Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson, curators in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Cultra near Belfast for more than thirty years, position this work on Irish farming life carefully between formal, sometimes elitist, history and a more socially adaptive, community-centred idea of heritage. Human relations and relationships are kept center-stage. Having set out their stall, “a good economy (was) one that ensured the well-being of people participating in it,” the authors move on to the twentieth century. The book is suffused with evocative stories from the authors’ experience of fieldwork and we are reminded that the failings of memory are often compensated for by a complex richness of agency, irony, feelings, contradiction, ingenuity, and generosity. They don’t shy away from the inevitable stereotypes that drift casually in and out of many folk, and some professional, anthropologies of Ireland. They are all here, the peasant irrationally prejudiced against improvement; the overbearing father, the gentle mother, and the depressed old bachelor. The key word is “life” from the outset as the focus adjusts again and again to settle on the ceaseless cycle of challenge and change and, particularly perhaps, the postfamine watershed or postindustrial sisyphism. This period is depicted in some historiography as a massive cultural failure by a people overdue a wakeup call from an increasingly emboldened and crusading modernity. The epic human toll of the famine and the socio-political and economic re-alignment of its aftermath deeply disfigured social and cultural relations in Ireland. On the heels of mass dispersal and death the emphasis, both positive and negative, externally and internally, at times seems to have fallen on the family and much of what followed was survivalist and reactionary. The authors mention the anthropological panorama of arranged marriages, increased bachelorhood, emigration, and accelerated atomization in communities that sometimes led, as Hugh Brody’s work shows, and unsurprisingly it must be said, to despair and hopelessness.
A few of the canonical themes in some strands of the anthropology of Ireland appear to owe something to the legal experience of early anthropologists. There are references from and to the thematic templates of the works of Solon Kimball, Conrad Arensberg, John Messenger, and Hugh Brody, on topics such as family, community, and inheritance, throughout the work. It is testament to the depth of knowledge of the authors that they are in a position to re-appraise some of the contentions. They dispute, for example, Messenger’s view that selective inheritance led Irish sons to hate their fathers. They contend instead that by the time Messenger was writing many sons didn’t want to inherit farms. The book is not confined to ethnographic literature alone; it is liberally interspersed with literary evidence, not to mention an impressive array of photographs and artworks, which achieve a pleasant chiaroscuro. On the role of the father we are treated to the haunting poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, as well as the observant and sensitive prose of John McGahern, that succeeds in dissipating some of the melancholy. For mothers we are taken to the music of old favorites like Bridie Gallagher and Big Tom. All of this is further enriched by personal anecdotes and recollections. It seems moody and reflective by design and there is an attempt to achieve balance throughout; for example the enforced nature of some arranged marriages contrasts with others that were successful.
Going from 0 to 60 in short course, the country appears to enter a kind of partial cultural fugue-state from the iconoclastic 1960s. It is a story of changing roles, influenced partly by co-operativization, deskilled females, and the increased attractions, or is it marketing, of urban lifestyles that led to distance between women and farm work. There are great statistics here: in the seventy years between 1911 and 1981, the percentage of men engaged in agriculture decreased from over 50% to a mere 11% . Driven by the market, economy production and consumption increased. In 1917 there were seventy tractors in Ireland; in 1960, there were almost 22,000. Some of us were born during this noisy tractor invasion. This was accompanied by electricity and water mains in the 1950s and 1960s. Modernization, and it is in this era, boosted by increased media, that it achieves discursive lift-off, was associated with a blanket rejection of purportedly backward or traditional values. This led to a situation that was almost sui generis; for the first time since the Neolithic revolution farms become businesses, reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s model, embedded in the market economy rather than embedded in society. The authors gloss the “intrusion of cash exchanges between neighbors” interrupting formerly affiliative relationships. The ongoing commercialization and commodification of life led to bizarre situations at times: the authors quote Brody’s example of the two men who exchanged exact amounts. Unionization and co-operativization paid lip service to the local values but were mainly driven by capitalist motives. “For the first time in history,” the authors say, “the structural unit formed by a farming family and its land may become redundant, and as a class, the ‘survivors’ may no longer survive.” Work was something other than a naked market exchange; it celebrated ties between people, places, the natural cycle, and so on.
It is unclear whether the “filthy modern tide,” as Yeats dubbed it, was fully socially integrated. From the 1930s to the 1960s, large areas, some of them formerly “congested,” became depopulated. In County Down in 2010, we are told, a farm of three-hundred acres was ten farms at the start of the twentieth century. There was considerable displacement as small farmers or cottiers, now laborers under the new market conditions, began to migrate. “Spalpeen” became a derogatory term in some circles. Merciless economic competition spread, setting in train a kind of Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, various forms of wage labor, hiring, and enslavement met with popular unrest, struggle, resistance, and violence. The authors note that the most striking thing about farm workers is actually their disappearance. Even in the late-nineteenth century observers found it “remarkable” in County Cork, for example, that they had, quite simply, “all gone away.” Ultimately reference is made to the questioning of community as a concept by some anthropologists, which seems a little like closing the door after the horse has bolted. This becomes an age-old philosophical and political debate in which we all participate and might think well upon. In 1841 there were approximately 1,100,000 farm workers, while in 1930 there were 160,000. Curiosity sent me to www.cso.ie where it shows, under the Farm Structure Survey, that there were 17,200 non-family workers on farms in 2013.
The book tails off a little into a discussion of the sometimes dubious heritage of re-enactments of what is thought of as rural heritage, some derived from the schemes and plans of the nineteenth-century reformers of society; the ploughing competitions, the threshing and the seasonal festivals, become a blend of regional or domestic tourism. It takes us on a tour of museums from Sneem in County Kerry to Kilmacrennan in County Donegal, including The Museum of County Life in Turlough Park, The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, The Ulster American Folk Park, Muckross House, and Down Museum in Downpatrick. The authors finally sound a note of caution on the open season approaches, or the uncertainty and irony of some of them at least, that make heritage a salvage yard left in the trail of the rapidly advancing train of history. They urge an approach that tries to re-envisage the interconnectedness of social relationships, artifacts, and techniques. They conclude that we do not have a general theory to match the detailed descriptions. This is a great book about farming but it is also a canny history of Ireland. It traces key movements from sustenance to profit, sociality to atomization, culture to market, and humanity to heritage. One conclusion is that community in Ireland is greatly weakened. This is an enjoyable and challenging read for anyone interested in Ireland.
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[Review length: 1326 words • Review posted on March 23, 2016]