Sean-nós i gConamara / Sean-nós in Connemara: Digital Media and Oral Tradition in the West of Ireland

Upon an introductory visit, one might be fooled into making the assumption that the wind-ravaged fields, rock-strewn paths, quiet whitewashed villages, and backcountry roads of the Conamara region in the west of Ireland share those archetypal characteristics so many of us still ascribe to all things rural: isolated, uninfluenced by the modern world, lagging behind in technology, and richly endowed with folklore. After all, this sort of tropology is a cornerstone upon which many cultural tourism initiatives continue to be based.¹ But these tropes are certainly as old as rurality itself, for it is a common facet of the human imagination to define the unknown or the remote as that which is “beyond the pale.” Indeed, the fields of anthropology and folklore were built around the perceived need for salvage ethnography of such places, documenting and classifying a community and its intangible cultural heritage before its inevitable disappearance or decline at the hands of modernity. But even though the effects of this dark history can still be seen in academe, where the topic of folk music, for example, continues to conjure images of unchanging musicians performing an ancient and static repertoire, as researchers we no longer spend volumes seeking simply to invert these wrongs of the past, for we understand that, as with all great generalizations, they are quickly unraveled by knowledge and experience. Instead, we seek to provide nuanced understanding of specific times in specific places, informed by systems of knowledge unique to those places. Conamara (anglicized to Connemara), the gaeltacht (Irish-speaking district) in the west of the Irish Republic spread out beyond the cosmopolitan Gaillimh (Galway City), is a place that never stops moving; it is a place that has always been connected with travel and technology via maritime trade and is populated today by a mobile and well-traveled people; it is a place with a bilingual and highly technologically literate population where, for many, oral systems of knowledge continue to organize time and memory; it is a culture that looks outward toward the sea.

I spent two years in Conamara living, working, and doing fieldwork on different musical traditions and their roles in community development initiatives in the region. In this short piece, I am concerned not so much with detailing the specifics of sean-nós, the orally transmitted, unaccompanied, highly ornamented musical tradition sung as Gaeilge (in Irish) I studied there, as much as I am with using it to help provide an introduction to the topic of people employing the newest forms of technology to find ways to dynamically continue and interact with the oldest forms of technology––in this case, their oral traditions.² Sean-nós continues to be a criminally understudied oral tradition, though newer academic work by Shields (1985), O’Rourke (1987, 1990), Mac Aodha (1996), Ó Madagáin (2005), Ó Laoire (2004, 2007), and a number of others has been particularly helpful in illuminating this fascinating genre. Studies that treat the use of digital technology in preserving, continuing, infrastructurally employing, and critically interacting with sean-nós––even in terms of its more straightforward use in Irish language maintenance and continuation³––have thus far been virtually nonexistent.⁴ Therefore, I provide here a survey of sorts, detailing a number of programs and organizations in Conamara that are using digital media technology to enhance, continue, and further sean-nós, with the hope that discussions such as these inspire further work in the field. The primarily oral culture of traditional Conamara is in a constant state of change, just as sean-nós is no longer a primarily rural, native Gaeilge-speaking tradition. Studies that treat these fluidities and complexities of tradition both as they exist today and in their historical context will necessarily provide our methodological roadmaps for future writing and thought.

The west of Ireland is home to several gaeltachts that exist as small geographic areas largely within the counties of Donegal, Galway, and Kerry.⁵ The Conamara gaeltacht in Co. na Gaillimhe (Co. Galway) is the largest of the gaeltachts...