Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Use of Public Symbols in Northern Ireland (review)

Although there is a rich and significant body of scholarship about the folklore of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the sectarian violence that has plagued it has received scant attention from folklorists. This oversight is remedied in eloquent style by Jack Santino's latest book, which takes the Troubles and their folkloric underpinnings as its subject.

Studies of Irish folklore often treat its oral tradition, but Signs of War and Peace is a welcome addition to this body scholarship because of its emphasis on Northern Ireland's contemporary visual traditions: political and paramilitary wall murals, flags, banners, curb painting, decorated street arches, and spontaneous shrines dedicated to victims of the violence. Customs are also considered, especially the marking of various holidays with parades, effigy burnings, and bonfires. Santino also documents contemporary personal experience narratives about the Troubles from politicians, neighbors on both sides of the political divide, convicted terrorists, and children who lost parents to the violence.

The first of the book's six chapters, "History, Conflict, and Public Display in Northern Ireland," is a concise and supremely readable summation of the history of the Troubles. Santino argues that public display plays a crucial role in the conflict, that these signs and symbols are related to class-based aesthetics and traditions, and that they form a popular and performative style. He asserts convincingly that these folk symbols fight an "all-encompassing but not always violent war" (p. 16) and that political attempts have failed to resolve the conflict because politicians incorrectly assume that an agreement on one level of culture effects change on all levels of culture.

The next chapter, "Ritual Display and Presentation," explores Northern Ireland's tradition of public display and custom, especially the July 12 celebrations and the staggering number of parades (around 3,000) that take place annually in this small province. Santino also interviews the artists who create the murals and delineates their performative functions. Chapter 3 is centered around "Assemblage," a term that Santino introduced several years ago to refer to the arrangement and juxtaposition of items to create a symbolic public statement. He argues that the parades, arches, and bonfires he refers to are the principle means of dialogue between different groups: "They . . . take their place with the sectarian shootings, that are but an extreme on a range of dialogic activities" (p. 62).

Death and mourning made concrete are the subjects of a moving chapter, which treats a terrorist attack at a betting office that killed five Catholic men. Santino analyzes the "spontaneous shrines," a term he coined in a 1992 article, that are created at such sites of untimely and bad deaths. These shrines "allow those who disapprove of the violence employed by the paramilitaries to express their feelings with less risk of retaliation or intimidation," thus functioning rhetorically as a response to the murals (p. 90).

Arguing that issues of politics are found in varying degrees throughout the entire range of festival and celebration, the next chapter, "Conflicts," takes a "subaltern perspective" to show how the dynamics that are "painfully obvious" in Northern Ireland also operate elsewhere. Santino demonstrates how rituals and holidays often involve social conflict, citing such examples as the class conflict evident in the public mourning rituals at Princess Diana's death. He then argues that the popular style employed by the protestors on both sides in Northern Ireland can identify the protestors as lower class and set them apart from the elites in institutions that the protestors support. A chapter on "Shared Style and Paradox" concludes the book with an astute application of Bakhtin to some of the parades Santino witnessed. This chapter includes interviews with those who work from within the Belfast community to mend the sectarian ruptures.

The range and depth of...