Irish Ethnologies

PREFACE

It is with great pleasure that I greet the publication in English of the texts of Ethnologie française vol. 41, no. 2 (2011), which appeared in French with the title Irlande après Arensberg et Ó Duilearga, under the editorship of Diarmuid Ó Giolláin. It is obvious that English-speakers should have access to this rich collection of texts that illuminates in a very useful way the complex history and actuality of Ireland and demonstrates the maturity of Irish anthropology. On several occasions, the editors of special issues of Ethnologie française dedicated to a particular country have noted, once the work was completed, that they had brought together and published an original collection of texts, and decided—as with Ireland—to publish it in the original language or in English. This was the case notably with Croatia¹ and with Israel, where the English versions were published online on the website of CAIRN international.² Ethnologie française’s strategy of dedicating one of its four annual numbers to the anthropology of a foreign country—introduced by the editor in 1994—has been welcomed as innovative and useful.

Jean Cuisenier refounded the journal in 1971, two years after he took over the directorship of the Centre d’ethnologie française, a laboratory of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, the national research body founded in 1939 and subject to the Ministry of Education and Research). This was associated with the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires (MNATP), founded in 1937 by Georges Henri Rivière, who directed it for decades. Cuisenier embodied a new generation of university-trained ethnologists, and he wished to ensure the continuity of the team that with Rivière had established ethnology as a scientific discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. A new generation of professional ethnologists within the CNRS succeeded these scholars, and this new generation came from various research backgrounds: geography, folklore, ethnography, and others. To signify the break with the past and the modernity that Cuisenier wished to embody, the house journal was an instrument of choice.

ANTECEDENTS

A scholarly journal is a powerful means of making research productive, especially when the relevant institutional structures are weak. The various bulletins, almanacs, and other periodicals that sometimes linked and sometimes separated French and colonial folklore thus played a very important role between the end of the nineteenth century and the founding of the MNATP. Because of the dominance of physical anthropology, the scholars who worked on France were barely present in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, founded in 1859 by the surgeon Paul Broca, who pioneered a scientific anthropology. In contrast, such scholars were to be found during the great period of folklore studies at the end of the nineteenth century, at the dîners de ma mère l’Oye, which were soirées hosted by Paul Sébillot. A Breton specialist and a tireless promoter of folklore studies, Sébillot founded the Société des traditions populaires, which from 1882 published a journal of the same name that continued until 1919. The works of folklorists, essentially compilations of oral literature, songs, or popular beliefs, were published in remarkable collections, such as those of Pierre Saintyves (the pseudonym of Émile Nourry), or in scholarly bulletins with a limited distribution.

Research in exotic—especially Africanist—anthropology began to be organized at the Institut d’ethnologie du Trocadéro. This was founded in 1925 by Marcel Mauss and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and from 1928 directed by Paul Rivet, the future founder of the Musée de l’Homme. In contrast, for the ethnology of France there were only the scholarly societies until the MNATP was founded in 1937.

After the transformations of World War II, the expansion of the project of the MNATP from the middle of the 1950s marked the moment of creation of a scientific ethnology of France, and it was towards this that collection, research, and publication converged. Le folklore paysan edited by Rivière lasted but a year (1938), with the war intervening, and it was only in 1947 that a regular publication reappeared, Le mois d’ethnographie française. The change of terminology is interesting, even if the content remained the same: folklore was replaced by ethnography, the new word also appearing in the name of the society that published it, the Société d’ethnographie française. As the museum project gained speed, Rivière thought it useful to replace the journal with one that would carry the name of the museum, Arts et traditions populaires, the first such journal to receive a financial contribution from the CNRS. It reflected the work of the researchers collaborating with Rivière in the museum, and it published works pioneering a modern ethnology, even if still under the name of folklore. Besides leading articles, the journal gave space to various reports and published a yearly bibliography of French ethnology.

With the arrival of Jean Cuisenier, the first significant change was linguistic: the society became the Société d’ethnologie française and the journal changed its name in 1971 to Ethnologie française. It was a question of getting rid of every trace of an outdated past. The move from ethnography to ethnology was also towards a more scientific construction of the field. The ethnology of the MNATP was, if truth be told, also scientific, and indeed it was generally recognized that it was the crucible for the constitution of the field as a scientific domain. However, it had until then limited its purview to so-called traditional society, the peasantry, which was disappearing in the 1960s and was being replaced by industrial agriculture. Moreover, the theoretical and methodological approaches of this ethnology had been strongly influenced by its links with prehistory and notably by the works of André Leroi-Gourhan, and it concentrated above all on the study of techniques and traditional knowledge, rejecting social and symbolic aspects under the term customs and beliefs. Cuisenier had completely different perspectives and ambitions: he wanted to establish an ethnology that was problematized, that was more theoretical.

