by Dermot Keogh
Whether labelled as ‘folklore’ or ‘popular culture’ we should, in this reading, endeavour to regard the materials accumulated by the Folklore Commission as historic instances of cultural expression in particular historic contexts within the flow of a single universe of cultural discourse, without, of course, denying the very real ethnic, linguistic, economic and political diversity that existed in the social circumstances of people’s lives. Viewed like this, the Folklore Commission materials retain their very considerable value as an ethnographic record. A different set of questions can, however, be brought to bear on them from the ones designed to elucidate exclusively their representative capacity in relation to some essential Irish tradition.
On this basis also, gaps in the ethnographic record can be better perceived, and the missing, or largely invisible, folklore and popular culture of the de Valera years themselves can be conceived of, as a target for research and elucidation by both historians and ethnologists working in partnership. Many topics quickly suggest themselves: music hall culture; the culture of the dance-hall and the whist-drive; the culture of popular urban Christianity; the culture of the new slum-clearance housing estates; the culture of the factory floor. Connolly himself draws attention to our relative ignorance regarding the culture of cinema in Ireland, given its enormous popularity from the 1920s. We need, he says, to know about the cultural response to this new cultural form of different regions of the country and of different groups of people. We need to know which particular film genres most appealed to Irish audiences and to what degree the characters and the motifs of commercial cinema were assimilated into the wider culture. He reminds us that the earlier eighteenth century Dublin playhouse was the site for a similar hybridisation of elite and popular, or metropolitan and local, or high and low culture in the context of a then socially-undifferentiated consumer demand for a commercially produced form of social recreation.
On the other hand, we can ourselves observe and experience at first hand the emergence and influence within our contemporary cultural world of similar, apparently novel, forms of group recreation such as comedy clubs, or of group religious practice, such as charismatic healing rituals. On examination, these may well turn out to be transformations of cultural forms already present at the local or folk or popular end of the cultural spectrum of de Valera’s Ireland. Rendering the specifics of the actual popular culture of the de Valera years is thus a common task for history and ethnology that is essential to any analysis of the cultural history of Ireland in the twentieth century.
A second issue raised by Connolly also has direct bearing on the question of the relative invisibility of contemporary popular culture in de Valera’s Ireland. This is the dominant focus, which, Connolly alleges, exists within Irish popular culture studies on the decline and disappearance of cultural forms, together with a prevailing sense of loss and dispossession in the face of great change. Connolly suggests two reasons why such a focus should exist; one having to do with the belief that the language shift from Irish to English inevitably constituted a decline in cultural creativity; the other with a belief that ‘cultural subjugation’, as he puts it, the muting and suppression of cultural expression, is also an inevitable consequence of the political subjugation that Ireland has experienced since the seventeenth century. Connolly argues instead for seeing creative cultural adjustment to changing circumstances and to new possibilities in place of the view that sees continual withering away of cultural expression and cultural identity. He draws attention to examples of evidence of a capacity on the part of Irish-speaking groups in the eighteenth century to deal ably with the expanding urban and commercial sector of society.
I might mention that I have myself discussed the County Clare poet, Brian Merriman, and his long poem ‘The Midnight Court’, as an example of this kind of hybridisation in cultural expression. It bridges native tradition and the social reality of the later eighteenth century north Munster world which was experiencing increasing literacy, increasing marketisation and monetarisation of the economy, and increased expansion in the operation of courts of law.13In that eighteenth century cultural world, with its mixture of tradition and commercialisation, Connolly contends that what he terms the ‘triumph’ of the metropolitan was inevitable, whatever the language spoken and whatever the political circumstances. The demonstration of the cultural mechanism of that metropolitan ‘triumph’ is what is relevant to our own concerns. The National Folklore Archive, built on the dedicated labours of the Folklore of Ireland Society and the Irish Folklore Commission, comprises a huge and hugely valuable primary resource for the study of that cultural mechanism, as it actually operated within the cultural and social reality to which the testimony of the Commission’s contributors bears eloquent witness.
When we come to look at the popular culture of Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century we can see how a prevailing cultural ideology that saw cultural identity chiefly in terms of antiquarian tradition, served to divert attention away from the culturally creative nature of the adjustments to modernity that were expressing themselves in the world-view, the lifestyle and the material culture of the twentieth century urban and urbanising world, in which Irish people actually lived increasingly metropolitan-influenced lives. Hyde had spoken in his 1892 lecture of the Gaelic past at the bottom of the Irish heart ‘that prevents us becoming citizens of the empire.’14De Valera in his turn spoke of the wish that lay in the heart of every Irish man and woman for a country not only free but truly Irish as well.15The ways in which the real men and women of de Valera’s Ireland could be seen to be truly Irish were, to a significant degree, circumscribed by the ideological perspective that placed little or no value on cultural forms that deviated from a kind of folk norm in official thinking.
