Irish Ethnologies

Description

Irish Ethnologies gives an overview of the field of Irish ethnology, covering representative topics of institutional history and methodology, as well as case studies dealing with religion, ethnicity, memory, development, folk music, and traditional cosmology. This collection of essays draws from work in multiple disciplines including but not limited to anthropology and ethnomusicology.

These essays, first published in French in the journal Ethnologie française, illuminate the complex history of Ireland and exhibit the maturity of Irish anthropology. Martine Segalen contends that these essays are part of a larger movement that “galvanized the quiet revolution in the domain of the ethnology of France.” They did so by making specific examples, in this instance Ireland, inform a larger definition of a European identity. The essays, edited by Ó Giolláin, also significantly explain, expand, and challenge “Irish ethnography.” From twelfth-century accounts to Anglo-Irish Romanticism, from topographical surveys to statistical accounts, the statistical and literary descriptions of Ireland and the Irish have prefigured the ethnography of Ireland. This collection of articles on the ethnographic disciplines in Ireland provides an instructive example of how a local anthropology can have lessons for the wider field.

This book will interest academics and students of anthropology, folklore studies, history, and Irish Studies, as well as general readers.

Contributors: Martine Segalen, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Hastings Donnan, Anne Byrne, Pauline Garvey, Adam Drazin, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, Joseph Ruane, Ethel Crowley, Dominic Bryan, Helena Wulff, Guy Beiner, Sylvie Muller, and Anthony McCann.

Sujets

• Human Geography
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• History of Ireland
• Celtic studies
• Culture of Ireland
• Ireland
• Anthropology
• Stephen Ireland
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268102401
• Langue: English

Extrait

IRISH ETHNOLOGIES
IRISH
ETHNOLOGIES

EDITED BY
DIARMUID Ó GIOLLÁIN
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2017 by University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
The Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Institute for Scholarship in
the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame, in the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid, 1955– editor.
Title: Irish ethnologies / edited by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin.
Other titles: Irlande apráes Arensberg et Ó Duilearga. English
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. |
Originally published in French under title: Irlande apráes Arensberg et
Ó Duilearga, as a special edition of Éthnologie française, vol. 41, no. 2 (2011). |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024317 (print) | LCCN 2017039608 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780268102395 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268102401 (epub) |
ISBN 9780268102371 (hardback) | ISBN 0268102376 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology—Ireland. | Ireland—History. |
BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Ireland. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /
Anthropology / Cultural. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography.
Classification: LCC DA927 (ebook) | LCC DA927 .I7713 2017 (print) |
DDC 305.8009417—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024312
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
Preface
Martine Segalen
Introduction
Diarmuid Ó Giolláin
ONE Re-Placing Ireland in Irish Anthropology
Hastings Donnan
TWO Epistolary Research Relations: Correspondences in Anthropological Research: Arensberg, Kimball, and the Harvard-Irish Survey, 1930–1936
Anne Byrne
THREE Ireland’s Ethnographic Horizons
Pauline Garvey and Adam Drazin
FOUR Folkloristic-Ethnological Studies in Ireland
Gearóid Ó Crualaoich
FIVE Pluralism and Silence: Protestants and Catholics in the Republic of Ireland
Joseph Ruane
SIX The Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS): The Site of a Symbolic Struggle over Knowledge
Ethel Crowley
SEVEN From Civil Rights to Carnival: The Anthropology of Public Space in Belfast
Dominic Bryan

EIGHT Stories of the Soil: In the Irish Literary World
Helena Wulff
NINE Locating Local Tradition: The Sociocultural Construction of Irish Folk History
Guy Beiner
TEN The Irish Mermaid: Man’s Alliance to Woman, Nature, and Death in a Peasant Culture
Sylvie Muller
ELEVEN A Tale of Two Rivers: Riverdance, A River of Sound, and the Ambiguities of “Tradition”
Anthony McCann
List of Contributors
Index
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 Croatia 1 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