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3. Writing Ireland
- University of Michigan Press
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3 Writing Ireland = One way to think about intellectual activities and disciplines is to inquire about the organization of knowledge, to ask what counts as knowledge in a particular domain—and indeed the history of disciplines is in large measure a history of the organization of knowledge. Jonathan Culler (1988) Racialization practices exclude, and their combination of politicized semiotic systems and institutional power has become, in this period of decolonization, objects of struggle. Ethnographies have also become contested items in this period of predicament, and the struggle has given rise to concern with ethnography as persuasive ‹ction, as something both made and moral (Clifford 1988). In Ireland these wrangles are acute, not only for the places such as Ballybogoin in the north of Ireland but also in the discussions between the people studied to the south of the island of Ireland’s border and the anthropologists who study them, many of whom are from the United States.1 Realist ethnographies have been discussed and debated in the national press in the Republic of Ireland, and the genre of American ethnographic writing on rural Ireland that prevailed at the time I started ‹eldwork came under public criticism. This anthropological genre, in the words of one Irish journalist, focuses invariably on dysfunction—the stresses and strains of our rural culture in the problem areas of the west. It reaches for words 87 like “repression,” “demoralisation,” and “anomie.” When the studies reach print they can be deeply upsetting to the people put under the microscope. And the more vivid and perceptive the writing, the more likely it is to hurt. (Viney 1983, 9) These upsets deserve consideration at this postcolonial and re›exive moment in sociocultural anthropology. Irish scholars and artists, like other intellectuals in formerly colonized and colonized areas, have directed themselves to rereading their home country’s literary, historical , and political texts. Such reevaluations have the goal of reimagining Ireland, of enabling “new writing, new politics, unblemished by Irishness , but securely Irish” (Deane 1985, 58). It seems constructive for anthropologists of Ireland, wherever they are based, to engage Irish intellectuals in this project. Evaluations of past anthropological texts and their effects on the world render a sense of anthropology’s history and its articulation to power. In their discussions of place making and the anthropological tradition , Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have suggested that the re›exivity demanded of anthropologists should be not only that which re›ects on the individual’s personal biography and theoretical position but also, and more important, that which contextualizes their ethnographic writing in terms of the texts that have written the particular region under study (Gupta and Ferguson 1997b, 25–40). Both the ethnographer and the place studied have been written, and an engagement with past writings can elucidate that process. A critical anthropology, then, requires an examination of its organization of knowledge. This chapter will relate this ethnography to a genre of anthropological writing of Ireland from the recent past that has dealt with topics discussed here: the importance of talk in forming social relationships, the splitting of subjectivity , and Irish identity. A feature of everyday life that has marked the Irish—talk and what it means—has formed a considerable problem area in the anthropology of Ireland. In his Irish Times article depicting the controversy surrounding ethnography in rural Ireland, “The Yank in the Corner: Why the Ethics of Anthropology Are a Worry for Rural Ireland,” Michael Viney (1983) addressed this issue indirectly, but the artist assigned to illustrate Viney’s piece made the centrality of talk and silence perfectly clear. the troubles in ballybogoin 88 [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:36 GMT) Three cartoons caricatured anthropologists and held up an Irish mirror to the U.S.-based ethnographers of rural Ireland. The most prominent cartoon depicts a barman beginning to hoist his pint of beer. A balding, giant man with a hooked nose and a half-smile, he is conversing with a little, round man who is staring into his pint. On the bench in front of the bar sits a tape recorder. An anthropologist, a young bespectacled man, leans back against the wall watching the conversationalists out of the corner of his eye. His arms are folded tightly across his chest, his legs are crossed, and a look of frustrated boredom marks his face. “He’s lookin’ bored out’a his tree,” an Irish wit might say. The second cartoon shows three people, two old men...