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INSTITUTIONAL PERSONS AND PERSONAL INSTITUTIONS The Asylum and Marginality in Rural Ireland A. Jamie Saris So deep was she in this thought that she did not notice the entrance of old Marse Prendergast, who lived in a cabin just across the road. Marse was a superannuated shuiler1 and a terror in the valley.The tears had been summoned to her eyes by the still unchanging quality of Ned’s tone.They were at once detected by the old woman. “Still crying, are ye, Nan Byrne, for Henry Shannon that’s dead and gone?” This was a sore cut, but it was because of its severity that it had been given. Marse Prendergast’s method was to attack the person from whom she desired an alms instead of making an approach in fear and trembling. Brinsley MacNamara,Valley of the Squinting Windows 11 This piece is a sustained reflection on three types of marginality found in Kilronan, a market town and its environs containing about sixteen hundred people found in the Sligo-Leitrim area of Ireland.The three terms I am investigating —“character,” “unrespectable,” and “mental patient”—all overlap in the life of one of my consultants who has been connected to the mental hospital in Sligo town, about eighteen miles away, for much of his adult life. My main purpose in this piece is to try to think clearly about the implications of the simultaneous presence of these seemingly different forms of subjectivity, all of which show a different aspect of the local presence of the mental hospital, different legacies of a “colonial” history, and what this state of affairs might say to ideas derived from postcolonial contributions to anthropology and related disciplines , such as “subaltern history.” Not so well hidden beside the trail of this excursion is a longstanding argument of mine that the really interesting aspect of the power exercised by states (colonial or postcolonial) is not to be found in their existence as imagined entities, nor in their production as the effects of 309 individual actors, but in their reality as concrete institutions possessed of particular technologies and histories in a specific time and place (Saris , , , ). PURPOSE Tomás O’Connor gives the sense of understanding his mission in life. He possesses that distinctive gait generally associated only with purposeful individuals . Forward-leaning, energetic, yet dignified, his pace is smooth and nothing short of ground-devouring as he walks upward of eighteen miles a day around Kilronan and the surrounding countryside. My first impression ofTomás, when I made his acquaintance in , was of a sturdy, medium-sized man whose shock of white hair made him look older than his (then) fifty-four years. He and one of his sisters, Bridie, occupied a farm of about twelve acres roughly six miles east of Kilronan. Little cultivation was happening there when I arrived on a grey January day.The two larger fields were let to a neighbor for grazing, and the two outbuildings hard by the farmhouse showed the effects of decades of indifferent maintenance. At one time, however, the farm generated enough resources (if just enough) to support nine people. Into the late-s,Tomás was still tending a small kitchen garden of spuds and cabbage of about a third of an acre, more out of a conviction that it was right to grow one’s own food than for any real need to subsist. By the time I had met Tomás, he had spent roughly half his adult life in the asylum in Sligo town, wherein he had been hospitalized several times over the course of twenty-five years under diagnoses as diverse as “agitated depression,” “personality disorder/borderline schizophrenia,” and “bipolar disorder.” For the last ten years, he has been visited regularly by the new regime of community psychiatry to which Ireland, along with nearly every other nation on the globe has subscribed. According to his own terse reports when questioned directly (by me or the professionals with whom he interacted) about his current state of health and happiness, he has adapted well to the community, enjoying the interaction with the townspeople and the space that the outside provides for his avocation for wandering. On the other side, both the brother and sister are looked upon with some pity by many in the area and were pointed to as an example of severe rural poverty by most of the state professionals with whom they were in contact. Tomás, due...

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