Ray Cashman argues that “social life and culture are both represented and enacted through storytelling.” Echoing J. L. Austin, he says “people do things with stories. What they do depends on who is talking to whom, in what context and for what ends” (1). His focus here is on the content and use of “local character anecdotes,” and he analyzes in detail their content, placing and variety as they arise in processes of friendly talk, its flows and interactions, in a small, sociable milieu. This very careful and detailed discussion is set within an equally meticulous account of his own fieldwork practices and their location, explaining also its broader social and historical context.
Living there from 1998–99 with subsequent visits up to 2007, Cashman describes Aghyaran, in a small (ca. 50 sq. miles) “spit” or “peninsula” of County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. It is part of the United Kingdom but largely surrounded by County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland, and thus within a borderland that has cut across near neighbors since the partition of Ireland over seventy years before. From the 1970s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, it was heavily patrolled by security forces. As with all international borders, however, this one could—and can—be profitably exploited on either side when taxes, currencies and local resources have differed in each jurisdiction. Such features have helped to form border dwellers’ identities in many parts of the world, as the growing publications of researchers in comparative and interdisciplinary border studies demonstrate (see Donnan 2005).
While eschewing older typological approaches, Cashman’s analysis relates the tales to more recent work on anecdote type and narrative function, and argues that stories of local characters become stereotypes for moral evaluation. As he clarifies in his footnotes, where he locates deeper theoretical discussions, he follows the ethnography of communication tradition. Generous in acknowledgments of help, he singles out especially the academics Richard Bauman, Géaroid Ó Crualaoich, and Henry Glassie. He names and describes his main sources of stories and broader information; photographs of several people he worked with add to the warmth and appeal of his descriptions. He is anxious to justify “contextualizing and analyzing local character anecdotes” to show how they also challenge the “rhetoric and effects of sectarian identity” (8). These have indeed been ferocious: the rhetoric alone shocks outsiders in Northern Ireland but Cashman seems not to have heard it much articulated at the ceilis and wakes which provide his main texts.
Of course, such openness brings researchers problems. How far should one repeat tales that might cause the tellers trouble? Cashman says his subjects mainly talked of social and economic changes in their lifetimes, but chooses a trope that does not concentrate on such issues and while he notes that smuggling is often boasted about, he retails a small comic incident from the past, not anecdotes about contemporary examples of breaking government and European Union regulations on cattle numbers or doctoring agricultural fuel for wider sale. Similarly, he does not relate traumatizing recollections of violent deaths that he acknowledges occurred in this apparently peaceful locality, but rather selects tales of harassment at vehicle checks.
Researchers anywhere may find that working with some people inhibits their acceptance among others, whether these differ by age, gender, class, or ethnicity. Cashman acknowledges that his growing network of acquaintances and even his own surname (an important marker in Northern Ireland) actually limited the kind of people to whom he could extend his research. Those whom he mainly names and quotes are a few older people who came regularly to talk together (viz., to ceili): mostly Catholic, mostly male, and mostly bachelor farmers. A possible reason for these men’s forsaking television (and indeed the pub?) for convivial evenings elsewhere could be the comforting sociality for men without a marital home, and for whom their farm life can be isolating. As Cashman understands, such farming has nowadays to be supplemented to survive, but perhaps it’s these particular informants who are his source in describing this as men’s work, whereas it has been widely attested that nowadays both husbands and their wives engage in complicated job mixes to maintain their farm.
In contrast to the largely cheerful tone of his folklore findings, Cashman frames them by opening with his shocked arrival in 1998 at the time of the bombing in nearby Omagh, which killed both Protestants and Catholics, and making his final chapter a broad commentary on the widespread public forms of commemoration that also are often sectarian in their appeal to one “community” (as it is called) against the other. As he and Donnan (2005) note, tellers in both may exempt their own neighbors of different faith, unless these have betrayed that acceptance by treacherous acts of terror themselves. But Donnan (2005) and Donnan and Simpson (2007) show tellers, in their case border Protestants, who reveal detailed bitterness or inarticulate misery that Cashman’s choice of occasion and topic may occlude.
Since a reiterated aim of the book is to show how local character anecdotes foster local community, what composes this community? Cashman makes clear the difficulties of using such a polysemous term. Here, for instance, individuals may identify with what are conflicting communities in different contexts. As a social anthropologist, albeit one who has been immensely influenced by Hymes, Gumperz, and the ethnography of communication, I cannot fully critique Cashman’s claims in his own terms, yet I feel that the small, verbal genre he analyzes cannot bear the socio-political weight he gives it. But then, he himself gives us the broader detail with which to criticize him, and reminds us that decent, non-powerful people have persuasive—and witty—voices too.
WORKS CITED
Donnan, H. “Material Identities: Fixing Ethnicity in the Irish Borderlands.”
Donnan, H., and K. Simpson. “Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border
Protestants.”
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[Review length: 980 words • Review posted on May 12, 2009]