Associate Editor as follows:

Séamas Ó Síocháin, Editor, Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland. [email protected]

Fiona Magowan, Associate Editor, School of History and Anthropology, The Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, N. Ireland. [email protected]

Books for review and completed reviews should be sent to the Reviews Editors: Chandana Mathur, Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]; or to Máiréad Nic Craith, Director, Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster (Magee), Aberfoyle House, Northland Road, Derry/Londonderry, BT48 7JA. [email protected]

Other material (conference and research reports, news, advertisements, letters etc.) should be sent to: Anne Nolan, c/o Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth. [email protected]

Presentation Articles should be in the region of 4000 words. Included should be the author’s name and academic affiliation, the title and a short abstract of no more than 100 words. All contributions should be clearly typed on one side of A4 paper, double-spaced and with wide margins throughout (including notes and bibliographical references). Two manuscript copies should be submitted and a 3.5" disk or electronic copy in IBM PC format readable in MsWord. Receipt of a submission will be acknowledged, and articles will be processed only after receipt of both hardcopy and electronic copies.

The following points should be observed:

Notes should be endnotes and should be kept to a minimum; they should be presented in a typed list at the end of the article and double-spaced.

Bibliographical references in the body of the text should be given in parentheses in standard author-date form: (Lee and Devore 1968: 236). A complete list of references cited, arranged alphabetically by author’s surname, should be typed at the end of the article and adhere to the following style:

Kelleher, William F., 2003. The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Benavides, O. Hugo, 2004. ‘Anthropology’s Native ‘‘Conundrum’’: Uneven Histories and Developments’, Critique of Anthropology, 24(2), 159–78.

Curtis Jr., L.P. 1987, ‘Stopping the Hunt, 1881–1882: An Aspect of the Irish Land War’, in C.H.E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 349–402.

Subheadings should be typed flush left.

Quotations. Single inverted commas should be used except for quotations within quotations, which should have double inverted commas. Quotations of more than about 60 words should be indented and typed without inverted commas. Spellings. British English (not American English) spelling should be used in English articles except in quoted material, which should follow the original. Use -ise not -ize word endings. Irish Journal of Anthropology Volume 10 (1) 2007