THE RUPTURE

It was a great shock for the members of Société d’ethnologie française who were subscribers to the journal to find in their hands the first issue of Ethnologie française, the content of which broke strongly with Arts et traditions populaires. From the pale blue of the cover in light cardboard to the stiffness of the white glossy paper, there was a complete paring down, with only the title of the journal given. The choice of characters and the formatting expressed a marked esthetic concern, a reflection of the richness and the dignity of a new science. Very quickly the journal opened up to the new opportunities of an ethnology of the real world, abandoning the rural milieu and the technical culture of the kind that had been studied until then, and looking into politics, the family, urban life, the body, and so on.

Initially publishing miscellanies, from 1975 the journal published thematic issues, sometimes from seminars, sometimes specially prepared by one or more invited editors, as is the case today. Special issues were dedicated to the AIDS epidemic, tourism, extreme sports, and the body, but also to the anthropology of school or of the creation of art, or to questions linked to nationality and nationalism and to plural memories.

The themes often covered under classical titles were renewed by new perspectives, whether dealing with popular religious practices, foodways, ritual, domestic culture, or consumption. Also covered were topical issues that reflected new fields of interest for working-class or bourgeois culture, urban anthropology, kinship, or were questions raised by transformations in French society, such as on immigration, regionalism, racism, or tourism. Ethnologie française thus accompanied and galvanized the quiet revolution in the domain of the ethnology of France.

THE FOREIGN ISSUES

Ethnologie française initially restricted itself to the geographical field that was France and the French-speaking countries, gradually staking its claim as a journal dedicated to the ethnology of modernity and publishing articles by French and by foreign authors that crossed national boundaries. Its content reflected the preoccupations of anthropologists gathered in international professional bodies, such as SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore) or EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists). But with the move towards European integration, the journal desired to insist on its Europeanist vocation, which Cuisenier in fact did in 1994. It was a question of systematically getting to know the ethnological and anthropological production of other European countries. This preoccupation reflected questions concerning the construction of Europe: But what about the specificity of each country in the construction of a common identity? The answer was in the articles that the journal published every year, which tried to understand this vast and complex space from an anthropological perspective. In launching this project, a beginning was made in comparing the cultures and societies of Europe with a view to elucidating French preoccupations. Since then, every year Ethnologie française dedicates one of its four issues to the ethnology of another European country so that the journal’s readers may better understand the themes and approaches that inform the discipline in that country.

The principle was to give carte blanche (in the context of a friendly discussion with the editorial board) to an ethnologist/anthropologist from the country to put together a selection taking stock of the field with contributions from some of the most significant scholars. In this way French readers would gain an insight into the discipline as practiced in that country and the authors would have the possibility of making their work known to a Francophone readership.³ Of course, the denominations of the discipline, the field it covers, and the methods it uses are varied and often linked to the history of science and to the history of the formation of each nation-state. From Italian demologia to German Kultur- or Sozialwissenschaft, it is possible to measure the similarities and differences of these perspectives. Over the years, Ethnologie française has thus accumulated a remarkable corpus of texts that investigates the evolution of the discipline and its different understandings across Europe. At the beginning of the 2000s, the journal continued to look at the effects that were already evident of European construction on the discipline. One issue (vol. 38, no. 4, 2008) hence proposed to deal with the question by offering a reflection on Europe and Its Ethnologies. It followed the debates that had taken place among the French professional associations that were trying to look at themselves in the context of the new European landscape. What about Europeanist anthropology, what about the discipline, whether situated within or outside of Europe? What are the consequences of the expansion of the EU to the former communist countries? What are the practices of ethnologists with an Anglo-American training compared to the supporters of an ethnology that is sometimes close to folklore? How are the new disciplinary boundaries reshaped with the development of the cognitive sciences? Is it possible and is it desirable to construct common European training and research in European ethnology? How does one measure the results of political transformations on societies and cultures?

The texts demand an interdisciplinary look at European societies more than an ethnology of the self in dialogue with an ethnology of the other. It is in this international context that Ethnologie française, whose institutional foundations were shaken fifteen years ago, has developed.

INSTITUTIONAL TURBULENCE

From the end of the twentieth century it had been clear that the MNATP, which published the journal in partnership with the CNRS, was going to close in its present incarnation and to change its vocation and its location, moving from its site in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. For its part, the Centre d’ethnologie française, gradually losing its researchers, wound up operations in the year 2000 (Segalen 2005). As the editorial content of the journal became richer than ever, with an important portfolio of articles and of projects, its institutional supports collapsed.

