The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

Introduction

Introduction Telling Identities and the Work of Memory in Northern Ireland = I remember the baker O’Donnell blushing as usual, telling me: Ye know what they say about Ballybogoin, Bill. “When ye pull down yer zip to piss off’a Elizabeth Street, they’re talkin’ about it up on the square before it touches the ground.”1 Back then, in 1985, in the context of a conversation aroused by my surprise at how much of my recent private life the baker and several of his friends knew, this enunciation indicated that I should not be bothered by the local knowledge accumulating about me, that stories moved fast and furiously in Ballybogoin, and that there would be, as one of my interlocutors said, “no harm done” by them. Now, writing here, having put this statement in a frozen position far away from that pub just off Ballybogoin Square where it was uttered, a place patronized at different times by members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and their declared enemy, the British security forces, a place where local Catholics said “we watch ourselves,” I give this conversation piece a different meaning.2 There and then I was taught how to “watch myself,” especially how to guard my words; how to disengage myself, by subtle de›ections and in›ections, from conversations going too far; how to play the game by telling partial truths; how to tell “wee white ones” (little lies) and not get caught out; how to read and interpret the language and body movements of others; and how to relate words, bodies, and worlds. Here and now I remember representations of the type of talk that we discussed in the pub that night and re›ect upon the anthropological texts that have inscribed Ireland, particularly that of Nancy ScheperHughes . She writes: Yes, the Irish lie and lie they do with admirable touches of wit and ingenuity. Add to the normal defensiveness of the peasant, a folk Catholic moral code that is quite “soft” on lying, and a lack of tolerance for overt acts of aggression, and you have a very strong propensity to “cod” (sometimes rather cruelly) the outsider. Beyond crosschecking information, the only safeguard the ‹eldworker has against “converting the lies of peasants into scienti‹c data” (as one critic of the participant-observation method commented) is simply getting to know the villagers well enough to read the nonverbal cues that signal evasiveness or lying. (Scheper-Hughes 1982, 12) In Scheper-Hughes’s view, the talk of those Ballybogoin Catholics could not be relied upon. She submitted speakers to her gaze, read them, and distinguished between truth and lying. She realized the world must be read yet readily provided the last word. For Scheper-Hughes, it was the eye of the ethnographer that constituted the ethnographic ground, and she could discern a lie. Arriving on terra ‹rma, she peopled it with composite individuals, a scriptural method that provoked this response from a village reader of Scheper-Hughes’s text. Nonsense! You know us for better than that. You think we didn’t, each of us, sit down poring over every page until we had recognized the bits and pieces of ourselves strewn about here and there. You turned us into amputees with hooks for ‹ngers and some other blackguard ’s heart beating inside our own chest. How do you think I felt reading my words come out of some Tom-O or Pat-O or some publican ’s mouth. Recognize ourselves, indeed! I’ve gone on to memorize some of my best lines. (Scheper-Hughes 1982, 10)3 Talk, truth, and lying pose problems for the ethnography of modern Ireland. So do places like the other major component of the baker’s the troubles in ballybogoin 2 utterance, “the square.” Often, anthropologists depict such town centers as functional/historical wholes and emphasize their role in the “development” and integration of local economies and public spheres. The organizational pull of towns, especially their nuclei, places like the square, receives emphasis. Development occurs, and center domesticates periphery. Commercial functions change, but they persist and often dominate description. Through the ethnography in this book I try to trip up these two representations of the “other”: the Irish “other” as liar, a trope of a colonizing narrative, and the “other” as ordered from center to periphery, an element of a modernizing, teleological one. I disagree with ScheperHughes ’s contention that...