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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Information about membership can be found on the AAI web-site: www.anthropologyireland.org 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