It was then important to find a radically new solution, to break the journal’s moorings with its foundational site and institutions, which had failed at any rate. Cuisenier took various steps to find new institutional supports and offices to house the journal. An agreement was signed with the Maison de l’archéologie et de l’ethnologie of the Université Paris Nanterre, a member of the network of the Maisons des sciences de l’homme (MSH) of the CNRS. Thus the journal was installed in its new premises in December 2005 and has continued to benefit from the support of CNRS through the assistance of the personnel, but, sadly, there is now only one half-time secretary. After I left the CNRS and became a professor at Université Paris Nanterre in 1996, I took over the editorship, continuing our good relations with Presses universitaires de France (PUF), our publisher since 1998. Since 2007 the journal, through PUF, has been accessible on the CAIRN website⁴ on a pay-per-view basis. In 2010, CAIRN opened an international platform. The journal continues to be published by the Société d’ethnologie française, which owns the title.

HOW FAR DOES EUROPE GO?

Our geographic definition of Europe has been very flexible. We began with issues—ordered purely by scientific opportunity—dealing with the countries of Western and Northern Europe, and the fall of the Iron Curtain and the ending of the communist regimes obviously widened the field. We then dedicated issues to the former communist countries Hungary and Poland, to Mediterranean Europe, and to the Balkans. In 2014, the journal treated Turkey, drawing the European field towards newer boundaries, then in 2015 a number was dedicated to Israel, a country that spans three continents and the anthropology of which is not well known in France, since most work appears in Hebrew or in English. The year 2016 saw the publication of a new issue on Italy, this time focusing on changes in the family; in 2017 it will be the turn of Albania, and then Lithuania in 2018.

IRELAND

As far as Ireland is concerned, the project was suggested to us by Sylvie Muller, translator and ethnologist specializing in Ireland, and she eventually translated the articles. For French anthropologists, and for me in particular, there were three classics in the teaching of the discipline that I had read with passion and that dealt with villages, kinship, and religion: those by Arensberg and Kimball (1940), Fox (1978), and Cresswell (1969). If the issue helps to take stock of the history of the discipline, covering both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the various articles testify to the openness of Irish anthropology to a host of contemporary topics: memory, postcolonial museums, environmental problems, public spaces, the still-burning question of political identity and religion. If Diarmuid Ó Giolláin has decided to republish these texts in this volume, it is because the issues they address are still relevant. Unlike other disciplines, the results of anthropological research do not quickly become outdated. We hope that the readers who discover these texts will take as much pleasure out of reading them as the journal did in publishing them.

The issue was prepared in 2008, at the very end of the Celtic Tiger. This is why, as a symbol, we chose for the cover a photograph of a young woman dancing in the famous Riverdance show, eloquently illustrating an Irish paradox: the association of an ancient music and dance heritage with very contemporary marketing formulas. It was published in 2011 at the height of the economic and monetary crisis, so that the cover seemed at odds with the reality, but thus the image today perhaps recovers its symbolic value in an Ireland that seems to be renewing its economic growth.

Martine Segalen

Professor Emerita, Université Paris Nanterre

Editor, Ethnologie française

September 29, 2015

NOTES

1. Jasna Čapo and Valentina Gulin Zrnić, eds., Hrvatska Svakodnevica: Etnografije vremena i prostora (Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2013).

2. Edited by Fran Markowicz and Nir Avieli.

3. Italy began the series in 1994, and volumes have appeared, or will appear, dedicated to Romania (1995), Russia (1996), Germany (1997), Portugal (1999), Spain (2000), Bulgaria (2001), Switzerland (2002), Finland (2003), Ukraine (2004), Greece (2005), Hungary (2006), Great Britain (2007), Sweden (2008), Norway (2009), Poland (2010), Ireland (2011), Slovenia (2012), Croatia (2013), Turkey (2014), Israel (2015), Italy (2016), Albania (2017), and Lithuania (2018).

4. See http://www.cairn.info/revue-ethnologie-francaise.htm. The issues have been accessible online since 2000; all the issues since 1971 have been digitized on JSTOR.

REFERENCES

Arensberg, Conrad, and Solon T. Kimball. 1940. Family and Community in Ireland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cresswell, Robert. 1969. Une communauté rurale de l’Irlande. Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie.

Fox, Robin, 1978. The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Segalen, Martine. 2005. Vie d’un musée. Paris: Stock.