With later developments in folklore and popular culture studies, we are able to see today how official norms and representations of cultural identity are always destined to be static and crude and out-of-date when set against the ceaseless flow of cultural creativity and cultural transmission, the transmission of ideas, values, behaviours and objects that constitute the reality of a holistic cultural world out of which new cultural forms and new expressions of cultural identity are continually being created. As Connolly rightly insists in regard to the study of cultural matters by historians, it behoves us all as students of culture to try to avoid becoming prisoners of abstractions of our own making.
The terms ‘folklore’ and ‘popular culture’ must, therefore, be used in a way that is fully conscious of the unwarranted distortion of the reality of cultural history that their use has sometimes implied. Connolly would, in theory, countenance renouncing the possibility of talking about popular culture as an historical object or a historical system of cultural activity in its own right. He envisages, however, a continued interest by historians of culture in studying local, popular cultural manifestations.
Folklore studies and ethnology have, for their part too, undergone a veritable paradigm shift since the closing years of de Valera’s Ireland, that has brought their thinking on the creation and transmission of culture to a position somewhat akin to that claimed by Connolly for historians. The model of culture process that is associated with the name of the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz,16is one that offers the possibility of studying the local and popular production and transmission of culture and cultural identity without either a) falling into the trap of resorting to unjustified and unsustainable abstractions; or b) having to forego entirely a vernacular focus. This is achieved by a continual framing of every subculture and of all local innovation within the increasingly globalised diffusion and interplay of cultural forces and forms.
Folklore and popular culture within this perspective are the cultural forms that give expression to local creativity and identity in divergent vernacular ways rather than in convergent cosmopolitan ones. Both these tendencies are, however, to be regarded
as constantly at work together within the wash and flow of cultural production and transmission in the media and information age in which we live. A focus on the study of vernacular, local, popular aspects of culture and culture history within an overall frame encompassing cosmopolitan culture process, offers the prospect of being able to throw light on both the history and the cultural dynamic of the means whereby groups and individuals have, in Ireland as elsewhere, continually reconciled their traditional identities and world-views, with the demands and the opportunities of the prevailing economic and political circumstances, as these are created and transformed by developments in the wider world.
In mentioning, as a small example of this kind of focus, the UCC research project on the urban folklore and ethnology of Cork’s northside – a project established by means of co-operation between the Department of Folklore of UCC and a number of Cork northside community organisations17 – I want to draw attention to the considerable interest that is today being shown by communities in how best they can themselves represent (both to themselves and to others) their own traditions and their own cultural identity in the form of folklore and local history. This interest is not, of course, confined to urban communities only but, in general, it offers to folklorists and historians of culture alike, the prospect of being able to collaborate with each other and with local groups in order to collect an archive of primary evidence for the operation in de Valera’s Ireland, outside of the official frame of antiquarian cultural ideology, of the actual cultural process that operated in Moore Street and in Mayo, in Donnycarney and in Donegal, in Gurranabraher and in Graigue na Managh.
That actual culture process produced – out of the reconciling of the local with the metropolitan, of the known with the new – a repertoire of cultural forms that were as valid an expression of Irish cultural identity in the de Valera years, as those officially endorsed by political and educational authority in the years from 1926 to 1973. A further important consideration that arises from the collaborative nature of the kind of vernacular cultural study that the Northside Project involves, is the reflexive, dialogical nature of both the fieldwork and the ethnographic description which it entails.18This raises issues of theory and methodology that were not directly addressed by students of culture in the de Valera years but they are of sufficient concern today, to the study of culture and cultural history, to merit being at least mentioned in the present context as matters that give further common cause to historians and folklorists/ethnologists alike in the pursuit of the culture and the cultural history of de Valera’s other Ireland.
1 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–1993, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1980, p. 454.
2 Ó Faoláin, Seán, ‘This is Your Magazine’, The Bell, vol. 1, no. 1, 1940, p. 8.
3 Almqvist, Bo, ‘The Irish Folklore Commission: Achievement and Legacy’, Béaloideas, vol. 45–7, 1979, p. 26.
4 Foster, Roy, W. B. Yeats: A Life. 1: The Apprentice Mage. 1865–1914, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 126.
5 ibid., p. 136.
6 Lee, J. J., Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 211.
7 Linke, Uli, ‘Power and Culture Theory: Problematising the Focus of Research in German Folklore Scholarship’ in Bendix, R. and Zumwolt, R. L. (eds), Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honour of Alan Dundes, Garland, New York, 1995, pp. 417–8.
8 Quoted in Foster, Roy, W. B. Yeats: A Life, p. 126.
9 Rechnenbach, H., untitled article in Volk und Rasse, vol. 10, 1935, p. 376.
10 Ziegler, M., ‘Volkskunde auf rassischer Grundlage: Voranssetzungen und Aufgaben’, Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, vol. 4, 1936, pp. 711–7.
11 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, p. 354.
