In this book Ray Cashman combines his longstanding interest in rural Irish life with his folkloristic concern for understanding the individual in tradition to produce a gentle portrait of one man’s personality as reflected in his verbal art. Distinguishing this work from other performer-oriented studies, Cashman explores not Packy Jim’s role in furthering the tradition, but rather his use of tradition to forge a coherent and enduring sense of self. Cashman argues that self-making, like tradition-making, is best understood as a process that works with available resources and opportunities to solidify its form over time. Packy Jim, an elderly bachelor-farmer, is both an idiosyncratic personality and an exemplar of his milieu. Somewhat of an outcast, he is sensitive to slights. He became his own man reluctantly at age fifty after his parents had died, and he is locally rooted, almost fearful of travel. And yet, he retains and transmits narratives of events and personalities relevant to his small piece of the earth from centuries past. The rich portrait of his world-making results from a series of visits, conversations, and interviews with Cashman as his primary interlocutor over a period of fourteen years.

In addition to personal narratives, Packy Jim draws on eighteenth-century outlaw legends, nineteenth-century nationalist poetry (memorized from early schoolbooks), Catholic religious teachings, and stories of apparitions and fairy abductions, to produce his distinctive sense of self in the world. In sharing this rich trove of verbal art, Cashman’s goal is to describe the worldview of an ordinary man who lives somewhat anachronistically on a farm just on the Donegal side of the Northern Irish border. Although Packy Jim gives us few surprises, the resulting account is eminently interesting, broadening our notion of the diversity of human experience and voice.

Cashman’s first book, Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community, focused on the sociality of a small group of elderly neighbors in Aghyaran, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, who used their regular ceili gatherings as a means to construct a local space of nonsectarian community in an otherwise sharply divided world. If, in the first book, Cashman looks at how local character stories cement social relations, here we have one such character constructing an individually managed representation of self. In his introductory chapter, Cashman delineates a shift in his own practice from a focus on texts to a “performer-oriented ethnography of subject formation,” in which “what matters is how the stories are told, to what ends” (21). Although Cashman continues to assert the importance of dialog to the production of meaning and identity, his focus in this work is on the way an individual achieves a stable identity across social contexts.

A special delight in Cashman’s study is the care he takes in plotting his own fieldwork experience not only as a poetic way into and out of his subject (which it succeeds in being) but, more importantly, as a reflexive move that allows him to chronicle his own coming to know his subject. In the preface, we find Ray, as a nervous graduate student following the route of countless early folklorists to the edges of modernity in search of old stories. Yet Cashman’s younger self already embraces a broader definitional notion of what counts as folklore than does the subject of his inquiry, Packy Jim, who pulls down a book and reads out an old tale to the fieldworker who is asking about folklore. In the conclusion, Cashman returns to this moment in order to consider folklore’s definitional problem. Reiterating the difference between collecting the stuff and engaging with the performer’s conscious, selective, studied use of the handed-down and the idiosyncratic, Cashman demonstrates the continuing relevance of time-intensive fieldwork in out-of-the way places to expand our understanding of human experience and creativity.

In addition to providing a thoroughly contextualized examination of Packy Jim’s extensive repertoire, Cashman offers us beautiful illustrations of the storyteller and his world in twenty black-and-white photos, one house plan, and three maps. He also includes a short glossary of local dialect at the beginning of the work, an appendix on his transcription style, notes on the provenance of traditional tales in Packy Jim’s repertoire, chapter notes, and an index. Throughout, Cashman is careful to underscore his indebtedness to a wide range of scholarly work on Irish folklore, personal narrative, subject formation, place, and belief, deftly weaving his syntheses of that earlier work into his presentation of his own fieldwork with Packy Jim. In these ways the impressive scholarly armature of this study remains backgrounded so that Packy Jim’s voice and perspectives remain center stage.

An advantage of Cashman’s writerly choices is that his text remains accessible to a broad audience and would be appropriate for an undergraduate audience interested in Irish studies, verbal art, or the ethnography of speaking. Graduate students will find it particularly helpful as a model for turning fieldwork-oriented studies into texts, since Cashman writes very explicitly about how he found his focus, how and why the chapters are organized as they are, and how he knew it was time to stop collecting. Students and scholars will not find in this book insight into the challenges of negotiating difference between fieldworker and research subject, as Cashman openly and intentionally omits from his account material that might cast Packy Jim or any of his neighbors in an unfavorable light. Nevertheless, the book is a delight to read on many different levels and constitutes a valuable addition to the scholarship on the individual and tradition.

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[Review length: 913 words • Review posted on April 5, 2017]