Introduction

Irish Ethnologies

DIARMUID Ó GIOLLÁIN

Since 1994, the journal Ethnologie française has devoted one of its four annual numbers to the ethnology of another country. All but one of the essays that appeared in the special 2011 number (vol. 41, no. 2) dedicated to Ireland, Irlande après Arensberg et Ó Duilearga, appear here in the original English with minor changes and updating. Only one (chapter 10 herein), that of Sylvie Muller (who also translated the other chapters into French for the journal issue), was originally written in French, and I have translated it into English here. It is appropriate that this original collection of essays should be made available in English, and it has been possible to do so thanks to Martine Segalen, editor of Ethnologie française, who has also graciously written a preface explaining how the project has come about.

The essays cover various aspects of Irish ethnology. The term ethnology is used here in consonance with the title of the French journal and with the notion of European ethnology, which has become the common denomination for a broad field that brings ethnographically based disciplinary traditions such as folklore and folklife studies together with Europeanist anthropology. Although the differences between these various disciplinary approaches may at times be very great, it is instructive nevertheless to see their common origins in responses to modern social and cultural changes from the eighteenth century onwards and their problematics formulated under the influences of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism.

NATIVES, SETTLERS, TRAVELERS

The historic name for the island of Ireland is Éire. Never a part of the Roman Empire, it nevertheless absorbed, mostly via Britain, Roman influences—notably Christianity. A sense of national identity, associated with a common literary language and myths of a common Gaelic origin, appeared early. Even though the preeminence of the central kingship of Tara over other polities was often recognized, Irish unity never was a political fact. Early Gaelic expansion into Scotland (which, like that into Ireland, appears to have left no archaeological evidence) was to leave a lasting imprint (and the existence of a consequent Gaelic continuum down to the modern period challenges the congruence of geographic and ethnocultural boundaries). In early medieval times, a rich Gaelic Christian civilization flourished and gave rise to a remarkable vernacular literature (the language of this early period is called Old Irish). A sort of golden age—when Irish Latin and biblical learning had a major influence in Carolingian Europe—it was to become an important reference for a modern national identity.

With the twelfth-century conquest of much of the country by the Anglo-Normans, the basis for the English lordship of Ireland, an ethnic distinction appeared between the indigenous Gael (Irish) and the incoming Gall (English), which lasted through the medieval period. When England later broke with Rome, Catholic Ireland came to be seen as a dangerous anomaly vulnerable to the machinations of England’s Catholic enemies. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conquests led to the dispossession of most of the Irish ruling class (of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman origin), the suppression of the Catholic Church, and the flight of large numbers to the protection of the Catholic countries of Europe. Newly arrived Protestant settlers, Scottish as well as English, formed a quarter of the population by the end of the seventeenth century, above all in the province of Ulster, where the Scottish impact (not least in the distinctive dialects of Ulster Scots and in Presbyterianism) was to be particularly strong. The ancient Gaelic continuum across the North Channel was now mirrored by a Lowland Scottish one. A new ethnoreligious distinction appeared as Gael and Gall (the latter now understood as Old English) came to share a new identity, namely, as Irish Catholics in opposition to Protestant settlers (New English). Power in Ireland henceforth was monopolized by an Anglican aristocracy. At the same time, differences between Anglicans, whose Church of Ireland was the official (established) church until 1871, and other Protestants, especially Presbyterians—like other dissenting Protestants subject to various legal disabilities—remained significant.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English accounts of Ireland are notoriously unsympathetic, with comparisons of the Irish to the barbarians of classical antiquity or to the contemporary Native Americans. Like their model, the twelfth-century accounts of the Anglo-Norman Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica, they helped to justify English intervention as a civilizing mission. By the second half of the eighteenth century, published accounts of tours of Ireland were relatively common, and they have ethnographic value. The English agriculturalist Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland (1780) is an authoritative account of contemporary social life. Equally sympathetic is the account of the walking tour made by a young aristocrat, the Chevalier de la Tocnaye, in 1796, Promenade d’un Français en Irlande. It describes the culture of the peasants and expresses horror at their poverty and oppression. In July and August 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled in the south of Ireland with Gustave de Beaumont, and Tocqueville made copious notes.¹ Three main themes emerge from his observations: the extreme poverty of the Irish people, their enduring and implacable hatred of the aristocracy, and their deep attachment to Catholicism (Larkin 1990, 6–7).

