TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, UPDATED AND EXPANDED NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics MENTAL ILLNESS IN RURAL IRELAND UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON Universityof California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Universityof California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2001 byThe Regents of the Universityof California Library of Congress CataloginginPublicationData Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Saints, scholars, andschizophrenics: mental illness in rural Ireland/ Nancy Scheper-Hughes. — [20th anniversary ed., rev. and expanded], p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-22480-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mental illness —Ireland —Clochan. 2. Clochan (Ireland) —Social life and customs —20th century. 3. National characteristics, Irish. I. Title. RC450.I732 C637 2001 —dc2i 00-060379 Printedinthe United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 The paper usedin this publication is both acid-free and totallychlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). To the memory of HORTENSE B. POWDERMAKE R teacher, friend, and tribal elder, and in hopeful celebration of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. and to all the rebellious and "scandalous" youths of the new Ireland and to the liberation theology-inspired priests ofMaynooth CONTENTS List of Illustrations IX List of Tables xi Preface to the Y2000 Edition xiii Preface to the 1982 Paperback Edition xv Acknowledgments xxiii Prologue to the Original 1977 Edition xxvii PROLOGUE Writing Ireland 2 INTRODUCTION Mental Illness and Irish Culture 58 CHAPTER ONE In Space and in Time 76 CHAPTER TWO The People Left Behind 94 CHAPTER THREE Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics 134 CHAPTER FOUR Brothers, Sisters, and Other Lovers: Marriage, Celibacy, and Relations Between the Sexes 172 CHAPTER F I V E Problems in Rural Irish Socialization 222 CHAPTER S I X "Breeding Breaks Out in the Eye of the Cat": Sex Roles, Birth Order, and the Irish Double Bind 262 CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS Toward a Responsive Human Community 296 EPILOGUE Crediting An Clochdn 308 Vll APPENDICES A. TAT Card Descriptions and Sample Picture 329 B. Draw-a-Person Test Responses 331 C. TAT Responses: "]immy Hennesy" 332 D. Tables 335 Notes 34 Glossary of Irish Terms and Place Names 536 Bibliography 363! Index 38 3 Vlll CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS [Photographs not credited are by the author] Sheep fair, An Clochdn, 1974 5 Main street, An Clochdn, 1999 6 Sheep grazing, 1999 7 The Tailor and Ansty (Anonymous; a gift from the private collection of Victory Johnson) 8 Nellie's shop, 1999 14 Stone cottage in ruins, 1999 15 Returning from the creamery, 1974 (Anonymous; Le Cheile Community Center Archives, An Clochdn) 16 The creamery closed, 1999 ij Rusty milk tin, 1999 17 The blacksmith's forge abandoned, 1999 ij Mackerel fishing (Courtesy ofEithne Nic Gearailt, An Clochdn, date unknown) 18 Mackerel fishing at mid-twentieth century (Anonymous; Le Cheile Community Center Archives, An Clochdn) 19 The empty quay, 1999 19 Irish visa and passport photo of Nancy and the three "babas," 1974 20 Sketch of the stone carving ofCrom Dubh (by Eileen Hout) 28 Neighbor at turf fire in Ballynalacken, 1999 43 Two generations—alone together. Outside An Clochdn, 1979. (photo by Kevin Stack) 44 Tailor Dean of An Clochdn 320 x Euge Moriarty with the infant Nate, 1974, and letter from his wife, Nora 322 Nancy Scheper-Hughes 328 L I S T OF ILLUSTRATIONS LIST OF TABLES j. Vital Statistics in Ballybran, 1970-1974 98 2. Domestic Cycles in Ballybran Household Composition 99 3. Contrasts in Rural and Urban Sex Ratios in European Countries, 1947-1962 101 4. Percentage Distribution of County Kerry Farm Population by Sex and Age 102 5. Percentage Distribution of Farmers over Fifty, according to Successor Status in County Kerry 103 6. Village Occupations Hierarchy Scale 120 7. International Data on Anxiety Levels, i960 128 8. Psychiatric Hospitalization, 1955 and 1965, in Selected Countries 137 9. Irish Psychiatric Hospital Census, 1971, Marital Status and Diagnosis 139 10. Age Standardized Rates, per 10,000 Adults, of First Admission to Mental Hospitals by Religion and Ethnicity 141 11. Rates of First Admission to Mental Hospitals in New York State, per 100,000 Total Population, 1911 144 12. Average Annual Standardized Rates of White First Admissions to All Hospitals for Mental Illness in New York State, 1949-1951, per 100,000 Population by Nativity and Parentage 144 13. Conjugal vs. Consanguineal Themes on TAT Card 2 197 14. Values Hierarchy Scale 209 15. Selected Themes on TAT Card 13MF (Man with Partially Nude Woman) 216 XI 16. Selected Themes on TAT Card 4 (Woman Clutching Shoulders of Man) 218 ly. Household Composition by Number of Children 230 18. Male Psychiatric Patients 268 19. Female Psychiatric Patients 269 20. Childhood Deaths (Ages One Month to Ten Years, 19281969) 274 APPENDIX D: TABLES D~i Achievement-Anomie Themes D-2 