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8. Rendering Accounts
- University of Michigan Press
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8 Rendering Accounts = The true symbol of the British conquest is in Robinson Crusoe. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe; the manly independence and the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet ef‹cient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced, religiousness; the calculating taciturnity . James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe” Ballybogoin people, both Catholic and Protestant, but especially Catholic, share some of the same views of the English that Joyce does in the opening quote. In fact, this citation describes what Seamus meant by the term “workin’ work.” Seamus saw the merits, as Joyce did, of that “slow yet ef‹cient intelligence” and that “taciturnity” that he saw in his unionist neighbors and workmates and that he perceived as the necessary , part-time personality of Catholics, but he was more at home with accelerated interaction, wit, craic, and the everyday practices entailed in “workin’ moves.” He lived by both “workin’ work” and “workin’ moves,” and that doubleness, that split subjectivity, he believed, characterized Catholic difference within Northern Ireland and distinguished the Irish as a whole from the British. His “side of the house,” he often repeated, had to both “work moves and work work” to get by. This pair of signi‹ers represents a mixing of cultural practices. “Both sides of the house” participated in that mixing in their everyday lives, but to varying degrees. Starting with the four introductory tours 203 of this book, those hybrid practices become apparent. Each tour took similar cultural form. Each person brought me to their signi‹cant places, each told stories with similar narrative structure, albeit different content, and each conducted the entire event in the same pattern. All the guides picked me up at my living place, took me to the sites that had meaning for them, and brought me back to their houses for tea before returning me to my apartment. All had a very similar mode of hospitality ; each had an analogous way of making such an event meaningful. Northern Irish Protestant participation in such cultural forms rendered them a bit different than the English, from the Catholic perspective, and the Protestants recognized that difference as well. The tours, however, indicated difference (understood here as a structure of power organized around a system of binaries) as they indexed a sharing of cultural forms.1 In these tours, my guides moved through places that they perceived as opened or closed to them. They remembered the past as they traveled through these places and the binaries ; planter and native, colonizer and colonized, Protestant and Catholic permeated the landscape. When they subjected their habitual bodily movements to discourse, they remembered the state and its practices : the Church of Ireland building to which Kathleen McDuffy brought me and its colonial reorganization by the British military, the unwillingness of Colm to put his body “out of place” in the territory of that church, the industrial sites and their identi‹cations with the British modernity (one fostered strongly by the colonial state in Ireland) that Ian valued, the challenge to the state and its past that Ronan’s bodily gestures constantly made. All these signi‹ers indexed the fact that these people may have been hybrid and split subjects who shared two sides of the same house of cultural practices, but they were also subject to a state history and a set of state institutions that focused their cultural acts in ways that divided an “us” from a “them.” Public spaces were marked by a binary in which the ‹rst terms of Britain/Ireland, unionist/Irish nationalist, Protestant /Catholic, valleys/hills, industry/agriculture, state/citizens, “the square”/“the OK corral,” orange/green, and union jack/tricolor dominated decisively. This book tries to show the dynamics of this dominant binary and the challenges to it at a variety of sites from the domestic to the public. It focuses on the level of everyday life and the location practices that the troubles in ballybogoin 204 [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:49 GMT) occurred in a variety of spaces. The writing has not followed a linear trajectory dictated by theoretical argument. Instead, different episodes are juxtaposed to each other to demonstrate the density of contradictory relationships among people in Ballybogoin, the values they attribute to a variety of speci‹c places, and the state’s capacity to enter the events that people produced in the various place-worlds in which they dwelt.2 In a number of the stories and events represented...