PRECURSORS OF AN ETHNOLOGY OF IRELAND

The beginnings of ethnological interest per se can be found in the eighteenth century, mostly in the work of Anglo-Irish antiquaries relying on the historical and linguistic learning of Gaelic scholars, who were often members of the marginalized hereditary scholarly families. Gen. Charles Vallancey, a military engineer and Ireland’s leading antiquary in his day, touched on popular festivals in Collectanea de rebus hibernicis (1770–1804). Noteworthy was a first Gaelic revival, centered in the rapidly growing industrial town of Belfast at the end of the eighteenth century (see Ó Buachalla 1968). Motivated in part by the Irish challenge to James Macpherson’s claims for the Scottishness of the Ossian poems, the revival led to the publication of Gaelic folk and learned traditions in Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), and Edward Bunting’s A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (1796).² At the core of this revival were members of the dynamic Presbyterian bourgeoisie, among whom the influences of the Scottish Enlightenment (through the role of the Scottish universities), the American Revolution (through the extensive Irish Presbyterian migrant networks), and of French Revolution were central. It partly overlapped with the radical separatist politics of the United Irishmen, whose chief ideologue, Theobald Wolfe Tone, won military assistance from the Directory in France. One consequence of the repression of the rebellion of 1798 (cf. Beiner, chapter 9 in this volume) was the abolition of the parliament in Dublin. From 1801, Ireland became an integral part of the UK.

The Royal Dublin Society, a widely imitated and enlightened institution founded in 1731 to improve economic conditions by promoting agriculture, arts, industry, and science, carried out important surveys of agriculture in the early nineteenth century. Contemporary state intervention in social affairs in Ireland was much greater than in Britain and was in response to what was seen as acute economic crisis and continuing violence and disorder (Ó Ciosáin 1998, 93). The Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791 in order to accurately map Britain in anticipation of the feared French invasion, and it was extended to Ireland in 1824. In addition to mapping, detailed information was recorded on various subjects, including popular culture (Doherty 2004; Ó Cadhla 2007). Important ethnographic data also appeared in the work of the 1835 Poor Law enquiry (First Report of His Majesty’s Commissioner for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland), which took evidence from all social classes in order to elucidate the cultural reasons for Irish poverty (Ó Ciosáin 1998).

Interest in Gaelic culture was intensified by Romanticism, though the largely Anglo-Irish Romantic writers took a less positive attitude to popular culture because of their continued fear of a peasant jacquerie, rooted in memories of the communal violence of the 1640s and of 1798. Collections of tales, mostly for an English readership, appeared in the course of the nineteenth century, beginning with the work of the London-based Thomas Crofton Croker, whose Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) was promptly translated into German by the Grimm brothers. With Croker and his contemporaries the Irish peasantry, until then seen as the pauperized, brutish and sullen dregs of a dead old culture, full of disaffection and hatred for their new rulers, gain cultural interest (Leerssen 1996b, 162). Cultural nationalism was largely introduced from the 1840s, but until the 1870s it had little impact on politics, which was dominated by movements for Catholic emancipation, for and against the repeal of the Act of Union (Home Rule), and by agrarian agitation (the Land War). The Gaelic tradition came to be seen as a cultural asset during this period, both a proof of national continuity and an artistic resource, which appealed to intellectuals on both sides of the political and religious divide. But the Great Famine of 1845–48 decimated Ireland, and particularly Gaelic Ireland; the population from a high of 8.2 million recorded by the census of 1841 fell precipitously to 6.5 million by 1851.

Alfred Cort Haddon, the Darwinian evolutionist par excellence (Jones 1998, 195), came to Ireland in 1880 to take up the chair in zoology in the Royal College of Science in Dublin, and he stayed for twenty years. During that period he helped to found Dublin’s Anthropometric Laboratory (1891) and played a part in launching the Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom (1892). Under the auspices of the Anthropological Institute, the Society of Antiquaries, and the Folk-Lore Society, the Ethnographic Survey was organized by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Its Irish Committee consisted of members of the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory. The five headings under which research was to be carried out were physical types of the inhabitants; current traditions and beliefs; peculiarities of dialect; monuments and other remains of ancient culture; and historical evidence as to continuity of race (Urry 1984, 90). It involved photographing subjects, measuring their skulls and pigmentation for nigrescence, and recording customs, folklore, and dialect.

Haddon and Charles R. Browne’s survey of the Aran Islands in 1891–93 represents the first properly anthropological project in Ireland, with sections on anthropography, sociology, folk-lore, and ethnology, with population, archaeology, history, economics, and health also discussed (Haddon and Browne 1891–93). It was on leave from the Royal College of Sciences that Haddon first visited the Torres Straits, in 1888, and