Competence-Inadequacy Themes D-3 Control Themes Responsibility- D- 4 Guilt Themes D-5 Nurturance- Deprivation Themes D—6 Affiliation- Isolation Themes D-y Postponed Marriage in Selected Countries, 1930s and 1960s D-8 Permanent Celibacy by Sex in Selected Countries, 1930s and 1960s D-g Marital Fertility Rate, 1960-1964, in Selected Countries Xll L I S T OF TABLES PREFACE TO THE Y 2OOO EDITION WHEN THE E D I T O R S at University of California Press contacted me about their intention of preparing a twentieth anniversary edition of Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, their call coincided with an expected trip to Ireland in the summer of 1999 following a brief season of fieldwork in South Africa. I had planned to spend a few weeks in Dublin with our son, Nathanael, who was studying Irish theater at Trinity College (see Hughes 1999) and, after that, to head out to the west of Ireland for several more weeks. I had been for some time negotiating a return to "Ballybran." After witnessing some remarkable experiences of reconciliation in the new South Africa (see Scheper-Hughes 1999b), I had high hopes for a "negotiated set- tlement" between the anthropologist and the villagers of An Clochan, the true Irish name of the village that I took the liberty of naming Ballybran. The return was shorter and more traumatic than expected. In the new prologue, Writing Ireland, I comment on some striking changes, especially the remarkable prosperity of Ireland today in the wake of globalization and the effect, on community life, cultural identity, and national consciousness, of Ireland's membership in the European Union. The epilogue, Crediting An Clochan, tells the story of my naive and aborted efforts at peacemaking and of my hurried, even comical, departure from the village, sad as it was for me and for those in the village who were intimidated into silence and complicity against their own better judgment. I find myself revisiting ques- tions about anthropological ethics and the politics and poetics of "writing culture" and especially about the difficulties of balancing one's responsibil- ity to honest ethnography with care and respect for the people who shared a part of their lives and their secrets with me. XI11 PREFACE TO THE 1982 PAPERBACK EDITION O N E S O U R C E of ethnographic data Description is revelation. It is neither frequently absent in anthropological The thing described, nor false facsimile. analysis is the response of the people studied to the ethnographer's It is an artificial thing that exists, In its own seeming, plainly visible, description and interpretation of the meaning of their lives. 1 For the most Yet not too closely the double of our lives Intenser than any actual life part, anthropologists (as well as the could be. communities studied) have been — WALLACE STEVENS shielded from any local repercussions and aftershocks resulting from publication because we have traditionally worked in what were until recently "exotic" cultures and among preliterate peoples. In most cases the "natives" never knew what had been said about them, their patterns of kinship and marriage, their sexual practices, their beliefs and values or—God help us! —their basic personality structures. The anthropologist might, as a professional courtesy, send a village headman or a mestizo mayordomo a copy of the published ethnography, which was often proudly displayed in the village. Its contents, however, normally remained as mysterious as the private life of the "masked" white man, that professional lone stranger, who would periodically reappear (sometimes bearing gifts) and then just as inexplicably vanish (not infrequently at the start of the rainy season). Within this traditional fieldwork paradigm our once colonized sub- jects remain disempowered and mute. Such local invisibility (and hence invulnerability) has not been the fate of those who have studied "modern" cultures, and in particular that most lit- erate and self-reflexive people, the rural Irish. Irish reaction to, analysis of, NOTE : Some portions of this text were originally presentedas the Margaret MeadAward address at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Societyfor Applied Anthropology, Edinburgh, Scotland, and later appearedas "Cui Bonum —For Whose Good? A Dialogue withSir Raymond Firth" in Human Organization 40, no. 4 (1981): 371-372. and commentary on anthropological writing generally has been swift, fre- quently harsh, and (at least for the ethnographer) most unsettling. 2 Although, for example, Conrad Arensberg's The Irish Countryman (1937) was well received in the Republic as a sympathetic portrait of rural lives, the Irish did not like the image of themselves as an appropriate subject for anthropological inquiry. Hence, it was not too long before an enormously popular book by the Anglo-Irish novelist Honor Tracy (The Straight and Narrow Path, 1956) appeared and parodied the anthropologist protagonist in an Irish village as a naive, bumbling, and pompous fool of uncertain moral principles, given to inept interpretations of local custom, and prone to the perpetration of malicious gossip.