12 Connolly, S., ‘Approaches to the History of Irish Popular Culture’, Bullán, vol. 2, no. 2, 1996, pp. 83–100.
13 Ó Crualaoich, G., ‘The Vision of Liberation in Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche’, in de Brún, P., Ó Coileáin, S., Ó Riain, P. (eds), Folia Gaedlica, Cork University Press, Cork, 1983, pp. 95–104.
14 Hyde, D., ‘The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland’ in Ó Conaire, Breandán (ed.), Language, Lore and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures – Douglas Hyde, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1986, p. 154.
15 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, p. 131.
16 Hannerz, Ulf, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning, Colombia University Press, New York, 1992.
17 Ó Crualaoich, G., Ó Giolláin, D., Huttunen, H., ‘Irish-Finnish Research Collaboration: The Cork Northside Project’, NIF Newsletter, vol. 21, 1993, pp. 17–8.
18 A seminal statement of these issues is Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985. Their importance in relation to folklore is reflected in Jackson, B. and Ives, E. (eds), The World Observed: Reflections on the Fieldwork Process, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1996.
Cultural visions and the new state: embedding and embalming
Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh
In recent decades one of the more contentious ideological issues at the centre of critical debate in Irish cultural studies has been the appropriateness or adequacy of the discourse of colonialism/post-colonialism as a frame of analysis for the Irish cultural predicament – in its historical and contemporary settings. Discussion of the specific dynamics of the conflict in Northern Ireland is a central aspect of this ideological contention, and key sites of debate have been the Field Day cultural project (in particular, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and its Critical Conditions series of essays) and the controversy surrounding ‘historical revisionism’ in certain writings on Irish history in recent decades. Perspectives drawn from a wide range of disciplines are represented in this debate (e.g., anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literary and cultural studies) but most of the main protagonists have been historians or cultural and literary theorists and critics. While the historians have tended to emphasise the particularity of meaning attaching to ‘colony/colonial’ in legal and constitutional commentaries on states and power relationships, cultural theorists have given more attention to discourse analysis, theories of representation and variations on Gramsci and cultural hegemony.1Yet there has been enough dialogue between the disciplines to produce some genuine intellectual engagement, and the terms of the debate have extended far beyond the specific areas I have just listed.2
An aspect of the debate which has received less attention than one might have expected it to receive is the major project of decolonisation which informed the ambitions of a section of the Irish nationalist leadership which came to power in the new independent Irish state in 1922. This project was explicitly identified as part of the obligation and the task of identity-formation in that new Irish state from its foundation. Variously described by its principal ideologues both before and after the foundation of the Irish national state as ‘the formation of an independent Irish mind’, the ‘philosophy of Irish-Ireland’ or ‘the de-Anglicisation of Ireland’, it had as its central objective the restoration as the main vernacular of the Irish language – by then a minority language well-advanced on a long course of relentless decline, and increasingly contracting into relatively small pockets of territory where it still enjoyed a dominant position in the general process of social intercourse. This vulnerable minority language was to be restored in place of English, which by the early twentieth century enjoyed overwhelming dominance as the main vernacular of the vast majority of the people of every social rank throughout most of the island. The decolonising impulse, or cultural vision, which required for its completion such a massive linguistic revolution, would seem to merit some attention, at least to the extent that its sources and assumptions be identified and its encounter with the reality of politica
l power involved in state-formation be reviewed. This essay is a contribution to such a review.3It seeks to examine the particular cultural visions present among the political leadership at the establishment of the independent Irish state and to ask what was done, or not done, to embed these visions within the policies and practices of the state up to the late 1950s, that is, during what is commonly regarded as the age of de Valera.
The relationship between a distinctive language or speech, and a sense of community or distinctive peoplehood, has been acknowledged throughout human history. In Ireland, the relationship between language, peoplehood and identity was already a source of comment during the medieval period, in the encounter between the long-settled Gaeil and the more recently settled Anglo-Normans. Language and, notoriously, religion were the key elements of cultural discrimination in the great convulsion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the outcome of which was the triumph and ascendancy of the English language, law and politico-administrative institutions throughout Ireland, and the corresponding defeat and dissolution of the whole institutional edifice of the Gaelic political and social order.4 From that time forward, the matter of language, together with religion, has seldom been far from the centre of the debate on Irish culture, community and identity. And when, at the end of the eighteenth century, a further elaboration on concepts of identity and peoplehood congealed into the political ideology of nationalism, Ireland was not immune to the spread of the new ideology. An interest among a minority of the ruling elite (mainly Protestant and of planter descent) in the nature of Irish cultural particularity, allied to an encounter with early European romanticism, had already prompted the first in a series of ‘Celtic Revivals’ (Seamus Deane’s phrase) in Ireland. These were inspired by a desire to ‘know’ (i.e., to divine and, in a certain sense, to appropriate) the genius and the roots of the imagination of the ‘native’ or indigenous Celtic people and culture in Ireland.5