Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora: A Transnational Approach (review)

The epic immodesty of an insufficiently revised dissertation can almost be awe-inspiring. Stephen A. Brighton has analyzed the contents of four toilet pits in the late-nineteenth-century United States (two from tenements in the Five Points, New York City, and the others from two single-dwellings in Patterson, New Jersey). He has compared the material culture in those sites with baseline data: two pre–Potato Famine cabin sites in County Roscommon. Now, whether the rather small rural data base in midland Ireland and the rather small urban data base in the northeastern United States are miscible is not a matter about which he worries, since apparently everybody concerned was Irish Catholic and therefore socioeconomically comparable. In any case, to interpret his data he developed a theoretical frame that he broadcasts as having

far-reaching applications for historical archaeologists and historians. Broadly speaking, its purpose is to serve as a multidisciplinary model of how material culture can be used to interpret continuities and changes in social identity within a critical and analytical discourse of the term diaspora.

(p. xxvii)

Along with this hyperinflation of the importance of his own work comes the usual self-vaunting review of the literature that is standard PhD fare. Brighton’s reading of Irish historical writing is notably eccentric. For example (p. 270), he sees the 1966 work of Raymond Crotty as being one of the influential levers of the “new history” of Ireland, of which Brighton seems to disapprove. In fact, if there ever was a forgotten and noninfluential historian of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, Crotty fills that description. And one wonders how he could believe that “it was not until the 1990s that the Great Famine was considered an issue for serious academic study” (p. 29). Understudied it certainly was, but not for frivolous reasons, but because it was taken so very seriously. A modest respect for a massive subject is not something Brighton seems to understand. Indeed, he airily explains the problems with all views of historical diasporas, save his own. He introduces two overarching constructs—“proletarian diasporas” and “mobilized diasporas” (p. 25)—an exercise in false dichotomization that would not survive a first-year logic class.

Yet, wonderfully, surprisingly, when the half (or more) that is vapor is allowed to drift away, the actual analysis of the items in the various privy pits turns out to be clear, rigorous, and often deftly suggestive. Brighton makes a compelling case that in the Irish-Catholic cultures of the mid-nineteenth century, the commonalities between Ireland and America diminished as the later nineteenth century progressed.

This is a valuable, small start toward a comparative archaeology of aspects of Irish and U.S. culture. In future, one would like to see three sorts of studies. First, a comparison of rural material culture in Ireland with rural material culture among the Irish ethnic group in the United States. The work of John Mannion on eastern Canada would be a useful model. Second, scholars need to deal specifically with Irish-derived Protestant cultures, particularly as material transfer to the American South occurred. And, third, the material culture of religious observance, both in homes and churches, needs study, for religion undeniably was a central matter in the Irish diaspora.